Meet the New Boss: Latino Middle Class Growing

Art Garcia clung to the thought as he washed one soiled plate after another all those years ago. “One day, I will be boss,” the newly arrived immigrant told himself over and over.

Three decades later, the 44-year-old Mexico native owns a seafood restaurant in Oxnard, pays a mortgage on a four-bedroom home and is saving to send his three children to college.

He figures he can retire in 11 years--after he opens “at least five more restaurants.”

“It wasn’t hard for me,” said Garcia, a stout man with a thatch of silver hair. “If you decide to take the opportunity, then you will make it.”

Increasingly, Latinos in Ventura County are making it. Although many recent immigrants continue to live near poverty as farm workers, there is a substantial middle class already here and expected to grow as the Latino population expands over the next 40 years to become the county’s dominant ethnic group.

Fifty-five percent of all local, U.S.-born Latinos live in middle-class households, according to a 1996 Pepperdine University report by researcher Gregory Rodriguez. That compares with the less than 30% of Latino households considered middle class in 1972, U.S. census records show.

Even foreign-born Latinos, who make up two-thirds of adult Latinos in Southern California, are getting ahead faster than ever.

According to a recent study, 44% of Ventura County’s foreign-born have already reached the middle class, the same as in Orange County. By contrast, in Los Angeles County, whose proliferation of low-wage service industries and cheaper rent make it a first-stop for immigrants, only 32% of foreign-born Latinos are categorized as middle class.

These numbers are important because Ventura County’s economic future depends on how successfully Latinos move from lower income levels to take the reins of political, business and cultural power.

“It’s incumbent on Mexican Americans to do well,” said Rodriguez, a research scholar at Pepperdine. “Society cannot run if a large portion of it is not succeeding.”

Latino success is happening in different ways from other immigrant groups. Latinos rely more on shared family income than on higher education to achieve upward mobility, according to Rodriguez.

Success Stories Often Downplayed

That trend is particularly true of the four out of every five Latino immigrants who arrived in the United States after 1970, he said. In Ventura County, where housing costs are among the highest in the state, several immigrant relatives often pool money to buy a home and then all live together.

Homeownership is a good measure of economic stability because a bank loan typically must be secured, Rodriguez said. Perhaps more telling, buying property implies a belief in the future, he said.

“It is the greatest symbol of hopefulness that we have,” Rodriguez said. “It says: ‘I am setting down roots here because this is a community I want to be part of.’ ”

While Latinos, like other immigrant groups, are putting down roots in their communities, the failure to pursue higher education is hindering their progress. Less than two in five of U.S.-born Latinos in middle-class households have attended college.

In fact, middle-class, U.S.-born Latinos are far less likely to hold a bachelor’s degree than other U.S.-born groups, according to Rodriguez’s study.

Despite these problems, from Thousand Oaks to Camarillo to the upscale beach communities near Oxnard, signs of a growing Latino middle class are abundant. Some say the success stories have always been there, but they have too often been ignored because of a tendency among academics to study the most problematic segments of minority communities.

“Essentially, what we have is an academic and political spoils system where minority groups in America receive government largess and attention once they have proven high levels of dysfunction,” said Rodriguez, whose 1996 report was the first-ever study of the rising Latino middle class.

“No one is interested in articulating Latino progress; it’s a very perverse system we have where you put your worst foot forward,” he said. “I think it’s very insidious and very damaging, and paints an inaccurate picture of the Latino community.”

In many ways, Art Garcia has defied traditional thinking about immigrant success. Garcia not only catapulted into the middle class as an immigrant, but is already setting aside money to put his children through college.

Garcia’s father earned a modest living in Autlan, in central Mexico, playing cello for a community orchestra. His mother earned a few extra pesos stitching dresses at home. But the couple always struggled to provide for their five children, Garcia said.

Garcia was the youngest son. His childhood was happy but spare, and he wanted a different life. “I wanted to be somebody,” Garcia said. “Down there, there was no way.”

So at 17, he joined the huge wave of Latino immigrants who flowed into the United States during the ‘70s and ‘80s.

He landed a job washing dishes at a Sizzler restaurant in Los Angeles in 1972. Hard working and loyal to the restaurant chain, he kept getting promoted and was eventually named manager of the Ventura restaurant.

