When Luis Rodriguez’s father started a grocery market in Georgetown in 1992, they were one of the very first small businesses to cater to the Hispanic population in the area.
Fast-forward nearly 30 years later and the business now known as El Mercado is no longer the only store for Hispanic goods. It is one of hundreds of Hispanic/Latino small businesses thriving in the area, where an explosion of growth in the community has also meant more businesses organizing and opening.
While that growth has meant more competition for Rodriguez and his bottom line, it’s also a more visible sign of the transformation in how the Hispanic/Latino business community is seen throughout the state: As a growing entrepreneurial force that now accounts for 9.2% of workers and 5.7% of businesses, according to a 2022 report by the U.S. Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy.
“Latinos are not here to take and just benefit from resources,” said Carlos de los Ramos, chair of the Delaware Hispanic Commission. “They’re here to provide resources: They’re financially supporting their communities, they’re a source of employment, they’re paying taxes, they’re helping the state economy to grow.”
The cultural and economic impact of Hispanic/Latino businesses is not necessarily new. What’s changed in recent years — really since the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way many American companies connect and conduct business — is the level of resources and organization of the creative and innovative swath of entrepreneurs in Sussex County and statewide.
“There has been an explosion in Sussex County when it comes to small business – that has to do with the growth of our community,” said de los Ramos, noting that 42% of Georgetown’s population now identifies as Latino. “We’re more embedded in the community and more invested in the community. With that said, you cannot dismiss the growth in New Castle County as well.
“We are the sleeping giant.”
Entrepreneurship is a family affair
launching her own craft-based business which also offers on-site decorating services for events. | DBT PHOTO BY MARIA DEFORREST
Maria “Luli” de Lourdes Vasquez was 16 years old when her single mother and two siblings came to the United States from Mexico. About 10 years later, and a mother herself, she decided to launch her own business, Luli’s Creations.
Vasquez, now 32, worked for area restaurants before starting her own craft-based business, which offers balloon and flower arrangements for special occasions, as well as onsite event decorating. She hopes to someday expand her business both in the footprint of her storefront and by offering education to others interested in a craft-based business.
She said her entrepreneurial spirit was inspired both by her hard-working mother, who cried tears of joy when Vasquez opened her store earlier this year. But she also strives to create a better future for her 8-year-old daughter who hopes to one day own her own business, as well.
“I came to this country to make my dreams come true,” Vasquez said. “It’s hard sometimes, to leave when she’s sleeping and come back when she’s sleeping. … But I tell her, one day we’re going to own our own house. And one day you’re going to have a really beautiful life. But now I have to work hard. She says, ‘OK, momma.’ That melts my heart.”
Vasquez and her boyfriend, who also just launched his own painting business, have benefitted from the classes offered by La Plaza Delaware, the state’s first business support system specifically for Hispanic/Latino entrepreneurs. Vasquez said it helped her realize that she’s not the only one struggling to make her dreams come true, but that it also connected her with the resources needed to learn how to do things like create invoices and market her services.
Vasquez is not the only member of a new generation of Hispanic/Latino entrepreneurs expanding their work and their families in Delaware.
From 2010 to 2020, the Hispanic population in Sussex County alone grew by nearly 44%, from 17,068 to 24,496 residents, according to the Delaware Population Consortium’s most recent projections. By 2050, that figure is expected to more than double to over 54,000 residents. Statewide growth lagged only slightly, with a 40% population increase in that same decade and a projected total of over 192,000 Hispanic residents statewide by 2050. By then, if the projections are correct, Hispanics would account for nearly 18% of the statewide population and nearly 19% of Sussex County residents.
Georgetown native and State Rep. Ruth Briggs-King (R-Georgetown) said she first noticed a growth in the area’s Hispanic/Latino population when southern Delaware’s poultry industry struggled to find workers. Sussex County’s poultry industry supported a wave of immigrants in the 1990s, recruiting them as workers, according to Mary Dupont, executive director of La Plaza. Many of those new Delawareans shifted to using their own skills to start new businesses, such as landscaping companies.
Now, the Hispanic/Latino workforce can be found in nearly every industry, from health care to technology to restaurants and retail, Briggs-King said.
“They’re working and investing in the community, buying properties, and we can see where they will take some blighted areas in some cases and lift them up,” Briggs-King said.
During her 14 years as a state lawmaker, she’s watched new businesses open in Georgetown and the community expand to include newspapers and television and radio stations.
“They really support their business community and they’re really growing it,” she said, noting that the path to citizenship for many of the entrepreneurs is still a long, challenging road. She’s currently sponsoring legislation that she said will make it easier for some Hispanic/Latino businesses to participate in the larger Delaware business community, particularly on state jobs that offer prevailing wages.
