Investment in Diversity

Perhaps nothing speaks more about your success in the financial world than having your picture on the cover of one of America’s most prestigious business magazines. It veritably shouts success when you’re a Latino who grew up in San Diego’s South Bay.

And perhaps nothing says more about the state of race relations in San Diego than what happened to George Ramirez, the Union Bank of California senior vice president whose picture—along with two other bank VPs—appeared on the July 1999 cover of Fortune magazine.

Ramirez, 42, a slim, handsome man who wears expensive suits befitting his position in the banking world, walked into an exclusive Fashion Valley department store not long ago looking for a new suit. After perusing the racks and finding some things he liked, Ramirez found something else. Not a single salesperson had approached him to offer assistance. It didn’t take him long to figure out why. He was wearing jeans and a sport shirt. And his skin was dark brown.

“That’s the unfortunate side of stereotyping,” Ramirez says, charitably. The salespeople “missed the opportunity to do some business—and to meet someone [they] probably would have liked.”

He walked away without making a purchase.

Ramirez is among the top go-getters in a growing U.S. Latino population that today stands at nearly 33 million. And therein lies one of the keys to his success. After slowly climbing the corporate ladder at Union Bank—he’s been in the banking business for 23 years, seven with other banks—Ramirez was promoted to senior vice president four years ago. Last year, he was named division executive for emerging markets, bankwide. One of the most rapidly emerging banking markets, of course, is Latino.

Mark Woods, senior vice president in charge of Union Bank’s management operations in San Diego, suggested a few years back that the bank create a marketing group to reach out to the ever-expanding Latino population in California. His idea spawned another among the bank’s African-American employees, who suggested the same for them and other minorities. And the bank’s Multicultural Marketing Group was born.

The results have been phenomenal. According to Fortune, “It has all paid off in the knockout rate performance” of Union Bank of California, which in 1998 had revenues of $2.61 billion and last year was rated by the magazine the No. 1 company in minority representation and end results. Seven of the 17 directors on the bank’s board are minorities, and 35.9 percent of its officials and managers are minorities, as is 53.7 percent of its work force.

“The bank thinks it’s good business and a great way to reach out to the community and to the markets we serve. It’s the right thing to do, [and] it comes back to us many times over,” says Ramirez, who commutes weekly between offices in Los Angeles and San Diego. As a Latino, to get where he is today, he says he’s had “to work harder, work smarter and be a little better” than many of his colleagues. In a financial world dominated by Caucasians, “I’ve had to learn how to be nonthreatening,” he says, and “make people very comfortable around me.”

It wasn’t always so comfortable for Ramirez.

“When I started 23 years ago, at another bank,” he recalls, “I was actually told by a supervisor that I could not speak Spanish to clients.” That wasn’t designed to benefit any clients, certainly. “It was because my supervisor wanted to be sure she could understand everything I was saying to them,” Ramirez says. “Incredible.”

And despite his rapid ascension in the world of banking, he’s had to turn a deaf ear to condescending or meanspirited comments from colleagues. “Sometimes, I’ve had to try to laugh off comments like ‘Well, of course you were promoted; you’re a protected class.’ Or ‘Sure, you’re our poster boy for affirmative action.’”

Ramirez was born in El Paso. His parents—Elva and Anselmo Ramirez—“are dyed-in-the-wool Mexicans,” he says. And they raised him “more Mexican than most people in Mexico.” He was surrounded by all the cultural trappings of Mexico, “the good, the bad and the ugly,” he says.

The family moved to San Ysidro two years after he was born, where he attended Mount Carmel Academy (formerly the San Ysidro Academy), with a student body that was almost exclusively Latino and Mexican nationals. Later, he went to Hilltop Junior High, where he was one of only a handful of Latinos in a student body of a thousand—and he learned firsthand something about diversity.

“It was a completely different world,” he remembers. “It opened my eyes to so much more.”

His mother, Ramirez says, always has been an impeccable dresser, even when going to market in Tijuana. And she dressed him accordingly for school. So it came as a shock to his parents to see the kids at Hilltop, where, he says, “there were no perfect haircuts, no perfect clothes. My parents hated it; they thought they would lose control.”

But Ramirez kept the lessons learned from his mother. And he kept the Spanish language—the only language he spoke until he was 6. “Those ethnic experiences are part of the professional adult I am today,” he says. Of course, he’s had to learn the language and behavior of corporate America, too. “Still,” he says, “you don’t forget who you are—and where you came from.”

Woods, Ramirez’ Union Bank colleague, is a native San Diegan who grew up in a neighborhood—and attended a high school—that was almost all white. But he believes Ramirez’ professional goal of reaching out to a diverse community “is the way to go. How can we not?” he asks. “We are a multicultural society, and [this] is good for business.”

Ramirez practices what he preaches at home, where his two children “have been brought up to understand their roots very well,” he says. His teenage daughter, Lauren, has been studying Spanish for five years. “She has a better technical command of that language than I do,” he says. Son Spencer, on the other hand, will not start learning Spanish until he’s 12, Ramirez says, because he must have a command of the English language first. Where Lauren and Spencer are headed, he says, “that’s going to be very important.”

His wife, Julie, whose father was Mexican and mother was French-Irish, grew up “in a very Anglo environment” where Spanish wasn’t spoken, Ramirez says. “So I had the opportunity to introduce her to the [Mexican] culture. And she has really embraced it—the culture, the food, the language.”

As a first-generation American of Mexican ancestry, Ramirez says he feels a commitment not only to his bank but to the community that embraced him when he was a child, as well. The best way to beat back bigotry, he figures, is for Americans to simply remember we have something in common: Our ancestors—save for Native Americans—all were immigrants.      

—Fernando Romero

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