I grew up in the fourth largest economy in the world

In Nogales, you learn to read an economy long before anyone teaches you to read a balance sheet.

I grew up on a border where the whole town could feel a number move. If the peso slipped, you knew by Saturday, because the shops on Morley Avenue were quiet. If the wait at the port of entry ran three hours, you knew by lunch, because the customers who came north every week to buy shoes and school clothes and groceries simply did not come. Families I knew ran businesses that lived or died on whether people crossed that day. They did not have a hedge. They had a cash register and a line of sight to the fence.

Nobody ever called that an economy. It was called a border town. It was called a niche market. When people came from out of state to look at it, they described it as a hard place to do business, and then they went home and put their money somewhere easier.

I have spent the years since then in rooms where capital actually gets allocated, first as Arizona's director of commerce, later at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and now as an investor. And I keep running into the same blind spot I grew up on the wrong side of.

The numbers finally said out loud what we already knew

The Latino Donor Collaborative, working with Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School, put the U.S. Latino economy at $4.4 trillion in 2024. If it stood alone as a country, it would be the fourth largest economy in the world, behind only the United States, China, and Germany.

Here is the part that should stop every investor. Latinos are about 20 percent of the population, but we drove 28.2 percent of all U.S. economic growth in 2024. Our slice of the economy grew 5.4 percent a year from 2019 to 2024, while the country overall grew 2.4 percent. Latinos start employer businesses at 2.5 times the national rate.

And last year, Latinos accounted for 92.6 percent of new household formation in this country. That term gets thrown around without explanation, so here is what it means in plain language: a new household is created every time someone moves out on their own, gets married, or buys a first home and starts paying their own utility bill. Those are the people who buy the refrigerator, the mattress, the insurance policy, and the second car. Almost all of the net growth in that group last year was us.

Then look at who is steering the money. There are 34 million Latinas in the United States. Eighty six percent lead or share their household's financial decisions. Seventy nine percent say building generational wealth is a priority, a higher share than non Latina women. Fifty two percent expect to own a business one day. And 80 percent say brands still treat them as an afterthought.

Latinos of Mexican descent alone generate $2.3 trillion in output, and a great deal of it is built on exactly the kind of family and business ties that run across the line I grew up on.

Capital has not caught up to the customer

That is the whole thesis, and it is why I do the work I do. At Intermestic Partners and Intermestic Capital, we look for cross border opportunities that serve this market and strengthen North America at the same time, including strategic industries where national security matters as much as the return. That is what unlocking the full potential of North American leadership actually looks like in practice: putting capital where the growth already is, instead of where it used to be.

The gap between what this market produces and what it receives is not a diversity problem. It is a mispricing. Somebody is going to correct it, and the people who move first are going to do very well.

What I keep coming back to

The families on Morley Avenue never needed a report from a university to tell them they were an economy. They knew what they generated, because they generated it every single day, in cash, in a language most of the market was not listening to.

The report just means the rest of the market is finally starting to notice.

This Hispanic Heritage Month, celebrate the culture. Then invest like you understand the math.

I wrote about this in more depth in this week's edition of The Power Courier, along with what is happening to the Latino workforce, the trade talks restarting with Mexico, and the House districts where our votes decide control of Congress. You can read it and subscribe free at 1marcolopez.substack.com.