Alma Rosa Montañez: Chief Corporate Counsel, S&P Global

“One of the big challenges for most people of color, and perhaps for many women, is individuating,” says Alma Rosa Montañez. “Being able to cast yourself as an individual by whoever is perceiving you, as opposed to whatever the perceived group stereotype might be.”

Montañez speaks to her journey as a woman bridging two cultures, the pain of being reduced to a stereotype, and what she did when a young woman intern tried to get her coffee.

Exploring Her Roots as a Lawyer

Montañez recalls first aspiring to be a lawyer at eight years old, when she was sitting in an immigration lawyer’s office with her family as they were finding a way to make a life in the U.S. But over the years, she’s considered that when you create your life in another country, you never know who you may have been if opportunity had existed back home.

“The funny thing about immigration is as much as you are drawn to America, and many of us are, for everything it has offered and hopefully will continue to offer, it’s still not the first option,” says Montañez. “If we all had the ability to make a life and a real path in the place where we are from, where we have these deep ties, we likely would choose to stay.”

As she moved through undergrad at Stanford University, Montañez came to understand more of her family’s personal migration story, which was catalyzed by the petrodollar crisis of the late 70’s & early 80’s. The crisis was ultimately traced back to imbalances at the negotiating table between sovereign borrowers and their lenders.

Coming out of Columbia Law School, Montañez chose to represent sovereign borrowers primarily in the oil industry working for the Mexican, Venezuelan and Brazilian governments while based in Mexico. This gave her an opportunity to explore what life might have looked like if she’d never emigrated. It would be her first attempt to bridge the space between her identity and her profession.

“I was drafting in Spanish and English, day in and day out. It answered a lot of questions about what my life might have been,” says Montañez. “I could skip generations of work in Mexico because now I was going back as an American, with Ivy League degrees, who sounds like a local and can function without feeling restrained by cultural stuff. But in many ways, I’m not from there anymore. I learned to become comfortable with the fact that I’m really not either Mexican or American – I’m both.”

Testing Herself in New York

Ultimately more interested in the workings of finances than oil and with some closure on personal issues, Montañez decided to test out her law chops back in New York City: “I wanted to find out if I was actually a good lawyer, not just a good lawyer in Latin America. If you took out my language skills, how would I measure up in New York?”

In 2006, she jumped into the deep-end of structured finance.

“You’re drinking from a firehose, billing 300 hours a month for many months a year, and not getting a whole lot of sleep,” she remembers. “But to be able to go from zero to running deals in the span of six months gave me the confidence to get past the imposter syndrome that accompanies so many of us who aren’t cisgendered heterosexual white men.”

Her journey hit a bump when the market crashed and the once steady lockstep career progression fell out from under her. She began some traveling, volunteering, learned Portuguese and tried to redefine who she was now.

Letting Go of Comfort to Evolve

As she was putting the pieces together, Montañez received what she describes as a call for a “purple unicorn”. It was for a role at S&P Global Ratings, for which a handful of lawyers fit the brief: experience in structured finance, ideally real estate focused, with Latin America language skills. She joined S&P in 2011, as Associate General Counsel, advising on everything from esoteric structured finance to sovereign debt, flexing all the muscles she developed in New York and again influencing outcomes in Latin America. For the first time all the pieces of her puzzle seem to fall into place.

Montañez grew to managing the team of lawyers advising on ratings in the Americas, but after five years that came to feel like cruise control and her drive to challenge herself returned.

She let go of safety and comfort and made a jump to S&P Global, the publicly listed parent company of the rating agency. She took a step back, giving up managing, to build a new skill set and eventually worked her way to managing and joining the GC’s leadership team, now on a trajectory to becoming a public company general counsel.

Becoming More Valuable As a Lawyer

“As a junior lawyer, your job is to impress with legal nuance and detail, the nitty-gritty of the legal analysis,” says Montañez. “When you become more senior, you get access to clients and to business people, so it’s about whether you can communicate and connect in a way that’s meaningful: being able to craft a legal narrative, not only for yourself and for the organizational needs, but also for your specific client and what they’re trying to achieve.”

