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Spanish...The NEW Language of CommerceGrowing up in the mountains of Puerto Rico, in a small town called Aibonito wasn’t about commerce and big money. Aibonito had all of about 20,000 people and I lived in a “barrio” with about 1000 people. The closest thing to commerce and big money that I remember was going down to the little “colmado” down the hill to buy “limbers” (frozen ice pops) for “cinco centavos.” I remember when my family moved to Indiana. My father would break his back every day building RV’s in Elkhart, IN. It never crossed my mind that there might be a language barrier between my dad and his employers. Much less did I think that 30 years later we would be witnessing (and living!) a total communications shift in the United States. A shift in which Spanish has, and is becoming more and more on a daily basis, The New Language of Commerce. In other words, without Spanish, BIG business and small businesses alike struggle to compete and expand. We’ve all heard about “Hispanic Buying Power.” What that means is basically how much money Hispanics make, and can spend, in the United States. According to Hispanic Business Magazine the purchasing power of Hispanics increased from $111 million dollars in 1980 to $276.1 BILLION dollars in 1997. It is projected to double by 2020 to be $520.4 billion dollars! According to the same article in Hispanic Business Magazine, in 1980, Hispanic owned businesses employed 196,000 people. In 1998, 1.5 million people and by 2020 it will nearly double again to 2.5 million people. Again, these are people employed only by Hispanic owned businesses. Obviously, the increase in Hispanic Buying Power is important to companies and explains why there are so many ads on television that are designed to be “crossover” ads. They are done using bi-lingual Hispanics and then they can be used for both the Spanish-speaking, as well as the English-speaking market. We’re also all aware of the recent success of Hispanic entertainers, especially singers; people like Marc Anthony, Gloria Estéfan, Ricardo Martín (alias Ricky Martin), Cristina Alguilera, Luis Miguel, etc. who have successfully produced and marketed English albums. And who can forget the Taco Bell Chihuahua and his “Yo quiero Taco Bell” line. But neither “Hispanic Buying Power” nor Hispanic fame is driving this New Language of Commerce. If not these things, then what leads me to say that we have a New Language of Commerce. There are two elements that lead us to the conclusion that Spanish is the New Language of Commerce.
These are two very distinct types of people we’re talking about. One, a labor class of people located right here in the “Good Ol’ US of A” and another group of people made up of professional, middle-class, people in Latin America. So we’re talking about “labor capital” and “intellectual capital.” Please understand also that many people in the “labor market” today will own their own businesses within the next 10 to 15 years. Many Hispanic laborers in the United States are college-educated people. Let’s talk first about the Hispanic labor force within the United States. This used to be primarily a Los Angeles thing, or at best a Southwestern United States thing. It no longer is. There are now significant numbers of Hispanics all over the United States. From cities like Portland, OR to Milford, IN to Dalton, GA, to Denver, CO, to almost wherever else you want to mention, there are significant numbers of Hispanics in the labor force. And I do mean significant! Just ask the people who run the carpet mills, or the RV factories, or the poultry processing plants, or the construction companies, or the landscape companies, or the textiles companies, By: Ricardo González, Founder and CEO of Bilingual America 
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