Realizing the American Dream

Along the way, he married Maria, “the salad bar girl,” and had two children, a boy and a girl. By the early ‘90s, he was earning $60,000 a year, enough to buy a $192,000 home in suburban south Oxnard. Life was good, but Garcia wasn’t done.

“I made my goal and thought, ‘What’s next?’ ” Garcia recalls. “Then the opportunity came to open my own restaurant, and I said, ‘I have to take it.’ ”

Garcia and another Sizzler manager, Pete Spink, left the chain a year ago to became partners in a new restaurant in downtown Oxnard, called Cabo Seafood Grill & Cantina. To celebrate, he and Maria had another child, Daniela.

The restaurant’s first year has been slow, but business is steadily growing, Garcia said. He expects his share of the profits to exceed $90,000 this year. The reason for his success is simple, Garcia said.

“In the United States, you can be anything you want to be,” he said. “But you have to be loyal and dedicated. And you need to know where you are headed.”

That is a message that Danny Villanueva, one of the nation’s most influential Latino businessmen, has taken to heart. A successful career as a venture capitalist and former partner of the L.A. Galaxy made the 60-year-old Somis resident a fortune estimated at $50 million in 1996, making him the 11th-richest Latino living in the United States.

Now, he is interested in giving back. Three years ago, he helped found Destino 2000: Hispanic Legacy Fund, an endowment managed by the Ventura County Community Foundation. With Villanueva as chairman and planting a $10,000 seed, Destino 2000 this year is close to reaching its fund-raising goal of $200,000.

Villanueva, who spent years courting captains of finance, found himself making pitches for donations in the homes of influential Latinos in Ventura County.

“I would go into homes in Moorpark, Oxnard, Santa Paula and have punch and cookies and pitch my little tail off,” he said. Some of the newly successful Latinos burst into tears in gratitude at being able to give, remembering their farm worker parents, who could never have afforded to donate money.

In Moorpark, Gary Cabriales’ story is more typical of immigrants, a slow climb, with each generation doing better than the last.

His grandparents crossed the border from Mexico, laboring as field workers in Texas and California. They were part on an earlier wave of immigration that occurred during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1919.

Stereotypes Still Linger

Cabriales’ father was a military man who went on to a second career in the aerospace industry. His mother was a nurse. They lived a modest suburban life in Moorpark, Cabriales said.

Cabriales attended the Air Force Academy and worked as a pilot instructor. After his discharge, he landed a job as a commercial pilot. For the past 10 years, Cabriales has flown Boeing 767s out of LAX.

His salary, combined with his wife’s pay as a teacher’s aide at Chaparral Middle School, puts their household income near six figures, Cabriales said. They are raising their four children in one of Moorpark’s newer suburban tracts. Their two eldest daughters are attending UC Santa Barbara.

The younger children attend schools in the Moorpark Unified School District, where Cabriales has served as a school board trustee for six years. Education has always been stressed in his family, Cabriales said. It is one reason he decided to run for the school board.

But he also sought political office to embrace the idea that communities can, and should, be racially diverse. Racism is still present in society, even if it is no longer overt, he said. There is no way to measure how much it has added to the burden Latino immigrants have carried as they struggled to succeed, but for Cabriales it has been substantial.

“When I’m in my pilot’s uniform standing in the cockpit, I get a different kind of respect,” he said. “There is just a different look in the eye when I’m out in the community in shorts and a T-shirt and haven’t shaven for a day.”

Other Ventura County Latinos tell of being mistaken for gardeners and nannies or of being snubbed at social gatherings dominated by whites. Jorge Garcia of Simi Valley remembers when a school administrator’s first question to him was whether he spoke English.

He explained that his family’s roots go back 70 years in Ventura County, that he is a professor at a college and that, yes, he speaks English.

About This Series

This is the first of a four-part series examining the impact of the coming Latino majority on Ventura County and its institutions.

SUNDAY: The future of Ventura County hinges on the success of Latinos, who will reach majority status around the middle of the 21st century.

MONDAY: Guaranteeing Latino success depends in large measure on guaranteeing them access to a good education and ending feel-good policies that justify failure.

TUESDAY: The growing Latino population will require massive job creation. But will the jobs be there?

TODAY: There are problems, but also encouraging signs. The Latino middle class has doubled in three decades.