How Spending Thirty Dollars at a Latino-Owned Business This Week Could Add Up to 400 Million Dollars Across the Country

Latino-owned businesses are responsible for roughly 800 billion dollars in annual contributions to the United States economy, and a new national campaign wants that number to become impossible to ignore.

Aquí: The Accountability Movement launched its “Buy Latino. Build Community. Build America.” initiative this week, timed deliberately to coincide with National Small Business Week, which runs through May 9th. The campaign is calling on individuals, families and communities across the country to direct their spending toward Latino-owned businesses, treating every purchase as an investment in the local economies those businesses help sustain.

This Is a Special Campaign for Latinos

Sindy Benavides, Founding Executive Director of Aquí, described Latino entrepreneurs as the engine of the American economy, a characterization she backed with the kind of figures that tend to reframe conversations. She pointed out that over five million Latino-owned businesses operate across the country, embedded in neighborhoods in every state, serving as the places where communities gather, find work and build stability over generations.

Benavides was equally direct about the pressure those businesses are currently absorbing. Speaking in both English and Spanish, she said the current climate of immigration enforcement has created a spreading fear that is keeping customers at home and draining foot traffic from Latino commercial corridors in real time. She argued that the consequences are economic as much as they are social, and that when Latino businesses lose ground, the damage extends well past the business owners themselves.

Carlos Castro, who owns and founded Todos Supermarket in Northern Virginia, offered a ground-level account of what that fear looks like inside a running business. He described customers who are now calculating the risk of a routine trip to buy groceries, families weighing whether leaving the house to go to a store or send children to school is worth the exposure. “Businesses are hurting and how we persist is through collective community support,” Castro said, framing community solidarity as the most immediate tool available to keep neighborhood economies intact.

The Math of Collective Action

The campaign’s most specific ask comes in the form of what organizers are calling the 10% Challenge. Itzel López, Co-Founder and CEO of the Latino Economic Development Council, laid out the arithmetic plainly: if one in ten American households spent thirty dollars at a Latino-owned business during National Small Business Week, the collective result would be a 400 million dollar injection into Latino-owned enterprises across the country. López called that figure transformational rather than symbolic, arguing that consumer choices at the individual level aggregate into forces capable of reshaping local economies.

Rudy Espinoza, Chief Executive Officer of Inclusive Action for the City in Los Angeles, described buying Latino as one of the most direct connections available between personal values and economic behavior. He positioned it as a complement to larger systemic advocacy rather than a replacement for it, something that any individual or institution can do immediately without waiting for policy to change.

Building a Map of the Community

Jay Miranda, President and CEO of the Honduran-American Association, announced that his organization has compiled a map of over 700 Honduran-American owned businesses operating across the United States, available at hondurasusa.org, and that the association would be mobilizing its network to support those businesses and others throughout the week.

Miranda described the campaign as a call to spend with intention, one rooted in the belief that directing dollars toward Latino businesses is an act of community investment with returns that extend well past the transaction itself. The Honduran-American Association, he said, is committed to reshaping the public narrative around who Honduran-Americans are and what they contribute, and the business map is one concrete way of making that contribution visible and actionable for the roughly two million members of the Honduran diaspora living in the United States.