Juan Cárdenas working remotely on his company, 2020. Photo courtesy by Juan Cárdenas.
Neeraj Konathan / Staff Writer
FIU alum and a recipient of the Dream Act, Juan Cárdenas recently opened his own marketing company to support the Hispanic community.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) includes Dreamers, or children who have been unlawfully living in the U.S. with protection from deportation while also providing them a work permit.
He arrived from Colombia at the age of 12, majored in marketing at FIU. He is one of the 800,000 people in the U.S. protected by DACA.
After six years, Cárdenas runs a marketing company called 2020 which he opened in 2016. The company is focused on providing marketing and public relation skills to other Hispanic marketing companies.
Cárdenas says he developed the idea after noticing a lack of companies focusing on the Hispanic population in the country.
Cárdenas has also progressed in his business through guidance from his mentor.
“[My mentor] taught me finance…how to dress, how to talk to business people, how to be professional and how to be disciplined,” said Cárdenas.
After immigrating to Miami, he recalls that the language was the most difficult barrier he faced throughout college.
“My biggest challenge was not only to learn for the class, [but] trying to learn a language that [everybody] understands,” said Cárdenas.
He embraced his new name, Juan Patron, to help people remember him. The name translates to boss or leader.
“I wanted to build a company where the Spanish companies will feel at home [and] be able to do business [in] their own language,” he said. “My entire company is catered to Spanish people.”
His biggest challenge was gaining other companies’ trust because he was so young and inexperienced when he opened 2020 at the age of 24.
Some notable companies that work with Patron’s 2020 agency are Doral Food, Wine festival, and Avianca.
He hopes to see more entrepreneurs with Hispanic roots creating more ways to help.
“Instead of looking for a job they can apply [for], they can start their own company,” said Patron. “By educating them [to] look, I always tell people [to] go see the community, then start a business online to solve those issues.”
Due to the COVID-19, the teaching workshops he had previously hosted in person at FIU are no longer possible.
Instead, he finds himself adjusting using Zoom to host events for business leaders, women entrepreneurs, and non-governmental organizations in using social media to provide for their communities.
“We [teach] them how to [open] a website and social media [accounts] so they can target [their audiences] and grow their business.”
Patron says that communicating through social media will allow young entrepreneurs to feel closer to their community.
Many Dreamers, including Patron, are looking ahead to the election, which will be a deciding factor in the future of DACA.
The Trump administration sought to end the Obama era DACA program in Sept. 2017, but this past June, the Supreme Court blocked the removal.
“My main concern is that DACA [will get] shut down… [people that] spent [their] entire life in this country, like myself will not be able to keep succeeding [and if] we’ll be able to keep growing [and] building the businesses within the family in this country at a basic level,” said Patron.
With more than 600,000 out of the 800,000 DACA recipients coming from Mexico and other South American countries according to Pew Research Center, DACA is an essential element in the future growth of the Hispanic community.
Patron told PantherNOW, “I hope, [that] because we [are] almost 1 million people, the president and this administration [will] make sure that DACA people will be able to permanently stay in this country.”
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