Ruby Muñoz Dang, Director of marketing, client services, Garcia Hamilton & Associates

As a child growing up in Houston with parents who had emigrated from Mexico, Ruby Muñoz Dang’s “whole life revolved around 10 blocks — the church, the school, our neighborhood grocery store.”

Everyone she knew spoke Spanish, and almost no one she knew had gone to college. Still, her parents encouraged her to continue her education, and while at the University of Houston, she met a classmate in statistics who worked at Davis Hamilton, which would become Garcia Hamilton & Associates LP, and told her the firm was trying to grow.

“I knew I loved numbers,” said Ms. Muñoz Dang, who is based in Houston. “I was really excited I was able to work in every department at Garcia Hamilton.”

She began in operations in 1994, then moved to trading, then research.

When Gilbert Garcia joined the firm, he asked Ms. Muñoz Dang and a colleague in 2008 to launch a marketing and client services department.

We “knew nothing about fixed income, had no clue what an RFP was, or a database,” she said. “We just kind of were winging it, right? And we learned along the way.”

It worked, and Garcia Hamilton’s assets under management grew from about $800 million in 2008 to $21 billion today.

Along with that came growth in staff, and Ms. Muñoz Dang underscores that of the firm’s 39 employees, about 70% are women and 65% are people of color.

“We took it upon ourselves to say that, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’” she said. “We’re going to demonstrate that women and people of color can participate in this industry.”