If you haven’t heard of Amalia Moreno-Damgaard, you haven’t been paying attention.
The banking executive turned chef/author/entrepreneur has been a media fixture during National Hispanic Heritage Month, which ends Oct. 15, while being tapped by businesses worldwide to share what she calls her passion, telling the story of Latin America through food.
“It’s been a really, really busy month, but you know, it’s a blessing to have this work and to have fun in the process,” she said.
Moreno-Damgaard can cover a lot of ground — business, culture, history and cooking — and she’s uniquely qualified to be an authority on all of them.
She grew up in Guatemala, raised and nurtured by her grandmother, who was an entrepreneur and an excellent cook. In the early 1980s, she moved to the United States, where she went to college and started her first career in Kansas City. There she worked in international banking and met her future husband, who was born and raised in Copenhagen. Their professional paths took them first to St. Louis and in 2001 they moved with their young son to Minnesota, where she eventually left a corporate career that required a fair amount of travel.
“Coming from Latin America, my customs and traditions, I didn’t want my son to grow away from me,” she said. “I started getting the urge, the strong calling of connecting with my son. ... I wanted to be a nurturing mother the way my grandmother nurtured me. And that was it. And for three years, I questioned did I make the right decision, because I had a bright future.”
But Moreno-Damgaard didn’t stand still. With a master’s degree in international business and the perspective of connecting Latin America to the rest of the world through her work and travels, she put her ideas in motion, meeting with mentors to help chart a new but familiar course.
“I have a North Star. We live in Minnesota and that is so appropriate,” she said. “My North Star is my grandmother; she is my light, she is my inspiration. I have a fire in me, and part of that is my grandmother, because she was an excellent cook and she was an entrepreneur. And guess who I became? I became another version of my grandmother.”