“I do not study to know more, but to ignore less.” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz  ·  Mexico  ·  1691

Project 2045 · a movement to parity · Est. May 2026

One in five today. Parity is the destination. 2045 is the deadline we set.

Parity is not sameness. It is the freedom to take part in this country as a full peer: the means to walk through any door, and the standing to be paid and respected in the work you choose. The share is how we measure it. Today we are 20 percent of America and hold 6 percent of its highest-paid work. By 2045 we are nearly a quarter of the country, and our share of every profession should rise to meet that line.

We feed this country, raise it, care for it, and teach it. We hold up whole industries. We run barely three percent of them. We organize across every occupation, so the pay is fair where we already stand and the doors open where they are not. Tell us your trade. This page becomes yours.

One in five Americans is Latino, and in every field our work holds this country up. Choose yours. We will show you where we stand in it today, and the one part only you can play in what comes next.

Ninety seconds. You will see your profession's real number, what closing the gap actually takes, and once a month a short brief on where we are gaining ground. Sign up and we will send you the full PDF on the numbers behind this. You will not be the only one again. No spam. No fundraising, ever.

What parity means

Parity is not sameness. It is participatory parity, the freedom to take part in the life of this country as a full peer.

It rests on two things. The means to participate, which is access to education, to capital, and to the door of any occupation. And the standing to participate, which is the recognition that every kind of work is worthy of respect and fair pay. Parity is reached when any person, from any origin, is free to choose their calling and is given a real chance to pursue it. We do not promise an outcome. We fight for a fair start, an open door, and equal respect for the work, whatever the work is.

The philosopher Nancy Fraser called this participatory parity, justice as the removal of every obstacle that keeps some people from taking part as equals. That is the standard we organize toward.

Every dream, equal

Parity is the freedom to pursue your calling at any altitude, and to be paid and respected for it.

There is honor in every job that holds this country up. The farmworker judges the harvest. The aide reads the patient. The laborer leads the crew. These are expert hands, equal to the surgeon's. We are not here to climb out of the work we love. We are here to make sure that whatever a person is called to do, the door is open and the pay is fair. A welder, a teacher, a nurse, a coder, a curandera, a founder: every one of them carries genius. The only thing that has ever been unequal is the chance.

Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. To him we cannot say tomorrow. His name is today.

Gabriela Mistral · Chile
Talent is everywhere. Opportunity is not. We move the second one to match the first.
Every language you carry is a tool the whole community gets to keep.
We do not measure a person by the obstacles in front of them. We measure what they build anyway.
The Inverted Ladder · 8 fields, top and bottom

There is honor in every job on this chart. The injustice is that we don't get to choose which one.

Pick any field below. At the bottom, in the hardest and most essential work this country has, we stand far above our share of the country, and we carry it with pride. At the top, in the work that holds the most pay and power, we nearly disappear. The distance between the two is not about merit or effort. It is a ceiling. Everyone deserves a fair shot at both ends, and at every rung in between.

Lowest-paid role in the field Highest-paid role in the field 20.0% · parity line (BLS CPS 2025)
Agriculture & FoodBLS CPS 2025 · CPS / OEWS
Agricultural workers
52.3%$35K/yr
Farmers, ranchers & ag managers
7.1%$88K/yr
ConstructionBLS CPS 2025 Table 11
Laborers
55.2%$45K/yr
Construction managers
20.1%$105K/yr
HealthcareBLS CPS 2025 · AAMC 2024
Home health aides
28.7%$35K/yr
Physicians
6.7%$230K/yr
Food & HospitalityBLS CPS 2025 Table 11
Cooks
39.2%$33K/yr
Food-service managers
13%$63K/yr
EducationBLS CPS 2025 Table 11
Teaching assistants
19.3%$34K/yr
Principals
9%$103K/yr
ManufacturingBLS CPS 2025 Table 11
Assemblers & production
24%$38K/yr
Plant managers
9%$116K/yr
Law & PolicyBLS CPS 2025 · ABA 2024
Paralegals & assistants
20.4%$61K/yr
Attorneys
5.9%$146K/yr
Business & CorporateBLS CPS 2025
Office & clerical staff
20%$44K/yr
Chief executives
8.4%$207K/yr

Eight fields. Sixteen jobs. In every one, as the pay rises, our share of the work falls.

This data feeds the Latino Parity Index. The register is how you receive it.

