Manuel Morales first came to the state as a migrant worker, traveling 1,300 miles from his hometown on the southern Texas border to pick summer crops for the season. After six years of making the hard journey, Manuel decided to stop migrating and plant some roots of his own in 1955 Indianapolis.

At the time, Indiana’s Hispanic population was somewhere between 0 and 1 percent. When Manuel lay dying of cancer several years later, he asked his son, Tomás, to give back to the city’s small Hispanic community. Tomás took his father’s words to heart and formed Morales Group in 2003, now one of the largest Hispanic-owned staffing agencies in the city.

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