Montañez notes that in any organization or practice, there’s the formal process, but also many informal processes that often take longer to navigate: “There are invisible gatekeepers at a lot of places. If you can figure those out, it’s a great asset. If you can make people’s lives easier by having a quick call or a conversation on the side, it makes you invaluable in a very different way.”

Learning To Belong Without Belonging

Montañez says that as a Latina lawyer, she is often confronted with potential biases : “My last name is Montañez with a tilde over the n. It’s not Montanez, but my anglicized name has been Alma Montanez for 30 years. When it comes down to the resume, do I add the tilde? If I do, does the person flipping through thirty resumes get put off by having to figure out how to say my name?”

Montañez notes that when people meet her in a meeting, they experience her as an individual. But from a piece of paper, questions and assumptions are created that have nothing to do with who she is. She also acknowledges the privilege of being able to individuate more easily because she doesn’t have an accent and is white presenting.

Still, weary of stereotypes and of being pigeonholed, she has shied away from leadership roles strictly in Latin America, notwithstanding how much of her career and development is tied to the region.

With only a handful of other women at her level of seniority and no other Latin American woman near, she’s learned to claim her seat for herself: “You have to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable all the time. If I was waiting to feel comfortable in a room, I wouldn’t be in any of the rooms that I’m in. You figure out how to belong, without belonging.”

What Montañez has found most deflating along the way are the instances when people whom she has worked with for years learn she was born in Mexico and suddenly shift from substantive conversations to things like “wow, your English is really good” or “wow, you don’t have an accent” or “so then, are you a dreamer?”

The speed with which one transitions from a peer with a cultivated relationship and track record to a stereotype is astounding, dehumanizing and painful.

Valuing Your Voice and Not Getting the Coffee

“When there are no mentors who look like you, you figure out who you can take a little bit of learning from,” says Montañez. “I’ve had the blessing of being mentored by a lot of really amazing women and they have been my saving grace.”

“One of my coping strategies has been to make observations about the things that I need to avoid. Never in my life will I get coffee for anyone other than a close friend,” she notes. “I reamed out this poor intern once: she came in on her second day looking for something to do and she offered to get my coffee. I told her: ‘Absolutely not. You will not be getting coffee for anyone, ever. Never offer that again. If you get the coffee, you’re going to be the coffee girl, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a coffee boy, but I haven’t.’”

Over the years, she has heard even the fiercest senior women speak to gaps in parity, even if seated at the table. It’s taught her that everyone struggles, and she makes an effort to bring that into her mentoring. “Some women of color and people with different cultural upbringings are often taught to respect the room and not to draw attention to themselves,” she says. ”It’s really hard to overcome that, but you start with reminding yourself that you have a unique perspective, and you actually do have valuable things to say.”

Through mentoring, she’s learned the value of validating other people’s experiences in dealings with bias: “Bias is like gravity. I don’t like it, but I have to deal with it. So if I’m going to move, I have to move, notwithstanding it. Yes, my load is heavier. Does that mean I stop, or does that mean I get stronger?” In acknowledging the weight her mentees are carrying, she hopes to support them through their own journey to get stronger.

She recommends mentees to begin with getting deeper in touch with their authentic and inherent value and values: “When you get in touch with your center, reaching out is from a place that’s more authentic, giving and more supportive. Anyone who feels supported in a genuine way is going to respond very differently.”

Making a Little Time Can Matter A Lot

Her law career has always kept her occupied and on call, but Montañez now also finds the energy to contribute to areas she’s passionate about.

In February, she was compelled to go from being a casual donor to joinng the board of directors of Mextica Organization, Inc., a Sunset Park based organization that supports essential needs in health, education, social, and legal issues for the Mexican and Latin American immigrant community in Brooklyn. She also supports The Squirrel Comedy Theatre, a non-profit people of color and LGBTQ+-led improv theater her sister co-founded.

Her professional skills help her serve these organizations. In making a little time to support causes and people she loves, Montañez is finding another way to unify her professional skills, her culture and her values.

By: Aimee Hansen