Why I Founded the Hispanic Construction Council, and What I Got Wrong at First

I founded the Hispanic Construction Council in 2022. The construction industry already employed 4.2 million Hispanic workers representing over a third of the entire U.S. construction workforce (Source: BLS Current Population Survey, Table 18b, 2024), yet no organization existed specifically to research, represent, and advocate for them. The need was obvious to anyone who had spent time in the construction industry. What I got wrong was how to meet it, and the correction I made in year two changed everything about how HCC operates today. Research from the Pew Research Center confirms that Hispanic workers have represented the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. construction labor force since 2000 (Source: Pew Research Center, 2024).

This is the story I do not always tell publicly, but I think it matters for understanding what HCC actually is and why we work the way we do.

The Moment That Started It

I had been working in and around construction for years before I founded HCC. I understood the industry from multiple angles, as a professional who had worked on the policy side, as someone who had relationships with contractors and workers, and as a person who grew up in a community where construction was a primary economic pathway.

In 2021, I was in a meeting with a group of construction contractors, most of them Hispanic-owned firms, discussing access to public contracts in a major city. The conversation was frustrating. Every contractor in the room knew the problem: Hispanic firms were winning small amounts of public construction contracts relative to their presence in the industry. Everyone could describe the barriers. Nobody had a number.

When someone finally asked how large a share of the construction workforce was Hispanic, and nobody in the room could give a precise answer, I understood what was missing. Not more advocacy. Not more presence at meetings. Data. The absence of data was the reason the advocacy was not working.

I drove home that night thinking about what it would take to build an organization that could answer that question with authority. By the following week, I had started drafting what became the founding documents for HCC.

The first time I walked a job site as HCC founder, not as a contractor, not as a consultant, but as someone whose specific job was to understand what was happening to this workforce, was a highway project in central Texas. It was a $22 million TxDOT contract. The crew was majority Hispanic. The foreman was a man who had come from Michoacan in 1997 and had worked construction in Texas for 26 years. He ran the site with the kind of quiet competence that only comes from 26 years of doing the same thing exceptionally well. He had never seen an organization whose job was to count people like him, advocate for them, or publish research about their economic contribution. I told him that was what HCC was going to do. He shook my hand and said it was about time.

Year One: What I Got Wrong

My first instinct was that HCC should be primarily an advocacy organization. We would attend hearings, build coalitions, submit comments on proposed regulations, and advocate for policy changes that would benefit Hispanic workers and contractors. I had seen this model work in other sectors. I believed it would work in construction.

The first year was humbling. I attended hearings. I submitted comments. I built relationships with Congressional staff, agency officials, and industry associations. And I found consistently that when I made an advocacy argument, the response was a version of the same question: how many workers are we talking about? What share of the workforce? What is the revenue of the sector?

I could not answer those questions with precision. I had estimates. I had ranges. I had anecdotes from member firms and personal experience. But I did not have a number I would stake my credibility on in a Congressional hearing room, and I knew it.

The advocacy without data problem is not unique to construction. It is a structural challenge for any organization trying to represent a constituency that has been undercounted and understudied. But in construction, where procurement decisions, prevailing wage policy, and workforce development funding are all tied to quantitative measures, the absence of data is a more acute problem than in many other fields.

The Question I Could Not Answer

The moment I remember most clearly was a meeting with a senior Congressional staff member in late 2022. I had requested the meeting to discuss Hispanic contractor access to federally funded infrastructure projects. I came prepared with examples, anecdotes, contractor stories, and a strong framing of the equity argument.

About ten minutes into the meeting, the staff member stopped me and asked: how many Hispanic-owned construction firms are there in the United States, and what is their aggregate revenue?

I knew the approximate answer. Somewhere around 95,000 firms. Revenue in the hundreds of billions. But I did not have a number I could put in writing and defend under scrutiny.

The staff member was not hostile. She was doing her job. She said: if you can get me a defensible number, I can put it in a brief. Without a number, I can include your perspective but I cannot build a policy argument on it.

I walked out of that meeting knowing that HCC had to become a research organization first and an advocacy organization second.

Building the Research Infrastructure

Making that pivot was not fast or cheap. Hiring researchers with both construction industry knowledge and quantitative methodology expertise is genuinely difficult. Building data partnerships with state workforce agencies, construction industry associations, and member firms required months of relationship building. Designing a survey methodology that could produce a defensible workforce share estimate required expertise I did not have in-house and had to bring in.

We spent most of 2023 building what became the research foundation for the State of Hispanic Construction Report. I hired two researchers. We established data partnerships with fourteen state workforce agencies. We designed and fielded a survey of HCC member firms that asked direct questions about workforce composition.

The experience of watching that data come in was something I did not expect emotionally. When the 35.2% figure emerged from the triangulated data analysis, I sat with it for a few minutes before sharing it with the team. One in three workers on American construction sites is Hispanic. 4.2 million people. $245 billion in wages (Source: BLS Current Population Survey, 2024). The 95,000+ Hispanic-owned construction businesses generating hundreds of billions in revenue represent the fastest-growing business formation rate in the sector (Source: Census Bureau Annual Business Survey, 2023). I had known the number was large. Seeing it precisely, with a methodology I could defend, was different from knowing it approximately.

What Changed After the First Report

The 2024 State of Hispanic Construction Report changed HCC's policy conversations immediately. The same Congressional staff member I had met in 2022 called me after the report published. She said: now I can use this.

In the two years since, the report has been cited in Congressional testimony, state workforce planning documents, union advocacy, and industry publications. The number that nobody had, the 35.2% figure, is now part of the policy conversation in ways that my year of unanswered advocacy was not.

I am not saying advocacy does not matter. It does. What I learned is that advocacy without data is a conversation about values, and those conversations are important but they do not always move policy. Advocacy with data is a conversation about facts, and that moves people who need justification for decisions they may already want to make.

What I Still Believe Needs to Change

HCC is three years old. I am proud of what we have built. And I am still frustrated by how much has not changed.

The wage gap is real and persistent. The contract access gap for Hispanic-owned firms on publicly funded projects is real and persistent. The absence of bilingual apprenticeship and licensing infrastructure in most states is real and persistent. I have better data on all of these problems today than I did in 2022. The problems themselves have not moved enough.

What I understand now that I did not fully understand at the founding is how long policy change actually takes. I thought good data plus clear advocacy plus political relationships would produce policy change within a year or two. The actual timeline is longer. The institutional inertia in construction labor policy is substantial. What I see happening is that the data is accumulating, the citations are multiplying, and the argument is becoming harder to ignore.

Who Helped Build HCC

I want to acknowledge the people who believed in HCC in year one, when the organization was a vision and a founding document and very little else. The member firms who joined before we had a report to offer. The researchers who took a chance on an organization that did not yet have an institutional track record. The advisors who gave time and counsel without any certainty about where this was going.

One early conversation I think about often is with a contractor in San Antonio, a woman named Elena who ran a concrete subcontracting firm her father had founded. She told me in early 2022 that she had been waiting for someone to do exactly what HCC was proposing. She said: I know the data matters, but someone has to care enough to go get it.

She joined as one of HCC's founding member firms. Her saying that, and the weight I felt from it, is part of why I did not give up in the difficult months of year one when the advocacy-only approach was not working. The people who needed HCC to exist were already out there. The obligation was to build something worthy of their trust.

That is still the obligation.