Lionel Sosa, considered by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential Latinos in the United States, and the chief advisor for several presidential campaigns, will visit Philadelphia to talk about how to court the Latino vote prior to the 2015 mayoral election in the City of Brotherly Love.

 

The founder of Sosa & Associates — now known as Bromley Communications — one of the principal Latino and multicultural advertising agencies, will be the speaker during a breakfast organized by AL DÍA at the Union League Dec. 5. 

 

Sosa’s advertising agency made its way after helping a Republican senator get reelected in 1978 with vast support from Latino voters. Prior to this no other GOP candidate had managed to get more than 8 percent of Hispanic vote in the Lone Star state. After this, different companies reached out to Sosa to make inroads into the Hispanic market and soon after he started billing millions without leaving politics behind. 

 

In 1980 he helped Ronald Reagan connect with Latino voters, focusing on his values rather than his actual campaign. In 2004 he was part of the George W. Bush campaign, and the former president made his way to the White House with 40 percent of Latino vote.

 

Prior to the announcement last month by Barack Obama regarding an executive action that could benefit an estimated 5 million undocumented immigrants, Sosa said that if the president managed to legalize undocumented immigrants he could pretty much lock the victory for Democrats in the presidential elections of 2016. 

“That said, it’s not impossible for Republicans to overcome”, Sosa said in interview with US News. “The strategy for Republicans will have to be to go ahead and risk upsetting the radical right in order to win the bigger prize of inclusion.”

 

Throughout his career, Sosa has written several books, among them “The Americano Dream: How Latinos Can Achieve Success in Business and in Life,” in which he recaps his own success and shares advice for Latinos to open up to the broader U.S. business culture. 

 

He is also author of “Think & Grow Rich: A Latino Choice,” in which he ties the principles of inspirational writer Napoleon Hill to his own success story, and those of other Latinos, to help readers develop a course of action to achieve their goals.  

 

Sosa is also responsible for “The Children of the Revolución,” a book and Emmy-award winning public TV series, that tells the story of more than a million people who left Mexico after the Revolution in 1910 to build their life in the United States. Among them were his grandparents, as well as the ancestors of figures like Henry Cisneros, Julian, Joaquín y Rosa Castro, and Sandra Cisneros, who also participated in this project.