Rubén Jaramillo sold a house to open his Piqueteadero Pura Arepa, a Colombian snack bar and restaurant. He searched long and hard for the perfect spot, and finally bought a building on Dexter Street in Central Falls, in the heart of a Latino cluster.
Up and down the street, signs beckon in Spanish, offering everything from groceries, to CDs, to computers, to insurance. Even the Anglos here court the Latino clientele – after all, they’re half the city’s population, and the lion’s share of the people walking about.
But that hasn’t made it any easier for Jaramillo to draw customers into his four-month-old business. Dexter Street, you see, is saturated with Latino restaurants and Colombian ones in particular. Right next door is the much fancier-looking La Sorpresa, and nearby are the tiny Piqueteadero Aquí Me Quedo and the well-known El Paisa.
“There are so many Hispanic places, there’s not enough (business) for everyone,” Jaramillo said on a very quiet Tuesday evening. “We’re all Colombians, and we all make Hispanic food, so the only difference is the price – and the flavor.”
In Central Falls, Providence, and to a lesser extent, other cities, the number of Latino-owned businesses has risen dramatically in recent years. Now, preliminary figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau are confirming what a casual drive down Dexter Street shows: Latino businesses increased by 56.2 percent in Rhode Island from 1997 to 2002, to 3,415 statewide.
Nationally, the figures jumped 31.2 percent from 1997 to 2002, for a total of 1.6 million.
In Rhode Island, the number of Latino businesses increased seven times as fast as the total business count, the figures show. Black- and Asian-owned businesses also increased rapidly, by 39.2 percent and 39.8 percent, respectively. Altogether, minorities owned 8.2 percent of Rhode Island businesses as of 2002, the report says; across the nation, it was 17.8 percent.
That’s still far from a proportional share: 18.1 percent of Rhode Islanders and 30.9 percent of Americans are minorities. But community leaders and economic-development experts alike see the growth in business ownership as crucial to minority groups’ economic advancement. Because most of that growth happens in urban clusters, it’s also tied to cities’ revitalization.
José Brito, president of the Southside Merchants Association, picked up on that point in a news release announcing the new Census report:
“This is good news for the state, not just for Latinos, because our state’s economic progress is linked to the well-being of Latino businesses,” he said. “The better off the community is, the better off we all are.”
Top government leaders seem to agree. Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty, whose office oversees the state’s Small Business Council, has walked just about every inch of Broad Street in South Providence in three separate tours, making connections with the local merchants.
On Aug. 3, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed led a walking tour of Dexter Street, accompanied by Mark S. Hayward, director of the U.S. Small Business Administration office in Rhode Island and by Juana Horton, president of the Rhode Island Hispanic-American Chamber of Commerce. And U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee had his own tour of South Providence businesses last Friday.
A good part of Latino business owners’ growing clout is due to the advocacy of people like Horton – owner of a large translation service – and Brito, who started the Southside association with about 20 members two years ago and now has more than 300, now spread out all across Providence (a name change is in the works).
With help from Tomás Ávila, a longtime community advocate who’s now part of a Latino-owned real estate company in Central Falls, Brito’s group has worked to organize and educate local merchants so they’re more business-savvy, and it’s used the impressive growth figures to get more support from the SBA and the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation.
“Based on the last conversation I had with the EDC, they’re paying a lot of attention to what we’re doing,” Brito said. Yet banks, whose support is also crucial, are still apathetic, he said.
The one exception has been Domestic Bank, which has drawn Latino merchants across the city line, into Cranston, through aggressive outreach. Earlier this month, Brito said, the bank sent loan officers to a Southside gathering, and 25 merchants filled out credit applications. “They’ve paid enormous attention to us, and now we’re switching our accounts to their bank.”
Still, Brito said, it’s hard to build clout when your business is not just small, but tiny. Yes, there are some big, profitable Latino-owned businesses out there; some of the larger restaurants and beauty salons, Brito said, support multiple families. But Rhode Island Latino businesses’ average annual receipts, based on the Census data, are only $62,582, compared with $213,218 for Asian-owned businesses and $416,940 for white-owned businesses. And only 8.7 percent of Latino businesses reported having paid employees, compared with 28 percent of Asian and 27.2 percent of white-owned businesses.
Horton said the Latino numbers are probably too low due to the informal way in which many businesses are run. Most are family-owned, she said, and when it’s all relatives, they may not be on the books. “We’ve been trying to educate the Hispanic businesses to understand that when you go for a loan, you’re going to have to have documentation of your staff, your resources, your finances,” Horton said.
Yet the reality is, Latino merchants do carry much of the labor burden in their own businesses. When Fogarty visited El Palacio de la Música, a popular CD store in South Providence, a few months ago, owner Jhonny “Bomba” Rodríguez told him he worked there every day by himself, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. At the store’s larger namesake in Central Falls (founded by the same man, Félix Peralta, in 1990, and now owned by his nephew), owner Braulio Llerena said it’s him, his wife and a friend, 9:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. every day.
“You have to be here all the time, and sometimes neglect your family,” Llerena said. “But it’s good in the sense that you get to know a lot of people. … And though you don’t get rich, you’re a little more independent, less pressured by the bills.”
In South Providence, at least, many of these family-run businesses can count on one another for support, and by banding together they’ve made big strides in the last few years. In other areas, however, Latino merchants aren’t as organized or united.
Brito said he’s gotten calls from Central Falls and Woonsocket, asking if he could help local merchants to form a group like Southside, but between his business and his activism, he’s already too busy. “It would be too difficult for me” to get involved, he said.
So Brito is staying focused on his own city, setting up workshops, and looking at ways to diversify the Latino business community, so there’s not such a heavy concentration of restaurants and bodegas, but perhaps a nice café, some cleaning services, even some small manufacturing operations. “There’s a new interest among us in changing,” he said.
In Central Falls, meanwhile, Jaramillo and his mother, Blanca Giraldo – the chef – are looking to diversify in a different way. Given the huge competition among Colombian eateries, they’re talking about switching to American foods.
“We’ve had a lot of Americans come in, but they want some of their own foods,” Jaramillo said.
“They try our things, but they’re not used to the flavors, so we need to give them what they like – we’re thinking of all-day breakfast. We just need more money to change over.”
