No country for bitter white men
Spanglish is becoming the language of money in Houston
Ed Muniz, owner of Muniz Engineering Inc.Photo by Michael Stravato
G&A Partners
Houston's The Plaza Group Inc.
They’ve made your lawns, beds and meals for several years, but now they might be signing your paychecks. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of Hispanic-owned businesses in Texas increased about 40 percent.
If money in Texas could talk, it’d speak Spanglish.
While Hispanics (namely Mexicans) in New York are largely seen are the mops and rags of the workforce, in Houston they are the face of new leaders emerging in the business world. Maybe it’s because they know their audience, which happens to have a projected $3 trillion purchasing power this year. This past summer, the Spanish-speaking television station, Univision, blasted to the top of TV ratings across the country.
In Houston, you’ll find a lot of color at the top. Ed Muñiz grew up in a South Texas border town and had his start in the workforce picking cotton, but later became the founder and owner of MEI Technologies, a world-renowned space manufacturing company.
My father had a similar upbringing. Jose Astrain spent most of his early childhood playing hooky and fishing out of the Rio Grande with the old men of his hometown of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. After my father's ninth birthday, my grandfather scored a job at a truck manufacturing company in Racine, Wis. and soon-after my father, grandmother, uncle and eight aunts piled into a sedan bound for the north in the dead of winter.
“We weren’t cold, I can tell you that,” my father told me recently over dinner at The Spaghetti Warehouse.
During my father’s sophomore spring break, he came home to a house full of clients waiting for my grandfather to finish up their tax returns. My grandfather learned how to file taxes on the side and because of his bilingual prowess, his coworkers and neighbors brought him plenty of business.
My father has always been a ladies’ man. He purchased a portable typewriter after completing a typing course he admits to enrolling into just to admire the young collegiate flowers of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Father asked my grandfather to teach him the ways of deductibles, dependents and refunds — and soon grandfather, who worked by hand, was bested by my father's stenographer skills, which allowed him to work three times faster.
Now, what was once a way of making a bit of extra money to feed the kids is now a prominent family-owned business on the north side. One of my favorite lines from the movie, No Country For Old Men is something the female protagonist’s mother says as they pull into a Texas border town, “It’s not often you see a Mexican in suit.”
Hide your three-piece.
