Little did Toni Allegretti Vazquez realize just how important those Spanish lessons she took more than 20 years ago would become.
”I started taking Spanish lessons because I was planning a trip to Spain,” she said. ”I`d become very interested in the culture and the people.”
As things turned out, she never made that trip.
Instead, she got married, had a child, got divorced, became an expert in international trade issues and ended up as the director of the State of Illinois Trade Office in Mexico City.
That Illinois has an office in Mexico has everything to do with Vazquez, 52.
She lobbied for its opening in 1988, long before the U.S. and Mexico began discussions about establishing formal commercial ties through what is being called the ”Free Trade Agreement.” The FTA would eliminate existing trade and tariff restrictions and create a powerful North American trading block consisting of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada.
Illinois opened its office in Mexico City in December 1989. There are currently 10 such offices around the world.
The purpose of trading offices is to increase the state`s visibility abroad in an effort to increase business opportunities for state-based companies and increase tourism.
Becoming a specialist in international trade was not what Antoinette Allegretti, the oldest child and only daughter of Joe and Mary Allegretti, set out to do. (Vazquez is her ex-husband`s surname.)
Vazquez grew up on Chicago`s Northwest Side. After graduation from Taft High School, she enrolled in the music program at De Paul University.
”I thought I was going to become a music teacher,” she said. ”Two years into the program, I decided I was not meant for teaching and I didn`t think I was good enough to be a professional.”
She decided to take a temporary break from school and rethink her future. It would be 25 years before she returned to the classroom.
She went to work for a large insurance company.
”When I entered the business world, I found out I liked it and I was good at it,” she said.
Within a year Vazquez became a supervisor. She attributes her swift rise to the knowledge gained working in her family`s restaurant business. For a number of years, her father, Joe, and his brothers, Gus, Fred and John, ran a chain of restaurants-Allegretti`s Italian-American Family Restaurants-on Chicago`s North Side.
”I grew up in an environment where we were always dealing with the public and where I learned early how to take on management and supervisory responsibilities,” Vazquez said.
”My brothers, Fred and Jim, and I worked closely with our parents. Several years later, when my father became ill, I managed his restaurants for him.”
Vazquez met her husband, a Mexico City native, in 1966 at a Latin American community dance in Chicago. After they married, she stayed on at the insurance company until their child, Jacqueline, was born. Vazquez thought at the time that she was ready to give up working and stay at home full time. She wasn`t.
”My daughter was born in 1968,” she said. ”And about three months later, I couldn`t stand being at home full time anymore. I mean, I loved her dearly, but I had to get out and do something.”
She started working part time for her father. At the same time, she enrolled in a career-planning course at a community college.
”As I was analyzing myself, I kept coming up with exporting, not only as a topic of interest but one that matched my skills. By this time I spoke fluent Spanish. But when I`d look in the newspaper for job descriptions and openings, I came up with nothing.”
What put her on the right path was a chance conversation with a couple who owned a plastics manufacturing business.
”One day the husband mentioned that he`d been receiving a lot of correspondence written in Spanish,” she said. ”It came as a result of an article about him that had been published in Latin America. He asked me if I would translate the letters for him.”
The translation request led to a job developing export leads for the firm, Plastisonics. Soon, Vazquez was working out of her home, offering similar export and import consultation for other small firms.
During this time she became involved in the Northwest International Trade Club in Elk Grove Village, Ill. Within a year she was named president of the organization, now called the International Trade Association of Greater Chicago. Through her activities with that group she was recruited for a job with the State of Illinois in its international marketing division, specializing in Latin America.
Just as her employment star was rising, Vazquez found that her marriage was failing. She was going through a divorce. She decided to take the state job because it offered more security than self-employment.
But, she said, her timing in taking the new job couldn`t have been worse. It was 1982, and at that moment, the bottom was falling out of Latin American economies. Inflation was rampant and countries like Mexico, which had borrowed heavily from foreign banks, were having difficulty repaying their debts.
”It was hard to convince companies to look toward Latin America as a market with potential,” she said. ”The state began focusing its efforts on Japan and the Far East.”
