We are Americans. We have served America since its foundation; we have contributed richly to its culture, its science. Little to none of that history is taught in American public schools; and in the media and entertainment industries, the image of the Latino has historically been roundly negative, if present at all. This, too, needs to change. A vigorous antidote to border fever is in order.
Take the economy. Research has shown that immigrant workers pay taxes and have a net zero effect on government budgets. Whether behind a pupusa stand or a polished desk in a major corporation, Latino workers occupy every rung of the economy and own a considerable stake in the financial success of this country.
Much of that work ethic and entrepreneurship has been spirited for centuries, starting with sixteenth-century traders in the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine, Fla.; or the first Dominican in Manhattan, Juan Rodríguez, who, by 1613, was trading weapons for furs and serving the Dutch as well as the Native Americans. In the 1800s, Mexican vaqueros, the continent’s first cowboys, trained an emerging class of white buckaroos, furnishing them with saddles, 10-gallon hats, chaps and lassos. A century later, during the 1950s and into the 1970s, waves of Cubans and Puerto Ricans arrived on the East Coast, bringing bodegas, paladares (family-run restaurants) and other vibrant Latino enterprises.
Within a generation, Wall Street analysts — and an American president — were marveling at the business acumen of Latinos. But the explosion in the years that followed was even more astonishing. Though Hispanic owners often have difficulty getting financing, in the decade from 2012 to 2022, their small businesses multiplied by 44 percent (more than 10 times the rate of other similarly sized businesses). This is an incursion of a different kind.
Surprisingly, almost 90 percent of immigrant Latino ventures earning at least $1 million a year are owned by millennials (people in their late 20s to early 40s) who came to the United States as youths. That is certainly true for the Argentine businessman Ezequiel Vázquez-Ger and his Venezuelan wife, Mafe Polini, who flew into Washington from their respective homelands when they were 24 years old and began at the bottom of the economic ladder. In time, they dreamed of owning a restaurant, used their savings to help fund their first, and ended up owning six establishments in the capital (one of them earning a Michelin star).
