Hispanic-owned businesses and workers: Growing acceptance

Published on Tuesday, 28 October 2008 14:20

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Jesus Bravo has lived in North Carolina for 11 years. He moved from California with a group of his work friends, and when Bravo and his friends arrived, he needed a job. From there he began the arduous task of finding employment. Well, not really.

The process was remarkably easy, and soon after he got to North Carolina, Bravo began working at a glass manufacturer.

“I wanted a job, I talked to a friend who was working there, then I went and applied and they told me right away,” he said.

Bravo worked there for five years while also working part-time at Margaret’s Cantina, a Mexican restaurant in Chapel Hill. He’s been in the restaurant business for more than 15 years as an employee, at different times he has worked as a bus boy, waiter, bartender and manager, so it made sense that he would open up his own restaurant.

Close to six years ago, Bravo and his friends decided to open the Fiesta Grill Mexican Restaurant on Highway 54. It wasn’t quite as simple as getting his first job turned out to be.

“It wasn't very easy,” he recalled. “This is our first business, and when we started we didn't have much information about how to open a business so we had to research a lot and ask other owners to figure it out and see what needs to be done.”

Gloria Gonzales, whose husband owns the Don Jose Tienda Mexicana in Carrboro, faced similar problems trying to open a business. She moved to North Carolina 12 years ago. Like Bravo, she got a job right away when she arrived in the state. She began working at a B.P. gas station, where her sister had been working, after her sister informed her they could use another staff member. That is the key to getting a job, Gonzales said – knowing someone with a job already. Though it was easy for her and Bravo, she understands that isn’t always the case.

“I think there are both sides,” Gonzales said. “If you don’t know anybody, it can be really hard.”

Bravo and Gonzales’ initial struggles are something James H. Johnson Jr., distinguished professor at the University of North Carolina, said is a problem for the Hispanic population trying to start a business.

“The complex language that is used in documents to get loans, to get a business permit, all of that, it's hard for native English-speaking people to understand some of the fine print on all of the paperwork you've got to do, and that's doubly hard when you don't speak the language,” Johnson said. “It's triply hard when the (Hispanic community’s) median years of school completed are 7 or 8 years.”

Johnson is one of the authors of a 2006 study on the economic impact of the Hispanic population in North Carolina.

After working at the gas station for two years, a friend of Gonzales’ ran into debt problems after taking out a loan that was too big for him to repay. The man owned a store called The Mailbox, and offered to sell it to Gonzales’ husband for a cheap price. He accepted, and the two ran the store for five years before a similar opportunity arose with the Don Jose Tienda Mexicana.

Gonzales’ husband opted to buy the Tienda, and the two went to the bank to try to take out a loan to help out, but the paperwork was too complicated – the banks wanted to know exactly what they would be selling, what exactly they needed the money for, and it was a stack about an inch-and-a-half thick, a daunting task for people trying to start up a new businesses. Gonzales said they ended up borrowing money from her brother when the banks told them no.

No credit, big problem

Raymundo Arenas, a nine-year resident of Durham, also decided to open his own store five years ago.

“We didn’t have any credit, no social security,” he said through a translator. Arenas rents the space for his store, Tienda Hispana La Potosina. He said it was hard to initially open his doors.

Arenas cited a lack of Latino community-oriented financial services as one of the issues, and applying for permits like an alcohol license were quite difficult, but once he broke though the barriers, his store has been successful, now having been open for five years.

In 2006, there were 8,996 Hispanic-owned businesses in North Carolina, and Johnson said that sector of the economy has a great opportunity to continue growing. The key, he said, will be whether or not many of the barriers stacked up against the Hispanic community are addressed. Whether it is the language barriers furthered by complicated English-only documents or the American system of credit histories and other issues associated with financing, things are stacked against Hispanic entrepreneurship. In 2002, 9,048 Hispanic-owned businesses generated $1.8 billion in sales and receipts for the state, though the issues haven’t been directly addressed so the amount of businesses has remained relatively stable. The economic numbers are impossible to ignore, however, and regardless of barriers, many people in the Hispanic community continue to open and run successful businesses throughout North Carolina.

The fact that the barriers are not addressed concerns Gonzales.

“I don’t think they believe in us,” she said of the banks. “The Hispanic people, I don’t think it’s the language. I don’t know what it is, I wish I did.”

Johnson said the numbers alone should prove to the state that they certainly should start believing in the Hispanic population.

