ASU Hispanic Business Students Association celebrates 50th anniversary

The ASU Hispanic Business Students Association was formed at a time when Hispanics were just starting to receive opportunities they had previously been denied. According to the association’s website, it was “organized in 1974 as the Chicano Business Students Association. The organization was renamed in 1979 and became the Hispanic Business Students Association. The goals of the association are to provide Hispanic students with educational opportunities, career options in business, and association with students who have different goals but mutual interests.”

We talked about the association and its history with Dr. Louis Olivas, a founder and advisor for the association and an ASU Professor Emeritus. Former ASU student, Michael Trejo shares his experience with the group and what it meant to him, he refers to Olivas as “Dr. O.”

“I really needed to find a home on campus and that very quickly became the Hispanic Business Students Association… the culture of the organization just took me out with immediately and then, I found where I was meant to be on campus so if the organizations run like a business Doctor O. made sure of that but you know, it also had a very distinct element of community service too. ASU is a big place and everybody is sort of looking for where they belong in that big place,” Trejo said.

Olivas became a role model and mentor for Trejo and wrote recommendation letters that he says helped him get into Harvard and an internship at Wall Street.

“The presence of Latinos at the college of business was nil. I don’t ever recall the first 5 or 6 years that I ever had a Latina or Latino in any of my business classes and so it started to evolve when I arrived in 1979,” Olivas said.

The program is unlike any other that exists in the country and even though it’s successful, it hasn’t been replicated at other universities, according to Olivas.

Olivas recently made history by having a chair named after him, making him the first Latino or Latina to have a chair named for him at a top ranked business school in the country.

“When you’re a professor at University, every college will have an endowed chair and those endowed chairs, you’ll look over the leaders, the scholars that are well known for what they’re doing. So when you get to see more of those chairs significant and you look at them saying well, maybe someday I’ll sit in the chair, less than 5% will get to sit in that chair but to have a chair named after me, I’m truly humbled and honored,” Olivas said.