TIME

How Latinos Drive America’s Economic Growth

VICTORIA FLORES KNOWS HER MARKET. “EVERY girl wears hair,” she says as she brushes the synthetic extensions that were just clipped into a beauty blogger’s long bleached locks. “I don’t care if she’s white, black or Latina.”

Flores, 42, is working in an airy space in midtown Manhattan, three floors above a perfume outlet and a row of cluttered costume-jewelry stores. As a late summer sun beats down on the vendors below, Flores hustles back and forth across the office in white skinny jeans and wedge heels, trying to keep her own business afloat. Flores is the founding co-owner of Lux Beauty Club, an online hair-extension retailer, and since she launched her company in March 2016, life has run at warp speed. Flores, who is of Mexican descent and was born in El Paso, Texas, used to work on Wall Street as an associate at Morgan Stanley Prime Brokerage. Now her days revolve around hair: buying it, selling it and constantly trying to raise more capital so she can keep sending it out to women who think that getting new extensions is, as she puts it, “better than

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