Latino Wall St Presents: Tony Delgado at CPAC Latino 2025

First of all, I want to thank all you guys for coming. Thank you for all the love and the warmth. I have my best man at my wedding, Hugo. He's here somewhere. There he is. And the one thing that he said, he's been hanging out with all you guys and he said the warmth and the love and the energy in the room is really good. So I just want to thank all you guys, whether you came from Canada, whether you came from Spain, whether you came from just down the street in Orlando or all the way across the world, I want to thank you guys for being here. I also want to thank our crew and our production team working overnight. And I want to thank our sponsors and everyone who put this together. We were working around the clock, burning the midnight oil that people, some people didn't sleep to create this event for you guys. And I know when you look around, you see the chandeliers and the marble floors, but it wasn't always like this, right? Just last year, we hosted this event in a community college. And, you know, a couple of years before that, we were in different schools and libraries and wherever we, wherever we could to just get this message out. And last year we hosted Latino Wall Street at the Miami Dade College, and we had a vision to impact our community. And we had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. come and give the keynote speech, half in Spanish and half in English. Who was here last year for Robert F. Kennedy? Yeah, a lot of you guys. And, you know, I moved to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, because I wanted to have a positive impact on the Latino community. And because I saw a massive gap, I saw a gap in education. I saw a system that handed out diplomas without people actually having a plan for the future. And they never really taught people how to build real wealth. Fun fact, Puerto Rico has one of the highest percentages of college educated people in the United States. And yet they have some of the lowest salaries when it comes to the medium income. Why? Because the system is broken. Because the system doesn't teach you how to win. The system does not teach you how to build wealth. The system teaches you how to follow the rules. And people who don't break the rules do not actually become successful in America, right? To become an entrepreneur, becoming an innovator, right? Someone like Elon Musk, they have to break a lot of rules to actually go to the top. So this is why we created Latino Wall Street. Because we don't want Latinos to just survive. We want you to thrive. And so for years, people kept telling me, Tony, you should run for mayor. You should run for Congress. You should run for the governor of Puerto Rico. I've heard this a million times in the last five years, in the last five days. But I always said the same thing. I said, listen, I don't really believe in politics, right? I believe in capitalism. I don't believe in asking for permission. I believe in the free market and the American dream and democracy. And I always thought that if you didn't like the school you went to, well, you would save up and you would go to a private school. You send your kids to a private school. If you didn't like the house you grew up in, well, you could go and you can get a better job or start a business. And you could go and buy a better house and move to a better neighborhood or a safer neighborhood. And I never really believed in taking welfare. I didn't believe my mother taught me to never take welfare, never take anything from the government, right? But then something changed, right? Then when 2020 happened during COVID, we watched our freedoms get stripped away. We watched the government come in and tell us how to run our businesses, tell us how to live our lives, right? They didn't just put a mask on our face to protect us from COVID. They put a mask on our face as far as censorship, as far as what we could say on social media. And I saw the government actually overreaching in a lot of ways, right? Me and my wife got married in Puerto Rico during COVID. And we were told to cancel our wedding. And we had to tell everyone no. So we got married in 2020 during the heat of COVID. And we had to have all sorts of rules and restrictions and masks and all sorts of weird things, but we were able to make it happen. And I realized something that really changed my life. I realized that if we don't pay attention to politics, politics is going to pay attention to us, right? So during that time, I had just become a father, right? And like millions of other Latinos, I moved from Puerto Rico back to the United States to Florida to give my son a better life. And I know that if we don't protect our freedoms, if we allow socialism and communism to spread like they have in places like Venezuela and Nicaragua, our children will grow up in oppression, not opportunity. I grew up in a Democrat household. We loved RFK, right? And we love JFK. Kennedy was like a big name. I consider myself a Kennedy Democrat. So this really isn't about left or right, Democrat or Republican. It's really about freedom versus tyranny, freedom versus slavery. If there's one thing I know about the Latino community, it's that we know firsthand the terrors of socialism and communism, as it has destroyed more lives than any other ideology in human history. And so no matter who is in the White House, I think that Latinos deserve to have a seat at the table. And that's why we're excited to announce this very historic partnership, Latino Wall Street and CPAC, to create CPAC Latino. We're bringing world leaders, visionaries, and freedom fighters from around the world here, not just to talk, but to actually take action. Because there's no one that's born a titan. You have to become one. You're going to see political leaders and world leaders and business leaders. And a lot of them are self-made, just like us, right? A lot of them were not born rapes. They were not born with a silver spoon in their mouths. And they had to fight to rise to the levels of leadership and power that they're at. But we're not just starting here. CPAC is going to be taking this mission this year to Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, and beyond, because we believe in the free economy, and we believe in faith, freedom, and family values. So I want to personally thank Matt, Mercedes, and everyone at CPAC for believing in this mission. And now the time has begun. Let's start CPAC Latino.