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Every fall, we mark Hispanic Heritage Month in the United States and Latin American Heritage Month in Canada.
In the United States, Hispanic Heritage Month, also known as Latinx/Latine Heritage Month, recognizes the contributions and influence of Hispanic and Latine Americans to the history, culture, and achievements of the United States.
In Canada, Latin American Heritage Month is officially designated by an Act of Parliament, honouring the significant cultural, social, economic, and political contributions of the Latin American community to Canadian society.
For participating workplaces, observance of these months often take the form of festivals, food, or cultural spotlights. While celebration matters, it is not enough in 2025. Heritage months must move beyond symbolic recognition and create space for deeper dialogue, equity, and accountability. That means acknowledging the barriers Hispanic and Latine communities continue to face across North America (in workplaces, in education, and in society) and working intentionally to address them. Real celebration is more than just recognizing past contributions; it means building the foundations today that guarantee representation, access, and opportunity tomorrow.
We are living through a period of disruption across workplaces: budgets are under scrutiny, technology is reshaping decision-making, and political forces are fueling instability. Our recently released 10-Year Report outlines just some of these trends shaping the future of work. These dynamics affect everyone, but their impact is not evenly distributed. As an example, the pressures are particularly sharp for Latine team members.
These forces inevitably shape the workplace too. They seep into systems, influencing who gets hired, who feels safe to lead, and who gets left behind. Latine employees sit at the intersection of these pressures, navigating linguistic bias, cultural marginalization, and systemic underrepresentation, forcing many to mask or be measured by how “white-passing” they can appear.
This is not an issue that only impacts a small fraction of people. Latine people make up nearly 20% of the U.S. population and more than 1.1 million people in Canada, shaping the future of talent, markets, and innovation. Yet they remain severely underrepresented in leadership; Latinas hold just 1% of C-suite roles in the U.S., with similarly low representation in Canada. Organizations that fail to address this exclusion risk losing top talent, missing emerging markets, and damaging trust.
Notably, how organizations treat Latine professionals during this time is not a seasonal consideration. It is a stress test for whether leaders are building workplaces resilient enough to survive and thrive in a diverse, fast-moving, and unpredictable world.
We use both Latine and Hispanic throughout this piece to reflect the diversity of cultures across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the diaspora. No single term captures everyone’s identity, and many people identify more specifically by heritage. Language itself is part of inclusion. Workplaces that normalize multiple identities and linguistic realities are already taking a critical step toward equity.
(Check out our Feminuity Inclusive Language Guide to learn more)
Rebuild Representation Pathways
When DEI budgets shrink, Latine leadership pipelines are often the first to stall. To manage this, leaders can:
Audit AI and People Systems for Bias
AI-driven tools are excluding Latine talent not because of ability, but because of names, accents, or credentials. To manage this, leaders can:
Normalize Cultural and Linguistic Inclusion
Immigration enforcement and hostile rhetoric create fear that follows people into the workplace. To manage this, leaders can:
Invest Beyond the Office Walls
Latine communities are shaping talent and markets across North America. To manage this, leaders can:
Festivals, food, and heritage-month spotlights can be meaningful and appreciated, but they are not enough. Latin American and Hispanic Heritage Months should be a call to move from cultural recognition to organizational commitment.
Organizations that embed equity into systems, confront AI-driven bias, and amplify diverse Latine leadership are positioning themselves to weather disruption and lead into the future. It is a resilience strategy signalling that your organization is prepared for what comes next.
As a Dominican-Puerto Rican daughter of immigrants, and an immigrant myself, I know how often Latine identity is dismissed, oversimplified, or flattened in workplace conversations. The diversity of our comunidad (community) is real and powerful, yet too often erased. We embody multiracial and multilingual identities, Indigenous ancestries, immigration stories, and generations of resilience. Our communidad is more than just stereotyping us as soldiers, farmers, builders, or immigrants. Our history is more than the curated stories shared each year. Our history holds injustice, daily discrimination, and the displacement of our people, from Borinken (Puerto Rico) to across the Americas. It also holds joy, beauty, and strength. Our history began long before these countries and continues today as our lucha (our fight) for justice and belonging. This blog is about putting that reality on the table. Latine professionals are not a monolith or a side note, we are critical to leadership, innovation, and resilience. When organizations design systems that support our full complexity, they do more than include us. They build stronger workplaces for everyone.
Follow these inspiring leaders for insights, activism, and stories that amplify Latinx and Latine voices: Alán, Bianca Graulau, Carlos Eduardo Espina, Cleopatra TataBele, Daisy Prado.
Check out these websites to explore Latinx and Latine culture, activism, and community: In Cultured Company, Join the Lucha, Taíno Studies, United We Dream, WeAreMiTu.
Keep learning with these essential reads on Latinx and Latine experiences: Brown Trans Figurations: Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies by Francisco J Galarte, Finding Latinx by Paola Ramos, My Broken Language by Quiara Alegría Hudes, Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America by María Hinojosa, The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.
This blog is not meant to be a static guide, but rather a compilation and reflection of our learnings to date. Everything changes - from technologies and innovations to social norms, cultures, languages, and more. We’ll continue to update this blog with your feedback; email us at hello@feminuity.org with suggestions.
Learning Experience Lead
(She, Her)
If you wish to reference this work, please use the following citation: Feminuity. Zenoni, N. "Heritage Months Are a Workplace Stress Test"
