Global Business Executive, Former CEO of Three International Companies, Trade Policy Advisor to Clinton and Bush Administrations
The ACCF congratulates Board of Advisors Member Sol Trujillo on being named the AL DIA Person of the Year for 2020.
Why an ‘AL DIA Person of the Year’
It was Eva Longoria who first said it in Time Magazine on August 27, 2019:
“As a nation, we can’t afford to wait any longer to shift the narrative around Latinos in the U.S.”
After centuries of suppression of our history from the U.S. Educational System, the overt misrepresentation on films Mrs. Longoria herself has witnessed first hand, and the ongoing underrepresentation of Latinos in the news media evident to everybody, we only needed the most extravagant manipulation of information by political propagandists, observed over the last couple of years, to demean the image of Latinos to the lowest level in America.
Latinos were referred to in the 2016 presidential campaign as “rapists” and “criminals,” and no one seemed to be publicly bothered or outraged on the disproportionate fabrication and utterly unfair characterization of 60 million Americans.
Even the liberal-minded Tom Brokaw decided to join the abuse of an ethnic community with limited means to defend itself and took his own license on national television to say Latinos weren’t working hard enough at “assimilation” or ensuring their kids were learning to speak English.
Hispanic leaders all across the country seem to agree on this: Enough is enough!
There is a chorus of them taking action from Coast to Coast to do something about the most rampant defamation of an ethnic group in America, probably going by now well beyond what Jews or Irish, or Italians endured before.
The AL DIA Person of the Year, a tradition we started only a couple of years ago, will be yet another activity that will be put at the service of this common endeavor: to shift the narrative around Latinos in the U.S.
“As a nation, we can’t afford to wait any longer,” we agree with Mrs. Longoria.
The AL DIA Person of the Year will be dedicated from this year on to the individual selected by AL DIA’s editors for doing the most to shift that narrative on Americans of Latino descent in the U.S. Society.
This year we started with a businessman who is making a claim, in the current environment, few may believe:
“Latinos will save the economy.”
Because of the extraordinary work he did this year to prove it, using factual data from his annual GDP report and bringing together a constellation of national business leaders at his L’Attitude National Business Conference, we have no hesitation in saying that Solomon “Sol” Trujillo is a deserving ‘Person of the Year 2020’.
