In the seven months since becoming chief executive officer of the Tulsa Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Maritza Leon Cartagena has planned the chamber’s biggest event.
The 12th annual Festival Americas, featuring live music, vendors and family-friendly activities, is Saturday at Guthrie Green. Leon Cartagena took on the planning as the chamber’s only employee, despite never having attended the event.
“It’s definitely going to be different from other years,” she said.
With a new leader at the helm, the festival is adding a 15-stop passport and a loteria-style game. The additions, she says, are meant to reflect all the countries of the Americas.
Leon Cartagena stepped into her new role in March after founding CEO Martha Isabel Zapata departed in November 2025. The chamber can now report 210 members — up from 160 when she started.
If you go
Festival Americas runs from 4 to 10 p.m. Saturday at Guthrie Green, 111 Reconciliation Way. Find more details on the bands playing and vendors coming here.
She began planning the festival in July but spent months before that meeting with each member, getting feedback on what they needed most from the organization.
“I actually decided not to have an office for now so that I could actually meet the members at their locations,” she said. “So if they have a restaurant, I go to the restaurant, or if they have a store, I go to the store because I wanted to capture a better picture of what their business looks like, what their environment looks like, right? Like if they’re working with their family, if they’re working with other people, and those people also have families.”
During those conversations, three needs stuck out to her: How to grow their businesses, how to get more customers and how to connect with American businesses and owners. Within each of those themes were more specific goals, like developing business-specific marketing strategies.
“I haven’t started working on those because that’s where we start doing the work of connecting, putting them together and starting to build a road map for them of where we’re going (and) how to go there,” Leon Cartagena said.
Her focus is on building connections between members and businesses with similar accomplishments, either through networking events or luncheons.
“They were doing inspections for the trucks and a lot of our food trucks didn’t know what that entailed, what they needed, how they can have everything that was being asked for — language barriers — there’s just so much within that one theme or circumstance and so addressing those things by bringing other members (in).
“The rules and the regulations and the way to grow (businesses) here is very different than the way to grow and the rules and the way things are done in our countries,” she added.
Leon Cartagena says the Tulsa Area Hispanic Chamber can create a stronger community if members share their knowledge.
“So that’s my job now to bring those people that have that knowledge, that are doing their job already and teach those that are looking for that information,” she said.
This article was produced as part of a partnership between the Tulsa Flyer and La Semana, a Tulsa-based bilingual Spanish-English newspaper serving Latino communities in Oklahoma.
News decisions at the Tulsa Flyer are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
