By DOUGLAS BURNS
The more than 1,500 Latino-owned businesses in Iowa reported more than $288 million in sales receipts in 2007.
What’s more, few are in debt because they’re financed through family and community relationships, and 96 percent of Hawkeye State Latino businesses are located in downtown areas, according to Himar Hernandez, a community development specialist with Iowa State University Extension Service.
In many Iowa towns, Latino businesses have filled once largely deserted central business districts, resurrecting a more intimate shopping experience of past decades that draws not only recent immigrants but customers from the established community as well, Hernandez said in a speech to the Carroll Rotary Club Monday at the Carrollton Centre.
“It’s kind of like going back to the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s,” he said.
Perry, about a 30-minute drive west from Des Moines, is one place where the Latino business community has flexed its muscle.
With no Wal-Mart in Perry, “the downtown is very viable,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez, a native of Spain who now lives in Ottumwa, has compiled detailed demographics on the Latino immigrant experience in Iowa, much of it dealing with economics.
In Iowa, 62 percent of Latino businesses are retail and 20 percent are restaurants.
Nationally, Latinos are a growing demographic force at 13 percent of the population. In Iowa, Latinos represent 3.8 percent of the population.
The Latino families are younger than the average Iowa family.
Just over 50 percent of Latinos in Iowa are younger than 18, compared with 25 percent of the general population being under that threshold.
Fifty-four percent of Latinos in Iowa have children under 18, compared with the 31 percent of all Iowans who have children under 18.
This is a potentially vital fact for the future of Iowa because of the decades-long brain drain of white educated young people. For example, according to Hernandez, more than 60 percent of University of Iowa students plan on leaving the state after graduation.
Hernandez, a graduate of Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, said there is a major challenge with an education gap in the Latino community.
“Some of them don’t know how to write in Spanish” – much less English, Hernandez said.
This accounts for some of the language barriers that have been at the center of political controversy with immigration. But Hernandez says the education and language issues will work themselves out with second- and third-generation immigrants.
“You just have to bear with the first wave of immigration,” Hernandez said. “You’re not going to do anything with the 60-year-old. It’s the second generations you build on.”
Because of an historical sense of place, the Latinos in Iowa are exceptionally comfortable here, he added. Ninety-five percent of Latinos in Iowa are originally from rural areas of Latin America, said Hernandez
“The Latino families, once they move, they like to stay,” Hernandez said.
Source: The Times Herald
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