INCÍSOS SPECIAL · HEIRS · 09/31

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Ninth of thirty-one profiles of Hispanics who changed something in the United States.

The hardware store

The story does not begin in a boardroom. It begins in Quito, in her grandfather’s hardware store.

That was the first chapter of what became a three-generation entrepreneurial line. The second began in the United States in the 1960s, when her parents immigrated. Her father arrived with a job offer tied to the Pan American Games, but what ultimately secured the family’s place in the country was a business of their own.

Nina was one of six children. By age ten she was working in the family business.

She has said it gave her a front-row seat to the subtleties of entrepreneurship. Not the theory: the daily risk, the payroll, the client who does not pay.

Three hundred dollars

She studied at Texas State University. In 1996, at twenty-five, she founded Pinnacle Group with $300.

It was a one-woman workforce solutions firm — in plain terms, connecting companies with the professionals they need.

Thirty years later, Pinnacle Group has roughly 5,000 employees and operates in the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Canada, Latin America and Poland. It serves 20 percent of the Fortune 100.

The Women Presidents’ Organization named it the fastest-growing women-owned business in the United States in 2015 and again in 2018.

The detail that matters for this special

The story of Nina Vaca and Pinnacle Group opens the entrepreneurship chapter of the McGraw-Hill textbook Understanding Business.

It is worth pausing there.

That textbook is studied by business undergraduates across the country. When an American student opens the chapter on how a company is founded, the first thing he reads is the case of a woman born in Quito who started with $300.

She does not appear as a diversity example or in a sidebar. She appears as the case that explains the concept.

The rest of the record

She has served on the board of Comerica since 2008, Kohl’s since 2010 and Cinemark Holdings since 2014. Barack Obama named her a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship in 2014, an advisory group under the Commerce Department.

She belongs to the 2016 class of Henry Crown Fellows. She has been named one of the top hundred chief executives in STEM publications, Woman of Distinction by the National Women’s Business Council in 2017, and a trailblazing woman in labor and business by the National Women’s History Project.

In 2026 she entered the Tech Titans Hall of Fame, seventeen years after her first award from that organization, and the Minority Business Hall of Fame. She also appears on the list of the 250 most influential living immigrants in the United States, where she is the only Ecuadorian.

In June 2026 she served as vice chair of the organizing committee for the FIFA World Cup in Dallas.

She is a triathlete, and has said she applies the discipline of endurance sport to running a company: competing against yourself and reinventing constantly.

Why she is here

There is a figure in her biography that no September speech can improve on.

Three hundred dollars in 1996. Twenty percent of the country’s largest companies as clients in 2026.

Nobody left her that. And the country celebrating Hispanic heritage this month already teaches it in its classrooms as the example of how a company gets built.

Primary sources: Pinnacle Group, institutional profile of its founder. U.S. Department of Commerce, Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship program record. Aspen Institute, 2016 Henry Crown Fellows class. Tech Titans, 2026 Hall of Fame announcement. Forbes Ecuador profile published in 2026. The CEO Magazine interview published May 25, 2026.

Read this in English

Octava de treinta y una semblanzas de hispanos que cambiaron algo en Estados Unidos.

La niña de la casa prestada

Nació el 20 de diciembre de 1954 en Chicago. Hija de padre mexicano y madre mexicoamericana, fue la única mujer entre siete hermanos.

La familia se mudaba constantemente entre Chicago y Ciudad de México, siguiendo el trabajo y la familia extendida. Ese vaivén tiene un efecto sobre una niña que la propia Cisneros ha descrito muchas veces: nunca terminaba de pertenecer a ninguno de los dos lugares, y en ninguno de los dos tenía un cuarto propio.

Ha contado también que deseaba una puerta de dormitorio que pudiera cerrar del todo, y que el tamaño de la cómoda de su habitación lo impedía.

De esa falta salió un libro sobre una casa.

Iowa

Estudió el taller de escritores de la Universidad de Iowa, uno de los programas más prestigiosos del país. Fue ahí, en un seminario donde sus compañeros hablaban de casas de la infancia con desvanes, sótanos y escaleras, donde comprendió que su experiencia no aparecía en ninguna parte de lo que se consideraba literatura.

No la escribió en contra de ellos. La escribió porque nadie más iba a hacerlo.

La casa en Mango Street se publicó en 1984. Es un libro breve, hecho de viñetas cortas, narrado por Esperanza Cordero, una niña que vive en un barrio pobre de Chicago y que quiere una casa que sea suya.

Ha vendido más de seis millones de ejemplares, se ha traducido a más de veinte idiomas y es lectura asignada en escuelas primarias, secundarias y universidades de todo Estados Unidos.

La paradoja

Aquí está el dato que convierte esta semblanza en parte del argumento de este especial.

El mismo libro que el sistema escolar estadounidense asigna como lectura obligatoria ha sido objeto de retiros y cuestionamientos en bibliotecas escolares del país. Cisneros ha denunciado públicamente la prohibición de más de mil seiscientos textos escolares que abordan raíces hispanas, racismo o identidad de género.