Creating a new network
When the COVID pandemic hit the United States, it quickly became clear that minority communities were being disproportionately affected by the virus, in part due to less access to testing and vaccination compared to their white counterparts. In response, the office of Delaware Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long launched calls to share information with Hispanic/Latino, Black communities and interfaith communities, said Edwin Hernández-Vargas, Hall-Long’s director of legislative affairs and engagement.
The Hispanic/Latino community calls began with about 10 community leaders, and before they knew it, there were upwards of 400 community leaders on their mailing list, a fraction of which would join the bi-weekly calls and virtual meetings.
“Very quickly these leaders emerged, and they started forming partnerships,” Hernández said, noting that a bridge had formed between New Castle County and Sussex County, where social resources for the Latino community already existed, as well as with Kent County in between.
Then, in 2021, on the heels of that new network, Lewes resident Dupont took her nonprofit sector and economic justice experiences and launched La Plaza, a Sussex County-based organization that aims to “build the capacity of Latino businesses” in southern Delaware. The idea started when Dupont was working with the state and United Way of Delaware’s “Stand By Me” financial empowerment program. She had noticed the growth of Hispanic/Latino businesses in the Georgetown area, and wanted to help them access more resources and investments.
While she said Georgetown was not supportive of her pitch to create a business development program and business district specifically for Hispanic/Latino businesses booming on North Race Street, she was able to turn to local churches and the West End Neighborhood House to launch training programs on small business planning.
La Plaza now offers leadership development and classes for business owners to learn American business strategies and to bridge the cultural differences so that they can succeed as Delaware businesses, not just as Hispanic/Latino ones.
“I have seen a huge blossoming over the past year and a half that we have been doing this,” Dupont said. “I’ve seen the overall attitude of the Latino businesses go from kind of looking down at the ground to up at the sky. They are now, ‘Anything is possible.’”
Last June, the new organization hosted a business summit with over 200 participating businesses. And in 2022, the Delaware Alliance of Latino Entrepreneurs (or ¡DALE!, which means “let’s go” in Spanish) expanded the network of businesses helping each other. Within its first year, !DALE! has already boasted 200 members.
“A lot of our businesses are really excited about being together, about working together,” Dupont said. “They have more confidence in working with the broader community.”
While cultural differences and discrimination have held that “melting pot” of communities back, Dupont said she’s now seeing the larger business community not only inviting Hispanic/Latino businesses into the fold, but showing an eagerness to work with them.
“I’m not from the community, but I’m doing this work and I’m hearing every day from different people who have never paid an ounce of attention, now all of a sudden asking how to connect with these businesses,” she said. “The whole world of Delaware seems to really be waking up and being interested.”
Fostering generational growth
Over Memorial Day weekend, the Hispanic/Latino community came out in full force at Georgetown’s Sandhill Fields, where an estimated 20,000 people attended two days of the Delaware Super Cup, an international soccer tournament that also included business vendors and family activities. Dupont said the annual event is just one of many community events that bring together friends, families and local businesses.
For Sergio Morales, who heads up ¡DALE!, owning his own business in southern Delaware has been an endeavor decades in the making. The 44-year-old left Guatemala on his own at the age of 15 and settled in southern Delaware thanks to relatives. After working for farms and poultry plants, road construction and everything in between, he grew his talents in the construction business. He worked for others for over a decade before starting a business with his brother in 2010. In 2018, he went off on his own and started his own construction company, E&S Morales Brothers LLC.
Morales also was one of the first to take advantage of free business classes through La Plaza, and soon stepped into a natural leadership role recruiting other Hispanic/Latino entrepreneurs to not only participate in La Plaza’s offerings, but also grow the business community together. He said the community includes natives from his country of Guatemala, as well as Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Chile, Argentina and Puerto Rico.
“We’re here to work. We’re here to build. We’re here to educate our kids. We’re here to make this better every day,” the father of three said. “Everything is possible as long as we come together.”
As the Sussex Hispanic/Latino business community grows and comes together, a new group in central Delaware is just getting started. The Hispanic Organization of Latin Americans, or HOLA, a Kent County group with its roots at the Dover Air Force Base, celebrated its public launch with an information session on June 22, and it will host the first Baila Con Dover Latin Festival at Legislative Mall on Sept. 16. Meanwhile, La Plaza and ¡DALE! are gearing up for the second business summit (Congreso de Empresarios Latinos) at Delaware Technical Community College in Georgetown on Aug. 5.
“It seems like a lot of people are living the American Dream,” said Rodriguez, the Mexican native who owns El Mercado in Georgetown.
Today, he also owns a rental business, farm and wholesale business and employs over a dozen people, including family.
“And as their kids are being born here, they are getting more stabilized as far as living the American way,” he said.
Rodriguez too sees the hard work of the first generations, like himself, paying off as new generations make their way through careers in health care, law and more.
“You see the Latino culture working anywhere,” he said. “I think that hard work, especially with the Hispanic population starting from scratch … makes you appreciate life itself, what you work for, how hard you work.
“It’s just one step at a time.”
