| Non-Latinos Mine
Southland's Mexican Market
Most entrepreneurs who cater to, and profit most, from immigrants'
nostalgia for goods from home are not their countrymen.
By Sam Quinones, Times Staff Writer
December 5, 2004
Sent by Viola Rodriguez Sadler vrsadler@aol.com
When hundreds of immigrants celebrated Mexico's Independence Day at
an Anaheim parking lot, they transformed the tarmac into a boisterous
village carnival. Vendors sold T-shirts with images of revolutionary
Emiliano Zapata and his latter-day namesake, the Zapatista
Revolutionary Army. Food stands hustled tacos and churros, sugary
fried dough. The crowd cheered as an announcer called out the names of
Mexican states.
As the sun set, the classic norteño band Los Cadetes de Linares
took the stage and played "Palomita Blanca." On that Orange
County street corner, everything was cien por ciento Mexicano — 100%
Mexican. Everything, that is, but the man staging the event.
Ted Holcomb doesn't speak Spanish. He has never been to Mexico. Yet
he has learned to put on carnivals across Southern California that
mirror the annual festivals that Mexican villages hold to honor their
patron saints. "I have a closet full of [Spanish] books and
tapes," Holcomb said. "I just don't have time to study
them." Over the last decade, Holcomb has carved a sizable
business niche by offering an echo of home to tens of thousands of
Mexican immigrants.
He is not alone. The buying power of Southern California's 5
million or so Spanish-speakers, most of whom are Mexican, is measured
in the billions of dollars. But most of the largest enterprises
selling cherished parts of Mexican culture are owned by Koreans,
Lebanese, Iranians, Israelis and nonimmigrant English speakers, people
who have built their own American dream on Mexican immigrant dollars.
"You have these clever entrepreneurs who have seen an opening
and they've really gone after it," said Waldo Lopez, a business
consultant to the Tomas Rivera Policy Center at USC. Among the more
notable examples:
• El Gallo Giro, a seven-restaurant chain that
resembles a typical Mexican taqueria, selling birria, atole, pozole
and beef tongue tacos, is owned by Charles Bonaparte, a Frenchman.
• La Curacao, the largest Southern California
department store aimed entirely at Latino immigrants, is owned by
Jerry and Ron Azarkman, brothers who came to the United States from
Israel in the early 1970s. They started out selling electronics door
to door in immigrant neighborhoods. La Curacao also holds the West
Coast franchise for Pollo Campero, a wildly popular Guatemalan
fried-chicken chain that is the reason that Guatemala is one of the
few countries in the world with no Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants.
• The world's largest producer of traditional Mexican
cheeses, Cacique, was started by Gilberto Cardenas, a Cuban
immigrant. In the 1970s, he started making cheeses from Mexico's
ranchero culture, including Cotija and Poblano. Cacique, which is
based in La Puente, has 600 employees, 13 regional offices nationwide
and a chorizo sausage plant in Utah.
• Profiting from Mexican immigrants' fear of drinking tap
water, virtually all the water stores in Southern California are owned
by Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants. Wateria, the largest
water-store franchise with 24 outlets, is owned by Un Soek Kim, a
Korean. His office walls are decorated with census maps that show
Southern California cities with populations that are 80% or more
Latino.
• With 600 stores, the shopping district around Pacific
Avenue in Huntington Park has one of the highest concentrations of
Mexican-oriented businesses in Southern California. Most of them are
owned by Korean or Lebanese immigrants, who sell such goods as cowboy
hats and ostrich-skin boots.
On the strip is a clothing store called Tres Hermanos, the
same name as a nationally known chain of shoe stores in Mexico. The
store, which also uses the same red, white and green logo, is owned by
brothers from Lebanon. They have 25 branches across Southern
California, all selling to Mexican immigrants.
These entrepreneurs meet a need unfilled by the largest Mexican
companies, which, despite broad name recognition and capital, haven't
dared enter the intensely competitive Southern California market.
Only two nationally known Mexican retailers — Gigante supermarkets
and Famsa furniture — have opened stores here.