Where each number comes from.
Representation (the % Latino): for most roles, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey 2025 annual averages, Table 11 (Hispanic share by detailed occupation). Several roles use the field's own authoritative count: physicians, AAMC Physician Workforce & Diversity 2024; attorneys, ABA Profile of the Legal Profession 2024; Fortune 500 board seats, LCDA 2024; chief executives, BLS CPS 2025. The 2025 annual figures are 11-month averages excluding October due to the federal shutdown.
Median pay: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2024 (median annual wage for that occupation).
Within each field we show the occupation with the lowest BLS median wage and the one with the highest. Shares are rounded; the two data streams are independent (pay is never inferred from representation, or the reverse).

“Until we get equality in education, we won't have an equal society.”
Sonia Sotomayor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Pay and Representation · 1980 → 2045

We already do the work this country runs on. Now we take our place in the work that runs it.

Sixty years of federal data. Press play. The green lines are the work we already carry, every job under $100,000 a year, where we stand far above our share of the country. The red lines are the jobs over $100,000 a year, where our share stays low. The gold line is us: our share of the whole nation. We start in 1980, the first year this data was collected this way. After 2026 the dashed line shows where the high-paid careers go if they keep moving at the rate they have actually moved.

Occupations with median pay under $100K a year Farmworkers ($35K) Construction laborers ($45K) Food service ($30K) Latino share of the U.S. population Population (the parity line) Occupations with median pay over $100K a year Engineering / STEM ($101K) Physicians ($230K) Attorneys ($146K) Chief executives ($207K) At the current rate
1980
population vs physicians

Sources (Latino share of each group, by year): Population · U.S. Census Bureau, Decennial Census & American Community Survey, 1980–2024. Farmworkers · U.S. DOL National Agricultural Workers Survey & Census crop-labor tables. Construction & Food service · U.S. BLS, Labor Force Characteristics by Race & Ethnicity (Current Population Survey), 1980–2024. Engineering / STEM · National Science Foundation, Diversity in STEM, & BLS. Physicians · AAMC Physician Workforce & Diversity data. Attorneys · American Bar Association, Profile of the Legal Profession. Chief executives · U.S. BLS Current Population Survey 2025, Table 11 (Hispanic share of chief executives). Median pay figures are BLS Occupational Employment & Wage Statistics (May 2024). 2030–2045 is one extrapolation, not measured data. Population is the Census Bureau's National Population Projections (2023). The dashed current rate line extends the measured pace of the last decade, about +0.15 points per year. The parity line is not fixed: the Census Bureau projects the Latino share of the country keeps climbing. Because the high-paid careers are rising more slowly than the population they are measured against, the gap does not close at the current rate. It widens. The two lines never meet, which is why we do not print a year of arrival, at this pace there is not one. We do not draw a "with our plan" success line, because we will not put a number on the page that we cannot source. The plan exists to bend the red line upward faster than the gold line rises; that is the only way the gap closes. No pre-1980 figures are shown, because reliable Latino-by-occupation data does not exist before then.

In 1980, the gap between Latino population share and Latino physician share was 3.5 points. In 2024, that same gap is 13.3 points. The trendline since the 2023 SFFA decision suggests it widens further. The current pace is not closing this. Project 2045 is the path that does.

Representation, measured in outcomes

Representation isn't symbolic. It shows up in the bloodwork.

When a patient and a clinician share a language or a background, the medicine measurably works better. It is peer-reviewed. The gap on this page is not abstract; it is measured in glucose, in screenings, in years of life.

Language · diabetes control
Doctor speaks a different language
Doctor speaks the patient's language

Among Latino patients with limited English, the share with poorly controlled diabetes nearly halves when their doctor speaks their language.

Fernández et al., Journal of General Internal Medicine 2011. Observational study of insured Latino patients with limited English; 28 versus 16 percent poor glycemic control.

Background · preventive care
19% of the gap

In a randomized trial in Oakland, patients seen by a doctor of the same background chose far more preventive screenings, enough to cut the Black–white male cardiovascular mortality gap by an estimated 19%.

Alsan, Garrick & Graziani, American Economic Review 2019. Randomized field experiment in Oakland with Black male patients; modeled 19 percent reduction in the cardiovascular mortality gap.

Representation · life itself
+30.6days of life

Every 10-point rise in same-background primary-care doctors in a county tracked with longer life expectancy and 12.7 fewer deaths per 100,000 for that community.

Snyder et al., JAMA Network Open 2023. County-level association study of Black primary-care representation; about 30.6 days of life expectancy per 10-point rise.

These studies cover different populations and designs. We cite them as evidence that representation has measurable stakes, not as predictions of identical effect sizes for every community.