“I think the fact that the growth of businesses in the Hispanic community is pretty rapid is a testament to the fact that there's something unique about an immigrant,” Johnson said. “The glass is always half full as opposed to half empty when they come. It's a selective process – not everybody immigrates. These people have drive, and entrepreneurial acumen and commitment, and at the end of the day that's what's really important for fueling growth in the economy.”

Arenas said he believes there are far more financial and business services aimed at the Hispanic community today than there were even five years ago, and that more people are taking advantage of them. The North Carolina Hispanic Chamber of Commerce formed in 1996, and aims to “provide potential business owners, as well as small businesses, the assessment they require to start a business, or to find the financing they might require to expand their business.” There are also Latino Community Credit Union branches all throughout the state, including Durham, Charlotte, Fayetteville and Raleigh. There are beginning to be more resources available, something that could help the population work its way into even more jobs.

It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that the Hispanic population is only filling low-income jobs, or “stealing” positions from other groups in the state. But that is simply not the case. It is true that the Hispanic workforce is growing very rapidly, and it is also true that often that workforce heads toward low-income jobs. But that is a statistic that is changing more and more every year.

According to census data, between 1995 and 2005, the North Carolina labor force increased by 687,579 workers – a 22.9 percent increase. In the same time period, the Hispanic labor force in the state saw a growth of 241,602 workers, an increase of 431 percent. The Hispanic presence in North Carolina industries has grown immensely in the past decade. Even the manufacturing business, which laid off 327,470 workers between 1995 and 2005 due to outsourcing and global competition, actually saw an increase of 14,786 Hispanic workers in that span.

Of the new jobs created in the state in that time frame, one in three was filled by the Hispanic community, with a heavy concentration in construction.

In 2005, close to 75 percent of all Hispanic workers in the state were employed in four industries: construction, 42.2 percent; wholesale and retail trade, 11.5 percent; manufacturing, 10.7 percent; and agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, 9.2 percent.

However, there is a growing Hispanic population in the fast-rising job markets as well.

According to 10-year estimates from the Employment Security Commission of North Carolina, the three fastest growing job markets in the state are education and health services, hospitality and business and professional services.

In 2005, only 4.4 percent of Hispanics worked in education and health services compared to 20 percent non-Hispanics, but 8.3 percent of Hispanics worked in business and professional services compared to 8 percent non-Hispanics and 5.7 percent of Hispanics worked in hospitality compared to 9 percent non-Hispanics.

Workers are rushing to those industries, the gap between Hispanics and non-Hispanics filling the jobs is lessening. From 1995 to 2005, almost as many Hispanics entered office and administrative support jobs (15,164) as farming, fishing and forestry (20,102).

“I think there are certain niches that Hispanics have historically filled in our economy,” Johnson said. “In construction, something like 29 percent of the workforce is Hispanic. But if you look at the growth sectors of the economy … the Hispanic presence in those sectors is growing much like the demand for all workers in those sectors. I think in the future it's going to be less concentrated and more distributed throughout the economy.”

The incoming Hispanic community also creates jobs. An entire professional class of workers in North Carolina is cropping up because of a need for a wide variety of services for this new community of people. Bilingual workers are becoming more and more necessary in hospitals, schools and even state and local government to help provide the kinds of services needed.

“That's why the Hispanic workforce is becoming more widely distributed across sectors of the economy, because that initial migration triggers that professional class as well,” Johnson said. “People just assume that they're all low wage and don't make a lot of money and all of that but they create other jobs. And it's not that only Hispanics get those other jobs – lots of whites, blacks and other folks get those jobs, too.

“If you don't believe it, just go to the Yellow Pages and look at attorneys. Go down the list and look how many immigration attorneys there are. Why would we need them if we didn't have such a large Hispanic population?”

A quick search on YellowPages.com brings up 89 immigration law attorneys in the Chapel Hill area alone.

Hispanics have pervaded every industry in the state – some are still more common than others, but there isn’t a job sector in North Carolina that the Hispanic population hasn’t been able to join.

There are still issues, such as language barriers, the issue of the credit system and the fact that the median years of education for the Hispanic community is still far less than non-Hispanics, but Bravo believes the state is headed in a good direction in terms of equal-opportunity hiring.

“Yeah, I think it is,” he said. “They know how to treat us around here, you know?”

Gray Caldwell graduated from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication in May 2008.