On November 8, 2011, Kirk Semple of the New York Times
wrote:
More than 40 years after arriving in New York from Mexico uneducated and
broke, Felix Sanchez de la Vega Guzman still can barely speak English.
Ask him a question, and he will respond with a few halting phrases and
an apologetic smile before shifting back to the comfort of Spanish.
Yet Mr. Sanchez has lived the great American success story. He turned a
business selling tortillas on the street into a $19 million food
manufacturing empire that threaded together the
Mexican diaspora from coast to coast and reached back into Mexico itself.
Mr. Sanchez is part of a small class of immigrants who arrived in the
United States with nothing and, despite speaking little or no English,
became remarkably prosperous. And while generations of immigrants have
thrived despite language barriers, technology, these days, has made it
easier for such entrepreneurs to attain considerable affluence.
Many have rooted their businesses in big cities with immigrant
populations large enough to insulate them from everyday situations that
demand English. After gaining traction in their own communities, they
have used the tools of modern communication, transportation and commerce
to tap far-flung resources and exploit markets in similar enclaves
around the country and the world.
“The entire market is Hispanic,” Mr. Sanchez said of his business. “You
don’t need English.” A deal, he said, is only a cheap long-distance
phone call or a few key strokes on the computer away. “All in Spanish,”
he added.
Mr. Sanchez, 66, said he always wanted to learn English but had not had time for lessons.
“I couldn’t concentrate,” he said in a recent interview, in Spanish. “In
addition, all the people around me were speaking in Spanish, too.”
In New York City, successful non-English-speaking entrepreneurs like Mr.
Sanchez have emerged from the largest immigrant populations, including
those from China, South Korea and Spanish-speaking countries.
Among them is Zhang Yulong, 39, who emigrated from China in 1994 and now
presides over a
$30-million-a-year cellphone accessories empire in New
York with 45 employees.
Kim Ki Chol, 59, who arrived in the United States from South Korea in
1981, opened a clothing accessories store in Brooklyn and went on to
become a successful retailer, real estate investor and civic leader in
the region’s Korean diaspora.
In the United States in 2010, 4.5 million income-earning adults who were
heads of households spoke English “not well” or “not at all,” according
to the
Census Bureau; of those, about 35,500 had household incomes of more than $200,000 a year.
Nancy Foner, a sociology professor at the City University of New York who has written widely on
immigration,
said it was clear that modern technology had made a big difference in
the ability of immigrant entrepreneurs with poor or no English skills to
expand their companies nationally and globally.
“It wasn’t impossible — but much, much harder — for immigrants to
operate businesses around the globe a hundred years ago, when there were
no jet planes, to say nothing of cellphones and computers,” Ms. Foner
said.
Advocates for the movement sometimes known as
Official English
have long pressed for legislation mandating English as the official
language of government, arguing that a common language is essential for
the country’s cohesion and for immigrant assimilation and success.
But stories like Mr. Sanchez’s, though certainly unusual, seem to
suggest that an entrepreneur can do just fine without English —
especially with the aid of modern technology, not to mention
determination and ingenuity.
For Mr. Sanchez, who became an American citizen in 1985, one anxious
moment came when he had to pass his naturalization test. The law
requires that applicants be able to read, write and speak basic English.
But Mr. Sanchez and other entrepreneurs said that the test, at least at
the time they took it, had been rudimentary and that they had muddled
through it.
Mr. Sanchez immigrated to the United States in 1970 from the Mexican
state of Puebla with only a fifth-grade education. He held a series of
low-paying jobs in New York, including washing dishes in a Midtown
restaurant. The Mexican population in the New York region was small back
then, but it soon began growing, as did the demand for authentic
Mexican products.
In 1978, Mr. Sanchez and his wife, Carmen, took $12,000 in savings,
bought a tortilla press and an industrial dough mixer in Los Angeles,
hauled the machinery back to the East Coast and installed it in a
warehouse in Passaic, N.J. Mr. Sanchez spent his days driving a forklift
at an electrical-equipment factory and spent his evenings and nights
making tortillas and selling them door-to-door in Latino neighborhoods
around New York City.
His company, Puebla Foods, grew with the Mexican population, and he was
soon distributing his tortillas and other Mexican products, like dried
chilies, to bodegas and restaurants throughout the Northeast. At its
peak, his enterprise had factories in cities all across North America,
including Los Angeles, Miami, Pittsburgh, Toronto and Washington. It has
since been buffeted by competition and by the economy, and he has
scaled back.
He has relied heavily on a bilingual staff, which at times has included
his three children, born and raised in New Jersey.
Mr. Zhang, the cellphone accessories entrepreneur, said his lack of
English had not been a handicap. “The only obstacle I have is if I get
too tired,” said Mr. Zhang, who also owns a property development company
and an online retail firm.
In 2001, Mr. Zhang set up a wholesale business in cellphone accessories
in Manhattan. He then raised money from relatives and investors in China
to open a manufacturing plant there to make leather cellphone cases for
export to the United States, Canada and Latin America.
His business boomed, and he opened warehouses in Los Angeles, New York
City and Washington, controlling his international manufacturing, supply
and retail chain from his base in New York.
Mr. Zhang now lives in a big house in Little Neck, Queens, with his
wife, three daughters and parents, and drives a Lexus S.U.V. He has not
applied for citizenship, preferring to remain a legal permanent resident
and maintain his Chinese citizenship, which spares him the bother of
securing a Chinese visa when he goes to China for business.
While he can speak rudimentary English — he rates his comprehension at
30 percent — he conducts nearly his entire life in Chinese. His
employees speak the languages of trading partners: English, Spanish,
Creole, Korean and French, not to mention multiple Chinese dialects.
Over the course of a lengthy interview, he gamely tried on several
occasions to converse in English, but each time he ran into roadblocks
and, with a shrug of resignation, resumed speaking through a translator
in Mandarin.
Mr. Kim, the Korean retailer, recalled that when he opened his first
store in Brooklyn, nearly his entire clientele was Afro-Caribbean and
African-American, and his customers spoke no Korean.
“You don’t have to have a big conversation,” he recalled. “You can make gestures.”
While his holdings have grown, he has also formed or led associations
and organizations that focus on empowering the Korean population in the
United States. As in business, modern communication has made it much
easier for him to raise his profile throughout the Korean diaspora well
beyond New York.
“The success of my life is not only that I make a lot of money,” he
said, “but that I make a lot of Korean people’s lives better.”
Yet he admitted that he was embarrassed by his inability to speak
English. He has gone so far as to buy some English-tutorial computer
programs, but for years, they have gone mostly unused.
Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.
