The Fourth of July has long been a conflicted holiday for me.
This year, as America marked 250 years of independence, I felt that tension more deeply than ever.
I love this country.
That has never been in question.
For much of my career, I have dedicated myself to helping leaders, entrepreneurs, and communities realize the promise of America. I believe in expanding opportunity. I believe in building wealth. Most of all, I believe in developing leaders who can shape a better future than the one they inherited.
Yet while millions celebrated, I found myself wrestling with a question I could no longer avoid.
How do I celebrate a country I love while also mourning the parts of its history that shaped my own family’s story?
Ironically, I don’t think I could have written this article ten years ago.
For more than a decade, I have immersed myself in leadership, neuroscience, identity, and lived experience. I have worked with founders to build businesses that create generational wealth, and I have helped leaders understand how the experiences they inherit shape the decisions they make.
If leadership begins with understanding what shapes us…
What has shaped me as a leader?
Leadership Begins with Inheritance
When we launched the LLI twelve years ago, we often repeated a simple phrase:
Leadership is both our heritage and our legacy.
At the time, I understood those words intellectually.
Today, I understand them personally. Leadership is never built on a blank slate. Every leader inherits something.
We inherit family stories.
Some inherit opportunity; others inherit its absence.
Some inherit wealth; others inherit generations without it.
We inherit identity, culture, assumptions, and memories we never chose but nevertheless carry.
We also inherit the stories our nation chooses to tell. That realization forced me to revisit the story I had inherited about America.
The Story Before 1776
America’s story did not begin in 1776. Nor did it begin at Plymouth Rock.
Long before there was an Independence Hall, Indigenous nations had lived, governed, traded, farmed, and built thriving civilizations across North America for thousands of years.
In what is now New Mexico, archaeological evidence places human communities at least 11,000 years ago. The ancestral Pueblo peoples engineered sophisticated irrigation systems, cultivated agriculture in an unforgiving landscape, and built extraordinary communities like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. They established complex trade networks, remarkable architecture, and vibrant societies centuries before Europeans arrived.
Those achievements shaped the land my family called home.
Yet those achievements occupy remarkably little space in the history most Americans inherit.
That absence matters.
The stories we choose to tell determine whose contributions we value, whose sacrifices we remember, and ultimately who sees themselves reflected in the American story.
My Family Inherited Every Chapter
I am a ninth-generation Coloradan. If we traced my family’s roots deeper into New Mexico, they would stretch back even further.
My roots are Indigenous.
They are Mexican.
They are Spanish.
They are Irish.
They are American.
Every generation added another layer to that story. None erased the one before it. Like so many families throughout the Southwest, I am mestiza.
For most of my life, I believed that described my ancestry. Today, I understand it describes my inheritance. Within that single identity lives extraordinary beauty and profound contradiction.
I inherited the resilience of Indigenous peoples who lived on this land for thousands of years. I inherited the legacy of Spanish colonization that forever altered their world. I inherited the culture, traditions, and complexity of my Mexican roots.
And I inherited the promise of America—a promise that has created extraordinary opportunities for my family while remaining unfinished for so many others.
Every generation added another layer to that inheritance.
Every generation preserved something.
Every generation lost something too.
The Legacy of Colonization
When Spanish settlers entered what is now the American Southwest, they did not arrive in an empty land waiting to be discovered.
They entered the homelands of Indigenous nations that had governed, farmed, traded, worshipped, and built thriving communities for thousands of years.
Colonization forever changed that world—and, generations later, it would shape my own.
It brought conquest, violence, disease, forced religious conversion, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples.
It also introduced a language, traditions, architecture, faith, and customs that would eventually become part of my own family’s identity.
That is the complexity of being mestiza.
I carry the inheritance of Indigenous peoples whose connection to this land stretches back thousands of years. I also carry the inheritance of Spanish colonization that forever altered their world.
Those histories do not simply exist alongside one another.
They exist within me.
For generations, my family lived in the space between those histories.
The Inheritance of Wealth
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War and transferred nearly half of Mexico’s territory to the United States.
On paper, the treaty promised that Mexican citizens who remained on their land would have their property rights protected.
For many families, those promises never became reality.
Through decades of litigation, fraud, taxation, language barriers, and legal systems stacked against them, countless families lost land they had owned for generations.
That loss was never just about property. It was the loss of inheritance, wealth, and the loss of opportunity.
We often say wealth compounds across generations. So does loss.
History compounds too.
When a family loses land, they rarely lose only that generation’s assets. They lose future equity, future investment, future educational opportunities, future influence, and the ability to pass something tangible to the next generation.
History echoes in much the same way.
Its consequences shape who begins life building upon generations of assets and who begins by rebuilding what previous generations lost.
Why This Work Has Always Felt Personal
Perhaps this is why my work has never felt like just a career.
The irony is impossible for me to ignore.
Today I spend my life helping Latino entrepreneurs build businesses, create wealth, and expand economic opportunity. I speak about ownership, leadership, capital, and creating assets that families can pass from one generation to the next.
Yet I often wonder how different my own family’s story might have been had they been able to keep what they had already built.
How different would our trajectory have been? How different would generations of wealth, education, influence, and opportunity have looked?
I’ll never know.
What I do know is this. History shapes more than our past.
It shapes leadership, identity, wealth, and opportunity.
Leadership, then, is not simply about understanding ourselves. It is about understanding what we have inherited so we can consciously choose what we will pass on. Perhaps that is why the work of the LLI has always felt so deeply personal.
We help leaders reclaim identity.
We help entrepreneurs rebuild inheritance.
We help communities create the kind of generational opportunity that history too often denied.
In many ways, that has been driving me all along. Not simply to build businesses. But to help write a different next chapter than the one my family inherited.
The Next Chapter
I strongly believe in America’s promise. Not because we have always lived up to it. Because we still can.
The first 250 years of this country have been marked by extraordinary courage, extraordinary innovation, extraordinary contradiction, and extraordinary loss.
The next chapter remains unwritten and that gives me hope.
My hope is that we write it with the layered truth of our past—not a version polished for comfort, but one honest enough to acknowledge both our triumphs and our failures.
I hope we teach our children about Chaco Canyon alongside Independence Hall, the Pueblo Revolt alongside the American Revolution, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo alongside the Declaration of Independence.
Not because these stories compete. Because together they tell the truth of who we are.
Leadership is ultimately about inheritance.
Not simply what we receive. But what we choose to leave behind.
As America begins its next 250 years, my hope is that we finally realize the extraordinary promise embedded in the Declaration of Independence—that all people are created equal and possess the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Those words have always been bigger than our history. Perhaps they were meant to be. They were never intended to describe the America that existed. They described the America we were called to build.
Two hundred and fifty years later, that work remains unfinished.
And the next chapter is still ours to write.
