“I do not study to know more, but to ignore less.” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz · Mexico · 1691 · The first Latina intellectual on record — barred from the rooms that mattered. The gap she found is still open.
A movement to parity by 2050 · Est. May 2026
We kept this country fed.
We kept it building.
Now we run it. That is what this is.
Latinos are 78% of this country's farmworkers, 30% of construction, 40% of restaurant workers — and 3% of its doctors, 5% of its lawyers, 2% of its founders. That distance is not talent. It is a system. LIGAZON is the counter.
This is not a network for professionals. It is for everyone — any occupation, any industry, any city. The farmworker and the founder. The nurse and the engineer. The trades and the boardroom. If you are Latino and you work in this country, this alliance is yours. Sign your name. Stand in the count.
The Latino Power Atlas
Thirty-two indicators across economic, political, health, education, and housing power — every number measured against parity, broken out by national origin, animated over fifty years.
Open the Atlas →Theory of Change
Data creates clarity. Clarity creates accountability. Accountability creates leverage. Leverage creates parity. Four moves, in that order.
Read the theory →Academy, Fellowship, NEXO
The Academy moves students through the credential pipeline. The Fellowship places mid-career professionals where they have leverage. NEXO is where it adds up.
See the programs →Project 2045
A nineteen-year-old voting in 2045 is in middle school today. Project 2045 is LIGAZON's twenty-year commitment to the infrastructure that generation inherits.
Read the long view →A century of the gap. 2026 is the fork.
Medicine. Law. Tech. Finance. Four industries, one story — slow gains when the law helped, rollbacks when courts reversed it, and a collapse the moment affirmative action ended nationwide. At 2026 the lines split. LIGAZON is one path. The other is drift.
Medicine: AAMC physician workforce data 1920–2024 · Law: ABA national lawyer survey 1965–2024 · Tech: NSF NCSES S&E workforce 1971–2024 · Finance: BLS CPS-EEEO 1960–2024 · Population: U.S. Census Bureau · 2006 march attendance: UCLA Labor Center · Post-SFFA trend: AAMC 2024–25 first-year data · 2026–2045: post-SFFA decline vs. pipeline + accountability closure (Project 2045)
Population: U.S. Census Bureau national projections. Profession lines: aggregate Latino share of the highest-paid roles across medicine, law, corporate, tech, education & government. "Do nothing" extends the 2023–24 post-SFFA trend; "Project 2045" models the pipeline + accountability closure path.
They are coming for the workers. We are building the leaders they can't.
We will not look away from this year. We will answer it — not with fear, but with the one thing power cannot detain: a generation organized, counted, and rising into every room that decides our future.
In Latino homes this year, "the talk" stopped being about police and started being about who picks up the children if a parent does not come home. 57% of Latino parents now fear a friend or family member could be deported. That fear is real. So is this:
The same community being targeted as labor is the fastest-growing source of America's future doctors, lawyers, founders, and senators. Every name we add to this alliance is a future they cannot erase. Grief is not our strategy. Power is.
For the first time in twenty years, the rate is moving the wrong way.
In June 2023, the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions. The first U.S. medical school class admitted after that decision had double-digit fewer Latino students. Law schools tracked the same direction. We are not approaching parity. we are moving away from it.
Honesty up front.
Twenty industries. Twenty data sources. One pattern that no single organization had ever mapped until now.
BLS, AAMC, ABA, NSF, LCDA, NCES, USDA, CFPB. For the first time, these datasets are connected across 20 occupational sectors simultaneously. The inverse relationship between salary and Latino representation is not sector-specific. It is universal. Explore all 32 indicators in the Latino Power Atlas →
Median Wage × Latino Representation. The Inverse Relationship
Each dot is a single occupation plotted by median wage (x-axis) and Latino representation (y-axis). The trend is unmistakable. every occupation above $80K sits below the 19% parity line. Sources: BLS OEW May 2024, BLS CPS 2023, AAMC 2024, ABA 2024, NSF NCSES 2024.
The pipeline does not narrow in professional school. It narrows between sixteen and twenty.
Latino children enter U.S. classrooms as the largest demographic group. They graduate high school at near-parity. They lose the pipeline somewhere between the FAFSA, the MCAT prep course nobody could afford, the unpaid summer internship in a city without a couch to crash on, and the first family medical emergency. The funnel below names the four chokepoints and which lever opens each one.
The math: four in five Latino students who start as the K–12 majority never reach a professional credential. The chokepoint is not the SAT. It is the moment the family bill comes due and the student takes the first paying job that opens — because waiting is a luxury few first-generation families can extend a second year in a row.
The cost of entering a high-wage profession exceeds the total net worth of the families who most need those professionals.
This is not a metaphor. It is arithmetic. and it operates identically across medicine, law, engineering, and finance.
The financial barrier to professional entry is 5× higher relative to household wealth for Latino students than for white students. across medicine, law, and finance. For a white household ($189K median net worth), MCAT tutoring costs 32% of net worth. For a Latino household ($38K), it costs 157%.
