This article from the Washington Post on a highly successful bilingual car salesman is a must read for anyone who wishes to market to Hispanics in the U.S. German Vidal is deft and nimble with the two cultures he's selling to, knowing not only when to speak their language, but how to reach them at the emotional level where their dreams and aspirations lie.

He's an American archetype, permanently imagined in a plaid jacket, not to be trusted 100 percent, with a million-dollar smile and a gold-plated pitch: Tell me what I can do to put you in this car today!

But when this archetype speaks Spanish? The meaning of the transaction shifts. He extends a promise to immigrants working hard to get off buses, out of junkers, away from the deadly and sidewalkless thoroughfares of their sprawling new frontier: This new machine, he tells them, will help you merge right into the mainstream.

Tags: Hispanic | Spanish | Bilingual | Language

When he started out in the early 1990s, local dealerships were realizing it was good business to serve customers in their own language. Now you hear Spanish in most showrooms. At 45, Vidal has survived a high-burnout profession longer than most.

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She slips behind the wheel for a test drive. From the passenger seat, Vidal goes over the car's features, in Spanish. "¡Gracias a Dios!" she says, when he points out the zoned temperature controls.

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On the outside, a Hispanic car salesman may not appear radically different from the domestic model. But on the inside, he is thinking about how to bridge more complicated cultural currents. To succeed, he must also sell well to non-Hispanics, while in dealing with his own community, he must decide if he will be their champion -- or use their trust to take advantage. "I have not received one call saying anything bad about German. That speaks highly of him," says Alejandro Carrasco, operator of Radio America, 1540 AM, a dominant figure in local Hispanic broadcasting who crusades against businesses preying on Latinos. The Hispanic car salesman must also be savvy to differences. Hispanics are much more likely to take the advice of friends and relatives about what to buy and who to buy it from. They seek a guide in a land of dizzying choices and information overload.