“No one is going to have quality of life unless we support everyone's quality of life. It's our collective and personal health that's at stake.”
Dr. Helen Rodríguez-Trías, first Latina president of the American Public Health Association
If representation does this, where do you fit?  Add your name →
The stakes, in every field

Medicine is the clearest case. It is not the only one.

Healthcare is easy to prove because it is measured in blood. The same stakes show up everywhere a Latino professional is missing: in graduation rates, in a courtroom, on a job site, in the fields, in wages, in the size of the economy itself.

Education
+9 ptsmore likely to finish high school

Students assigned at least one same-background teacher in the early grades were 9 points more likely to graduate and 6 points more likely to enroll in college. The mechanism, a teacher who shares a child's world, is the one we build for.

Gershenson et al., American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2022. Randomized Project STAR data; strongest causal evidence is for Black students.

Law and justice
5.5×more likely to win the right to stay

Immigrants with a lawyer were 5.5 times more likely to win relief from removal. Only 37 percent of them had one, and just 14 percent of those in detention.

Eagly and Shafer, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 2015. National study of 1.2 million removal cases; association, not causation.

Construction and trades
4.4Latino worker deaths per 100,000, against 3.5 for all workers

Latino workers are killed on the job at a higher rate than the workforce as a whole. Construction is the deadliest field, with 410 Latino worker deaths in a single year.

BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2023.

Agriculture
~20×the heat-death rate of other US workers

The people who pick the country's food die of heat at roughly twenty times the rate of other American workers. The work that feeds everyone is the work least protected.

CDC, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 2008. Crop workers, 1992 to 2006.

The economy
$3.6Tfifth-largest economy on earth

If US Latinos were a country, their output would be the fifth-largest economy in the world, ahead of India, the United Kingdom, and France. This is not a community to be carried. It is one being underused.

Latino Donor Collaborative, US Latino GDP Report 2024 (2022 data).

Technology
8%of STEM workers, against 17% of all workers

Latinos are 8 percent of the STEM workforce and 17 percent of all workers, one of the widest gaps of any sector. The people building the tools the country will run on do not yet look like the country.

Pew Research Center, 2021.

Different fields, different measures, different studies, each one verifiable. We cite them as evidence that representation has measurable stakes everywhere, not as identical effects for every community.

Our flagship publication

The Latino Parity Index

Ligazon is the record of where Latinos stand in every American profession. When a newsroom, a dean, or a board needs the real figure, this is where it comes from.

Once a year we publish the whole picture in one place: the Latino share of every field, set against the parity line, with the gap and an honest date for each. It is registry-first. We lead with the licensing body where one exists and footnote the survey, the same method described in our How we count notes. One number per field, sourced and checkable.

First edition: Fall 2026. The register is how you receive it.

Put your field on the Index →
The Parity Horizon

When does each field reach parity?

Honest timelines, not slogans. Here is where each field stands today and the year parity comes within reach, when the pipeline is funded and the doors are opened.

This data feeds the Latino Parity Index. The register is how you receive it.

At the line 5 points 10 points 15 points
Tier OneDefend and riseAt the line

Construction trades, production work, and frontline policing: already above one in five. The work now is moving into ownership and leadership.

Tier TwoClosest to the line5 to 7 points behind

Construction management (20.1% today), dentistry, financial management, and K-12 teaching.

Tier ThreeTen points back~10 points behind

Nursing (10.0% today), engineering, accounting, architecture, and science.

Tier FourFurthest from the line12 to 15 points behind

Medicine, law, software, pharmacy, the professoriate, journalism, and corporate leadership: the furthest, and the reason to start now.

Distance is measured against the parity line: 20.0% of everyone who works in America (BLS Current Population Survey 2025, Table 11). That line is rising. Every tier here is measured, not forecast. We do not print a year of arrival, because at the current rate there is not one. 2045 is the deadline we set, not a date we predict.

Shares from BLS Current Population Survey 2025 and field-specific sources. Projections use a stock-and-flow model and are labeled as projections.

“No matter who you are or where you come from, the path is always forward.”
Julián Castro, former U.S. Secretary of Housing & Urban Development
Our Theory of Change

Project 2025 is a plan to close these doors. We open them.

In 2025 the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a 900-page blueprint for the federal government. Many of its proposals would tear out the exact tools that were slowly closing the gaps you have been reading about. Our answer is simple, and it is the opposite of theirs: for every door their plan tries to shut, we open one ourselves. For us, by us.