Un país puede enseñar un libro y retirarlo al mismo tiempo, en distintos distritos, en el mismo curso escolar. Eso no es una contradicción administrativa: es una disputa sobre qué se considera parte de la historia común.

Lo que hizo con lo que ganó

Su lista de reconocimientos es larga: becas del Fondo Nacional para las Artes en poesía y en narrativa, la beca MacArthur, la Medalla de las Artes de Texas, el premio literario del PEN Center USA, el PEN/Nabokov internacional en 2018 y la Medalla Nacional de las Artes, que le entregó Barack Obama en 2016.

Lo relevante es qué hizo con esa posición.

Fundó dos organizaciones sin fines de lucro: la Fundación Macondo, que forma escritores comprometidos con sus comunidades, y la Fundación Alfredo Cisneros del Moral, nombrada por su padre, que otorga apoyo a escritores nacidos en Texas o que escriben sobre Texas. Organiza además a Los MacArturos, el grupo de becarios latinos de la MacArthur que trabajan como activistas en sus comunidades.

Sus papeles literarios están depositados en las Colecciones Wittliff de Texas State University.

Hoy

Tiene 71 años. Es ciudadana de Estados Unidos y de México, y vive desde hace casi una década en San Miguel de Allende. Vive de su trabajo como escritora.

En 2022 publicó Mujer sin vergüenza, su primer poemario en veintiocho años. En las entrevistas de esa época pidió algo concreto: que la gente gaste su dinero en libros escritos por latinos en Estados Unidos, y que esos libros lleguen a manos de anglosajones y de políticos.

Sigue discutiendo con el país que le enseña su libro a sus hijos.

Esa discusión no es una herencia. Es una conversación abierta, con las dos partes vivas.

Fuentes principales: Sitio oficial de la autora y su editorial. Fundación MacArthur, ficha de la becaria. National Endowment for the Arts, registro de la Medalla Nacional de las Artes de 2016. Colecciones Wittliff, Texas State University. Declaraciones de la autora recogidas en entrevistas de prensa con motivo de la publicación de Mujer sin vergüenza.

INCÍSOS SPECIAL · HEIRS · 08/31

Leer en español
Eighth of thirty-one profiles of Hispanics who changed something in the United States.

The girl in the borrowed house

She was born December 20, 1954, in Chicago, to a Mexican father and a Mexican-American mother, the only daughter among seven children.

The family moved constantly between Chicago and Mexico City, following work and extended family. That back-and-forth has an effect on a child that Cisneros has described many times: she never quite belonged in either place, and in neither did she have a room of her own.

She has also said she wanted a bedroom door she could close completely, and that the size of the dresser in her room made it impossible.

Out of that absence came a book about a house.

Iowa

She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the most prestigious programs in the country. It was there, in a seminar where classmates spoke of childhood houses with attics, basements and staircases, that she understood her experience appeared nowhere in what counted as literature.

She did not write it against them. She wrote it because nobody else was going to.

The House on Mango Street was published in 1984. It is a short book, made of brief vignettes, narrated by Esperanza Cordero, a girl who lives in a poor Chicago neighborhood and wants a house of her own.

It has sold more than six million copies, has been translated into more than twenty languages, and is assigned reading in elementary schools, high schools and universities across the United States.

The paradox

Here is the fact that makes this profile part of this special’s argument.

The same book the American school system assigns as required reading has been pulled from and challenged in school libraries around the country. Cisneros has publicly denounced the banning of more than 1,600 school texts dealing with Hispanic roots, racism or gender identity.

A country can teach a book and remove it at the same time, in different districts, in the same school year. That is not an administrative contradiction. It is a dispute over what counts as shared history.

What she did with what she earned

Her list of honors is long: National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry and fiction, a MacArthur fellowship, the Texas Medal of Arts, the PEN Center USA literary award, the PEN/Nabokov International Prize in 2018, and the National Medal of Arts, presented to her by Barack Obama in 2016.

What matters is what she did with that position.

She founded two nonprofits: the Macondo Foundation, which trains writers committed to their communities, and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation, named for her father, which supports writers born in Texas or writing about Texas. She also convenes Los MacArturos, the group of Latino MacArthur fellows working as organizers in their communities.

Her literary papers are held at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

Today

She is 71. She holds United States and Mexican citizenship and has lived for nearly a decade in San Miguel de Allende. She makes her living from her writing.

In 2022 she published Woman Without Shame, her first poetry collection in twenty-eight years. In interviews at the time she asked for something concrete: that people spend their money on books written by Latinos in the United States, and that those books reach Anglo readers and politicians.

She is still arguing with the country that teaches her book to its children.

That argument is not a heritage. It is an open conversation, with both parties alive.

Primary sources: The author’s official site and publisher. MacArthur Foundation fellow record. National Endowment for the Arts, 2016 National Medal of Arts record. Wittliff Collections, Texas State University. Statements by the author in press interviews around the publication of Woman Without Shame.