Most Mexican immigrants, meanwhile — unlike many Asian and Middle
Eastern immigrants — come here with little education and virtually
no business experience. Many are here illegally. They are from a
country where the ruling political party spent decades demonizing
entrepreneurs and where banks cater only to the wealthy.
"I think that the regular Mexican guy, he just wants to
work," said Ralph Hauser, a Mexican American music promoter in
Pico Rivera. "They don't want to take a risk. They want to come
to work, make $300, send it back to Mexico, with the idea of
eventually going back someday."
Those who do start businesses often want them to grow only large
enough to employ family members.
"They start a business, but then they're afraid to try
something big," said Jose Luis Solorzano, owner of
Paramount-based Calzada Diana, which distributes shoes and clothing
nationwide. "I think people say, 'I have this little business.
I'll just do this. If I do something else I might lose everything.'
"
Thousands of local Mexicans have small businesses that serve their
compatriots: bakeries, markets, restaurants, clothing shops and record
stores. Mexican immigrants also own several large independent
supermarket chains, Northgate Gonzalez, El Tapatio and Vallarta among
them.
The Long Beach-based record label Cintas Acuario is owned by
Pedro Rivera, an immigrant from Sonora. He has built a music empire on
narcocorridos, ballads about Mexican drug smugglers. Fernando Lopez
Mateos, an immigrant from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, has based a
growing business empire on memories of home: two Oaxacan restaurants,
an Oaxacan-oriented newspaper and a multibranch money-wire service.
Yet these are more the exception than the rule, which seems to be:
Immigrants
from elsewhere mine the potential of one of the world's wealthiest
Mexican consumer markets more effectively than Mexicans themselves.
One high-profile example of non-Mexicans filling the void is Plaza
Mexico. Situated on Long Beach Boulevard and the 105 Freeway in
Lynwood, Plaza Mexico attempts to replicate a traditional Mexican
downtown in a strip mall formerly anchored by a Montgomery Ward
department store.
The plaza resembles Monte Alban, the ancient Indian ruins in
Oaxaca.
Its shops have the bold colors of a typical provincial town, and there
is a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The plaza's clock tower replicates the facade of the government
palace in Guadalajara. The stone and the lamps that light the plaza
are imported from Mexico. Even the tiles on the plaza contain
occasional figures from loteria, a Mexican children's game.
The governor of the state of Nayarit donated a statue in honor of
Mexican mothers that stands at one end of the plaza. And other Mexican
governors make appearances there when visiting Southern California.
Plaza Mexico's developer is Donald
Chae, a Korean immigrant
who
has labored to make his shopping center distinctly Mexican in the same
way Chinatown is distinctly Chinese. He hired Luis Felipe Nieto, an
archeologist and restoration expert from San Miguel Allende,
Guanajuato, to advise on Mexican designs and colors.
Korean immigrants like Chae dominate even at Southern California's
ubiquitous indoor swap meets, where they can be found picking up a
little Spanish as they sell cowboy belts from Jalisco, Brown Pride
T-shirts and pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Learning to sell to Mexican immigrants is fairly easy, say vendors.
"You see what people are wearing and go from there," said
John Kim, who, with his fiancee, helps run a jewelry stand in the
Western Pico Indoor Swap Meet. "You have to be aware of what
sells and what people want."
Holcomb, the Mexican festival organizer, learned his business at an
indoor swap meet. Just out of college, Holcomb was hired in 1991 to
promote the Anaheim Indoor Marketplace in a former White Front
department store. At the time, the swap meet was a sleepy venue of two
dozen vendors selling arts and crafts, mostly to English-speaking
customers.
Holcomb knew nothing of marketing to Latinos or much about the
local demographics. He was in Orange County, so to attract weekend
crowds, he figured he could hire country bands to play. "Nobody
would ever show up," he said. Then he spent $300 on a mariachi
band, he said, "and everybody in Anaheim came."
Holcomb saw an opportunity and began holding Mexican-style
carnivals throughout Southern California. Although Holcomb has so far kept the carnival business to himself,
competition is growing on other fronts as entrepreneurs discover the
lesson Holcomb says he has discovered about Latinos: "They
have a lot of spending power, and they're not afraid to spend their
money."
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