Claudia Romo Edelman Is Working to Challenge Stereotypes

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It wasn’t until Claudia Romo Edelman arrived in the United States a decade ago, after working for 25 years around the world, that she heard the word Hispanic. “I was like, What is this thing? What does that even mean?” says the former diplomat, who was born in Mexico City. “And then I started learning that, in America, they invented a word that means that 26 different countries all of a sudden are one group, and that I was going to belong to that group, and that that group was not terribly well perceived.”

To her dismay, not only did this community seem to garner scant regard from America at large, there did not seem to her to be much pride among Latinos—another word she had never heard applied to people until she got to America. “Every time I went to a restaurant and there was a waiter who was clearly Latino, and I spoke to him in Spanish, he would try to deny his identity, to suppress it,” she says. “For a group that is so powerful to think of themselves as so weak, for a group that is so big to be seen so small? It’s a big thing.”

Romo Edelman, 53, has a background in marketing at a massive scale; she helped launch such high-profile initiatives as Bono and Bobby Shriver’s (RED) and the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. So she set out to change the perception of the Latino community among its roughly 60 million members and for America more broadly. In 2017, she founded the We Are All Human foundation, which focuses on advancing diversity and unifying the Hispanic population.

Marketing is not an exact science. It’s more like a craft propelled by data. One data point that hit Romo Edelman hard was a survey in the Harvard Business Review that said that 76% of Latinos couldn’t be themselves at the workplace. “If you’re Jorge, you pretend to be George, and you leave yourself at home, and you come with someone you don’t know,” she says. She began to work with corporations to help prepare, hire, retain, promote, and celebrate Hispanic employees, creating pledges and workbooks for companies to use. She launched the program, called Hispanic Promise, in 2019 at the World Economic Forum, where she worked for 10 years. So far, 350 companies have signed on.

In the years she has been working on the issue, she has seen the needle move a little. In surveys her organization commissioned in 2018 and 2023, the number of Latinos who thought the Latin community was very unified rose by seven percentage points. But she acknowledges there’s still a lot to do. “The work that I’m doing is very much inviting companies, decisionmakers, and Latinos everywhere to take action,” she says, “so that we can be seen as what we are: positive contributors to the country.”