Thread: A Hispanic rhythm emerges on Main Street, Jasper County

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A Hispanic rhythm emerges on Main Street, Jasper County
Published Wednesday July 12 2006
By MIKE GISICK
The Beaufort Gazette
RIDGELAND -- It's a quiet afternoon at El Mesquite, a taqueria in downtown Ridgeland, and employee Miguel Mendez is discussing the relative merits and demerits of his competition.
He finds himself growing particularly excited about one cross-county rival, which he prefers not to name.

"The problem is, they have no sense of presentation," he declares, spreading his arms to make a wide gesture with the television remote control that takes in El Mesquite's neat shelves of dry goods and its gleaming refrigerated display of meats.

Little Mexico it's not, but Jasper County has seen such an explosion of Hispanic businesses in recent years that the competition between them is getting serious. When it opened in downtown Ridgeland five months ago, across the street from a Mexican restaurant that has since closed, El Mesquite became the fifth tienda in a downtown no more than a few blocks long in any direction. Down the highway in Hardeeville, it's a similar scene. Though the tiendas and taquerias -- corner stores selling basic groceries, phone cards and, in many cases, offering money wiring services -- are the most visible component of this new commercial presence, Hispanic business people are also starting to diversify their enterprises in the county.

Renty Kitty, who handles business licenses for the unincorporated portions of Jasper County, says he sees Hispanic proprietors opening a growing number of car lots and landscaping and construction businesses.

Kitty says Hispanic-owned business account for about 5 percent of the new business licenses he issues, up from virtually none five years ago.

"They come here to work in construction, they learn the business and they start their own," says Pedro Alvarez, whose La Isla auto dealership in Hardeeville is a first stop for many Latino immigrants since, he says, he's one of the few dealers willing to give them financing.

That's not to say that the Hispanic entrance into Jasper's business scene has been without obstacles. The most obvious one is demonstrated by four pieces of paper taped to the wall behind Kitty's desk at county headquarters in Ridgeland.

Like many county employees, Kitty has been through a pair of six-week evening Spanish courses.

"I'm not the best," he says of his language skills, "but I'm, hallelujah, almost good."

Between his Spanish and their English, Kitty says, he and the county's Spanish-speaking license applicants are usually able to get by, though he says it's a good thing that most bring their own interpreters -- often their children. As a last resort, there's always the four pieces of paper taped to his wall, which contain simple Spanish phrases, complete with definitions and a pronunciation guide.

"See," the first phonetic entry reads. "Yes."

But local officials say they've also found cause to occasionally employ another simple and easy to remember Spanish word: No.

In the last couple of years, Ridgeland has had to shut down several illegal businesses operating out of homes and without a permit, Town Administrator Jason Taylor says.

"They were selling everything from exotic birds to cowboy boots to Mexican pharmaceuticals," he says.

Taylor chalks that up to a combination of eagerness, the language barrier and an unfamiliarity with the American-style regulatory process.

"They've got a good entrepreneurial spirit but not always a good handle on the rules," he says. "They think that if they want to open a restaurant, they just need to get a stove and start cooking."

Rapid progress

It may be telling that, if you ask around Jasper County for someone familiar with the Hispanic business community, the name most officials offer belongs to a woman who moved out of the county four years ago.

Mary Bishop, who now lives on Pawley's Island, ran a barbershop in Ridgeland for eight years. The bilingual daughter of a Mexican father, she says she quickly befriended the newly arriving immigrants at a time when they lacked a social network beyond their own family ties.

"My barbershop became a meeting place," she says. "When you make a few friends and people trust you, that whole world opens up to you. People would come in to talk to me if they had a problem, and they'd come to tell me when something good happened to them."

At first, she says, she spent much of her time helping immigrants fight exploitive employers, some of whom were earlier, established immigrants. Then she watched as the immigrants began opening businesses of their own.

The first was El Ranchito, a restaurant on U.S. 17 just north of town that caters as much to non-Hispanics as to Latinos. As the immigrant community continued to grow, it spawned a Hispanic-owned service industry geared toward other Hispanics.

Gabriela Ramirez, who opened El Miguelito across from the Palms Hotel in Ridgeland three years ago, says her decision to open the store grew out of her own desires as a shopper.

"I wanted to buy things I couldn't buy here," she says.

El Miguelito is a base model tienda. Besides a small selection of non-perishable food, Ramirez offers several boxes of CDs and DVDs. "El Narco," one movie is called, though most appear to focus on romance or comical misadventures. Phone cards for dialing Latin America are also popular.

Like most other Hispanic business owners in the county, Ramirez says her clientele is almost entirely Latino.

Here to stay

Even Alvarez, the car dealer, says his clients are primarily Hispanic. That might change, he supposes, but he believes the Hispanic community has come to Jasper County to stay.

"There are some who just come here to work, send back as much money as they can and go home as soon as they can afford to," he says. "But others are settling here. They're buying houses. Just like everyone else, they can see this area is about to explode."

If there's a face of the future in Jasper County, it might be behind the counter of the Mercado Latino a few blocks from Alvarez's dealership in Hardeeville. Jaime Lamas, the market's co-owner, is a second generation Mexican immigrant -- he grew up in Los Angeles and worked for years in Las Vegas before moving to South Carolina a few months ago and buying half of his uncle's business. He speaks English without an accent, and he talks comfortably about some of America's more sensitive realities.

"When Vicente Fox said that Mexicans in the U.S. were willing to do jobs even the blacks wouldn't do, that upset a lot of people," Lamas says, referring to a May 2005 statement by the Mexican president that was condemned by several black leaders.

"Still, there is some tension here, and I think there's more tension between the Hispanics and the blacks than between the Hispanics and the whites," Lamas continues. "I can understand it, it's a competition. But I think it's fair competition. I think that's America."

Despite that, Lamas says he believes Hispanics will eventually integrate here. It took 20 years for the process to start in Los Angeles, he says, and might take just as long here. In the melting pot, as he puts it, sometimes it takes a while for things to start melting.

In the meantime, Lamas predicts that Hispanics will continue to open new businesses, carving out new niches wherever they find a space because, he says, "it's in our blood."

The immigrants are still coming, from Mexico but now from Guatemala, Honduras and other countries as well. Some won't stay, he says, but many will

"Here," Mendez, an Argentinian, says, back at El Mesquite with the remote control in his hand. "Here, it is muy tranquilo."

"They come here to work in construction, they learn the business and they start their own," says Pedro Alvarez, whose La Isla auto dealership in Hardeeville is a first stop for many Latino immigrants since, he says, he's one of the few dealers willing to give them financing.

As Barney Fife would say, this is where we need to "nip it in the bud" with the illegal aliens.

Originally Posted by JohnB2012

"They come here to work in construction, they learn the business and they start their own," says Pedro Alvarez, whose La Isla auto dealership in Hardeeville is a first stop for many Latino immigrants since, he says, he's one of the few dealers willing to give them financing.

As Barney Fife would say, this is where we need to "nip it in the bud" with the illegal aliens.

That's exactly what they do. They come here, get jobs, learn the trade, then start up businesses for themselves. My Brother in law sees this everyday with the type of work he does.

Americans hire them as painters, construction workers, dry wallers and the like,,,, then the very illegals they hire turn around and start up the exact same business in the same field they were hire in... and they then become competition for the employer who hired them in the first place.

Once the illegals get their businesses going , they in turn take away the very customers their orginal employer had to begin with, because the illegals charge less per hour for the very same job.

As sad as it is, it serves some of these illegal employers right for doing business with them in the first place!