When professional and client share a background, outcomes measurably improve.
Representation is not a sentiment. It is a performance variable. Across healthcare, education, and corporate leadership, peer-reviewed research is consistent.
Latino patients with diabetes saw their A1C drop 1.96 percentage points when assigned to a Spanish-speaking, Latino primary-care physician. That is a clinically meaningful difference equivalent to adding a second oral antidiabetic.
Latino students who had even one Latino teacher in grades K–3 scored higher on reading, were less likely to be chronically absent, and were 13 percentage points more likely to enroll in college-prep courses by high school.
Latino-owned businesses now generate over $800 billion in annual revenue and have created the majority of net new small-business job growth in the U.S. since 2007. The pipeline to ownership, not access to capital, is the binding constraint.
Limited-English-proficient Latino patients with language-concordant primary care had 23% fewer emergency department visits and 12% lower 30-day readmission rates than those receiving care through an interpreter.
In every state, Latinos crowd the bottom of the wage ladder and disappear from the top.
Click a column header to sort. Hover any header for the source. The same community that fills 80%+ of the farmworker workforce in five states fills fewer than 10% of the seats at the legal and medical professions inside the same state lines.
| State | Latino pop. | % MDs | % Attorneys | % Farmworkers | Top : Bottom wage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Mexico | 49% | 14% | 14% | 65% | 13× |
| Texas | 40% | 10% | 9% | 95% | 12× |
| California | 39% | 6% | 7% | 75% | 13× |
| Arizona | 32% | 7% | 7% | 95% | 13× |
| Nevada | 29% | 5% | 5% | 80% | 13× |
| Florida | 27% | 16% | 13% | 50% | 12× |
| Colorado | 22% | 7% | 5% | 85% | 13× |
| New York | 20% | 6% | 7% | 40% | 12× |
| New Jersey | 22% | 6% | 6% | 55% | 12× |
| Illinois | 18% | 4% | 4% | 60% | 12× |
How to read the ladder: the highest-paid sectors are physicians, attorneys, and Fortune 500 executives. The lowest-paid is farm labor. The Top:Bottom column shows the median physician wage (BLS OES 2024) divided by the median Latino farmworker wage (DOL NAWS 2022). In every state, Latinos dominate the floor of the ladder and are missing from the top — a 12–13× wage spread our families straddle.
Sources: U.S. Census ACS 2023 (population) · AAMC State Physician Workforce Data Reports 2023 · ABA Profile of the Legal Profession 2024 · DOL National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2020–2022 · BLS Occupational Employment & Wage Statistics 2024. State-level Latino shares of MDs and attorneys rounded to nearest whole percent.
Track the same family across one lifetime. The pattern is the same person, eight times.
She picks tomatoes at sixteen. She raises children on those wages at twenty-eight. Her mother rations insulin at fifty. She has never sat across from a physician who shares her language at any age in between. Read the cards in order — they are the same ledger, top to bottom.
The same hands that pick the food earn 81 cents per non-Latino dollar, accumulate 22 cents of net worth per non-Latino dollar, and walk into rooms where the doctor, the lawyer, and the CEO above them are 3–6.7% likely to share their language. This is not eight separate problems. It is one ledger, kept open across one community, for one century.
I have a profound faith in the people. I believe in their capacity to be the protagonists of their own destiny.— Antonia Pantoja · 1922–2002 · founder of ASPIRA · Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1996
Four moves. In that order. No skipping.
The mechanism that closed the schoolhouse door (Brown), the polling-place door (VRA), and the boardroom door (Civil Rights Act). Now applied to the inverted ladder.
Data creates clarity.
For the first time, federal data across twenty occupations is connected into a single picture every reader can absorb in under a minute. Census ACS, BLS, AAMC, ABA, NSF, USDA, DOL NAWS — one ledger. Refreshed quarterly. Public.
Clarity creates accountability.
Public covenants, pledges, and scorecards turn the data into specific commitments named leaders sign their names to — by district, by hospital, by firm. The signature is the leverage point.
Accountability creates leverage.
Signed commitments unlock funding, partnerships, procurement contracts, and pipeline placements that are then deployed back into the credential pipeline. The dollar follows the document.
Leverage creates parity.
The pipeline opens. Cohorts move through. The numbers on the chart climb — measurably, every year, against the same federal sources we started with. The clock starts moving the right direction for the first time since SFFA.
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 goes on the wall in the order it arrived.
See the full data for your field.
Every industry has its own gap. sourced occupations, wage data, representation ratios, and what parity actually looks like in your sector.
A 19-year-old voting in 2045 is in middle school today.
LIGAZON's horizon is generational. We are building today’s data record — the public ledger of who works where, paid what, and represented by whom. The infrastructure compounds quietly. The next generation reads it as a baseline they can move from.
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 — from the bottom of the wage ladder to the top — named on the same register, with the same pipeline programs being built behind it.