There are 1.4 million Latinos calling the Bay Area home. Among these Bay Area resident are people and businesses impacting the Hispanic community on a large scale. For this reason, the SFHCC, the San Francisco Business Times, and Wells Fargo Bank presented an event to acknowledge the most influential Hispanics in the Bay Area. The 2007 Latino Business Leadership Awards will acknowledge the 35 most influential Latinos in the San Francisco Bay Area in the areas of Corporate, Emerging leaders under 40, Entrepreneurship, Health, Nonprofit/ Philanthropy, and Public Sector.

We will celebrate the contributions that Latinos have made to society and we will recognize the Latinos who pave the way to our future. Spanish has become the U.S.'s de facto second language, Nuevo Latino has taken its rightful place in haute cuisine, the sounds of rock en Espanol and reggaeton have filtered up the charts, and Latinos not only star on but own and manage major league baseball teams. But like any immigrant group that has shaped mainstream U.S. culture before fully asserting its economic or political power, the nation's 41.3 million Hispanics are just getting warmed up.

While they command nearly $600 billion in buying power, they are only starting to attract the marketing attention on Madison Avenue that they merit, and their political clout similarly lags behind their sheer numbers. The country's largest ethnic minority, Latinos promise to help remake America in the 21st century as vitally as African Americans did in the 20th. Still, perhaps more than any of their immigrant predecessors, Latinos defy easy categorization. Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans and Argentine Americans may all speak the same language, but many wouldn't dream of standing under the same cultural umbrella.

A fair number of U.S.-born Hispanics don't speak Spanish, and many others have little or no European blood. Many Latinos believe they belong to a separate race, the product of an epic Latin American miscegenation of Iberian, Native American and African heritage. Such a wide array of opinions and agendas is reflected in the honorees of the Latino Business Leadership Awards. This is an exciting time for our community as we acknowledge the talent and leadership within the Bay Area.

The deadline for nominations is August 8, 2008. Nominations can be found online at the San Francisco Business Times or on the Nominations page of this SFHCC site.