Vazquez continued to keep tabs on happenings in Latin America. She also decided she needed to go back to school. She hadn`t completed the requirements for her bachelor`s degree, but through a special admissions program, she enrolled in the Executive MBA Program at Lake Forest College. She continued her job at the state and attended classes on weekends. In 1987 she graduated with honors.
Vazquez said she began hearing rumors about improvements in Mexico`s economy in 1988.
In the mid-to-late 1970`s Mexico`s economy had been booming. The surge was fueled in large part by the discovery of new oil deposits and U.S. efforts to create new oil supply sources following the Mideast oil embargo crisis.
At its peak in 1982, Mexico ranked fourth in the world in oil production, producing about 1.1 barrels a year.
Buoyed by its new-found economic clout, Mexico borrowed huge sums of money to fund new public works projects. But its boom period ended almost as quickly as it started, the result of a world-wide plunge in oil prices. Mexico found itself faced with a massive foreign debt it could not repay, along with soaring inflation and unemployment.
Mexico`s government turned inward as it struggled to find ways to regain economic and domestic equilibrium. By late 1980, those efforts appeared to be paying off, Vazquez said.
”Of all the Latin American countries, suddenly there seemed to be more interest in Mexico,” she said. ”Bankers were starting to tell me that their lines of credit to the country were increasing, that they were starting to do more export financing.”
It was serendipitous that the Illinois trade office planned an exhibition in Mexico later that year. While she was there, Vazquez scheduled meetings with various Mexican government and business officials.
Encouraged by what she learned in those meetings, she returned to Chicago and wrote a proposal suggesting that Illinois open a trade office in Mexico. Other states, such as Texas and California, were already in the process of doing just that.
”I said the opportunities were imminent,” she said. ”To address the opportunities adequately, we would have to have a presence there.”
Vazquez`s hunch was right. Illinois exports to Mexico have been steadily increasing. According to the State of Illinois figures, they`ve increased from $278.4 million in 1986 to $880.8 million in 1990. Those figures include an almost 20 percent increase from 1989 to 1990.
Vazquez explained that each trade office works at finding ways of achieving the state`s goal of increasing foreign trade. For example, in Japan and elsewhere in the Far East, the focus has been on attracting foreign investment to Illinois, she said.
One project in the Mexico City office has been to work the TriCity Regional Port District in southwestern Illinois to promote the use of waterways and roads in that part of the state for for distribution and transportation of goods from Mexico to the U.S.
The growth of trade is keeping the Mexico City trade office very busy, Vazquez said.
”We originally thought we could function very well here with four people. As it`s turned out now, we`re up to eight and about to hire a ninth. The agriculture department is going to hire a special representative and we can not keep up with the demand,” Vazquez said.
Mexicans, she said, realize that ”Illinois is a natural bridge to Canada, now that that country is involved in the Free Trade Agreement, as well as to the rest of the U.S. market.”
Living and working in Mexico has not been a culture shock, she said, nor has it been a hindrance being a woman working in a male-dominated country.
”I`ve been accepted very well. In part it has to with the fact that I`m viewed as someone with a position of official importance, and for that reason I`m extended all the courtesies that would be extended to any male.
”On a personal level, I think it helps to speak the language and to be culturally sensitive. I can relate to people quickly on a level they`re familiar with and comfortable with. That has added to my acceptance here.”
Her experiences in learning Mexico`s business environment are ones that any foreign business person would face, Vazquez said.
”You really have to establish personal relationships,” she said. ”It is a very Latin quality. Mexicans understand trust and confidence on the basis of a personal relationship that later becomes a foundation for their business relationship.”
Vazquez downplays suggestions that sacrifices had to be made in her personal life to achieve career goals. Had the opportunity come when her daughter had been in high school, she would not have been able to take it, she said.
Her daughter graduated last year from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and recently joined her mother in Mexico. She is enrolled in medical school at the University of Mexico in Mexico City.
”The timing for me in my life and hers, in terms of my making this move, was just perfect,” Vazquez said.
