Thread: Waukegan Latino MAll: read with caution

Sigh...yes this is my town.


East meets West

(http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/news ... S1.article)

March 30, 2007

By RYAN PAGELOW RPAGELOW@SCN1.COM

WAUKEGAN -- Using the Spanish word for gold, the Mr. Oro jewelry store caters to the Latino majority that shop at Belvidere Mall. When asked the price of a pair of earrings in Spanish, he answers in Spanish.

Mr. Oro, like many of the retailers at Belvidere Mall, is Korean. Ever since Belvidere Mall was home to a Swap and Shop flea market in the 1990s, Koreans have opened clothing and jewelry stores in the mall. They own more than 20 of the 60 businesses in the mall, sometimes combining Spanish and English like Mr. Oro and Bonita Fashion.

Mr. Oro's real name is Won Bae Kim. Since Kim is the Korean word for gold, he just translated his name into Spanish and named his jewelry store "Mr. Oro".

"About 80 percent of my customers speak Spanish and 20 percent speak English," Kim said, who commutes from Chicago.

He opened the store 13 years ago. His store now employs 10 people, including his brother. He keeps a Spanish-English dictionary behind the counter, but mostly learned Spanish while on the job from customers.

He says he has a good relationship with Latinos. His wife is Mexican. He also tries to make the customers happy by offering free repairs and he gave out "Mr. Oro" T-shirts to frequent customers last December.

Ben Park of Gurnee, the owner of U.S. Fashion, is the longest continually operating Korean store owner at Belvidere Mall. He's been there since 1991.

"I'm the oldest, but several stores came at the same time," Park said. "At that time a lot of Koreans came for the flea market because Gurnee Mills was too expensive and hard to get into. Here it was easier to get into."

He also keeps a Spanish-English dictionary behind the counter, but hires a bilingual assistant to speak to Spanish-speaking customers.

Originally from South Korea, he has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years. He owned a retail store on Chicago's South Side before coming to Belvidere Mall, at Belvidere Street and Lewis Avenue.

"I was looking for some peace and quiet," he said.

Fausto Pech, owner of Precious Dreams Karech, is one of the longest-running Latino retail owners in the mall. He opened his first store 16 years ago and imports about a third of his clothing from Mexico. The rest comes from New York and California.

He said Wal-Mart is the mall's biggest competitor for discount clothing.

"They sell everything there," Pech said.

Other retailers have blamed the closure of the mall's laundromat and movie theater for the drop in customer traffic which peaks at a few hundred on the weekends. For Pech, stalled bills that would give a path to citizenship for the nation's illegal immigrant population has affected sales since 2001 because many customers are new immigrants.

"They don't want to spend. They prefer to send the money to Mexico than to spend it here," Pech said.

For that reason, some of the Latino business owners pooled money together to rent buses and vans for the mall to take people to the marches in support of legalization for undocumented immigrants in Chicago last year.

"The people will spend and not be afraid that they will be deported," he said.

In the past they have also donated items from their stores to raffle off for fund-raisers for uninsured immigrants in need of a transplant or prosthetic limb, he said.

"We're trying to have the people of Waukegan stay local instead of going to Gurnee," said Jorge Morales, director of marketing for the mall and a security guard.

Belvidere Mall was built in the 1960s and had stores such as Radio Shack and Fannie May. When Lakehurst Mall opened in the 1970s, it was more than five times biggern than Belvidere Mall.

One by one, the stores moved to the bigger mall. By 1990, Belvidere Mall was virtually empty. So the owners decided to reopen it as a Swap and Shop flea market and built kiosks in the mall, which are still used today.

It was a place where immigrants like Ascension Ortiz of Park City could start selling fruit and elotes at a little table and eventually open Ortiz Grocery and Supermercado Morelos there.

You can buy Western ware, urban ware, chicharrones, a bus ticket to Guadalajara and the latest music and DVDs from Latin America.

"Everybody calls it the Latino mall," Morales said, "but the doors are open to everybody."

fedup, I haven't been in Waukegan in about 12 years but it sure wasn't like that when I was there. It doesn't take long does it?

Come for a visit, we'll go shopping.....

Please tell me that's not in the United States?

I'm afraid it is. Here is another one for your enjoyment. It has an American and Mexican flag flying on the top of the building. I have a picture of the flags if you want to see it! I have a whole album of shops like this in my midwestern town...

So then it's okay to open a hair salon and put up a big sign that reads:

"Caucasian Hair Salon"

???????????????????

Not according to the IICLU.

LOVELY!!!!!!

What a pretty neighborhood. Looks like trash. We have a neighborhood in Gresham that looks like that, the police also spend a lot of time there.

Yes I a agree, maybe one of us need to open a "Caucasian" hair salon. If they can do this, then why can't we?

Latino Hair Salon?

Here's a cut they call the Cholo.



They also do temporary prison tattoos like the popular tear-drop.

Originally Posted by americangirl

So then it's okay to open a hair salon and put up a big sign that reads:

"Caucasian Hair Salon"

???????????????????

Exactly.