Project 2025 calls for
So we do the opposite
SchoolsEliminate the U.S. Department of Education and the federal student aid and equity programs that first cracked these doors open.
We fund the pipeline ourselvesA culturally-rooted, peer-to-peer tutoring and cohort network that moves our people through every credential, no matter what Washington defunds.
AdmissionsEnd affirmative action and DEI, and direct the government to investigate and sue universities and medical schools over their admissions.
We build the merit case in the openPublic data, prep, and cohorts that get our students in on the numbers, and a public record of every school that shuts the door.
Care & dataCut and block-grant Medicaid, and strip "equity" and disparity data out of federal programs so the gaps become invisible.
We publish the data they eraseOne public ledger of who works where, paid what, and represented by whom, plus care organized in our own language.
WorkersMass deportation and rollbacks that fall hardest on the farm, construction, and service workers who feed and build the country.
We organize and protect the workforceWe name these workers as essential, count them, and build the legal and economic power to defend them.

What the 2026 crackdown costs us, in three numbers

This is not theory. The first medical-school class admitted after the 2023 affirmative-action ban is already smaller, the Justice Department has opened a fresh wave of admissions probes, and detention has hit a record, most of it of people never convicted of a crime. Here is the math, with sources.

The admissions chill
2,910
2023–24
before
2,595
−315 lost
2024–25
after the ban

315 fewer future doctors in a single year, a 10.8% drop in Latino M.D. matriculants in the first class admitted after SFFA. A pipeline a generation in the making, thinned in twelve months.

Detention, this winter
70,766 people detained by Jan 2026

74.2% had no criminal conviction, the largest population the country has ever held in immigration detention, three of every four with no crime to their name.

The doors being shut
15 additional

medical schools the Justice Department put under investigation over admissions in 2026, on top of the formal findings it already issued against UCLA and Yale.

Sources: AAMC 2024 matriculation data & JAMA Network Open 2025 (Latino M.D. matriculants 2,910→2,595, −10.8%, the first class after Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 2023); TRAC Syracuse immigration data (70,766 in ICE detention as of Jan 24, 2026; 74.2% with no criminal conviction, the count moves monthly); U.S. DOJ Civil Rights Division press releases, 2026 (the additional probes were not publicly named). Figures are measured counts from these sources, not projections.

Their plan needs us to do nothing. Ours needs you to add your name.

Add your name
Add your name

The register is open. Pick your trade.

No tiers. No price. Four short questions, ninety seconds. We ask what you do, where you do it, and what you want to contribute. Then your name is on the founding record.

What the register gets you

Your field's real number and what moves it.

 

The monthly brief, written for your trade.

 

Your name counted where the decisions are made.

Answer four questions
Not reacting. Reimagining.

They wrote Project 2025. We are writing Project 2045.

Detention deaths, mass deportation, a trillion dollars cut from Medicaid, a courtroom campaign against the schools that train our doctors: this is one coordinated plan to decide our future for us. We refuse to only defend against it. While that plan spends the decade dismantling, we spend it training the doctors, lawyers, teachers, and founders who make the next America impossible to erase. The data is where we start, not where we stop. A child in first grade today will be twenty-six in 2045. The work we do now decides what that year looks like for them.

01

Collect

Pull the federal data into one public ledger.

02

Find

Show exactly where the gaps are, field by field.

03

Measure

Track each gap against parity, every quarter.

04

Unite

Bring together the people in every trade who can move it.

05

Act

Open doors, fund the pipeline, and close the gap for good.

“We have a responsibility toward future generations. We need to leave them an environment where they can have a standard of living at least as good as the one we have now.”
Mario J. Molina, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1995

The numbers are public. The plan is plain. What we need now is each other.

Add your name
Language · Culture · AI

Our language is not a barrier. It is infrastructure.

As artificial intelligence is built to stand between people and their doctors, courts, and classrooms, one question decides whether Spanish and the cultures inside it survive the next decade, or are quietly written out of it. We work to make sure that technology carries our language forward instead of erasing it.

Read Language & AI
42M
speak Spanish at home, second only to Mexico worldwide.
−23%
fewer ER visits when care is in the patient’s own language.
<6%
of physicians are Latino, so most bilingual care goes uncredentialed.
1 in 5
Americans will be Latino by 2045, the next generation of patients and students.

The data is live. The register is open. The 2045 we inherit depends on the moves we make now.

The farmworker and the surgeon. The home-health aide and the senator. The line cook and the CEO. Every Latino who works in this country, in every trade and at every level, named on the same register, with the same pipeline behind it: a culturally rooted, nationwide peer-tutoring network that moves us through every credential, in small cohorts, person to person.

We are not asking for a seat. We are setting a longer table, and there is a place at it for every trade and every tongue. The future is not something that happens to us. It is something we are already making.

It is the founding year. Be one of the first one hundred names on the register.