Elected officials, business owners and community leaders gathered in Key Biscayne on Friday, October 2, as the Cámara de Comercio de Mujeres en Estados Unidos celebrated its second-anniversary gala at the Rusty Pelican, timed to Hispanic Women's Day. The evening was built to spotlight the leadership, legacy and growing influence of Hispanic women across South Florida and beyond.
The chamber announced the gathering as “una noche creada para celebrar el liderazgo, el legado y la creciente influencia de las mujeres hispanas,” according to the Cámara de Comercio de Mujeres en Estados Unidos. Announced special guests included U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar, who represents Florida's 27th District, along with state senators Alexis Calatayud and Ana María Rodríguez and several Miami-area mayors and commissioners, the chamber said. Daniela Kosán was named master of ceremonies for the night, while Yamilet Rivas, the chamber's president and founder, helped lead the celebration.
As Miami's Community Newspapers reported, the gala included networking, awards and cultural performances meant to spotlight women's contributions to business and community leadership, framing the entrepreneurs and leaders in attendance as people helping shape South Florida's future. A post from the chamber's Facebook page also noted that Estrella Galicia had signed on as a sponsor of the second-anniversary celebration.
A Night Rooted in Last Year's Turnout
The gathering builds on momentum from 2025, when more than 500 people turned out for the chamber's Hispanic Women's Day celebration, according to the chamber. That event was described as a gathering to celebrate the leadership, culture and economic impact of Hispanic women, and organizers have pointed to it as a marker of how quickly interest in the cause has grown.
The chamber says Hispanic women now participate in more than 300 industries and generate billions of dollars in annual revenue, according to the same source. Infobae reports that the group brings together entrepreneurs from technology, international trade, banking, education, logistics and real estate, reflecting the breadth of industries the chamber says it serves.
Growth Collides With a Financing Gap
Beneath the celebration lies a stark financing disparity that Rivas has flagged directly. Latinas lead 2.9 million businesses in the United States, but only 0.1% of them have access to capital financing, Rivas said, as reported by Infobae. The chamber says it tries to close that gap by offering mentoring, training and support networks aimed at expanding women-led businesses.
The numbers around Latino entrepreneurship more broadly help explain why that gap matters. Latinos account for nearly half of Miami's population and 27% of the city's small-business owners, according to a McKinsey report cited by the Miami Herald. Nationally, Latinos are creating 36% of new businesses, nearly double their share of the population, the newspaper reported.
Latinas in particular have driven much of that growth. From 2017 to 2021, Latinas started 31% of new Latino businesses, and the number of Latina-owned companies grew by 33% during that same stretch, per the Herald's reporting. Thirty-four percent of Latina entrepreneurs are younger than 45, the newspaper noted, suggesting a generational shift is underway even as capital access lags behind.
Loans Still Harder to Come By
The lending barriers Rivas described echo findings in the Herald's reporting on access to credit. Latino entrepreneurs are 15% less likely than white entrepreneurs to have loans approved, and nearly half of Latino credit applicants do not receive the full amount they request, the paper reported. Despite that gap, Miami stands out nationally: it is the only metropolitan area identified in the Herald's report where Latino small-business productivity exceeds that of non-Latino businesses.
The scale of that economic contribution has been climbing for years. Latina women's contribution to U.S. gross domestic product doubled over a decade, reaching $1.3 trillion in 2021, according to the Latina GDP project cited by Infobae. For a chamber marking just two years of operation, organizers framed Friday's gala less as a finish line and more as a checkpoint in a much longer push to convert that economic weight into capital, visibility and political recognition.
