Barrio boom

How explosive growth is reshaping Detroit's Mexican community.

by Louis Aguilar
3/22/00

Holy Redeemer Catholic Church

The Barrio is arguably the first stable, vibrant blue-collar inner-city neighborhood Detroit has had in decades.

Holy Redeemer Catholic Church

Nowhere else in the metro area does Latino culture dominate.

Mexicantown Bakery

"I cannot imagine having moments like this in the suburbs."

Mexicantown Bakery

Taqueria Lupita

Right above his tight little Mexican cowboy ass, Felix Vanegas declares his place in the world: Detroit Jalisco. The two words, stitched into the back of his fancy belt, blend this Midwestern city with a Midwestern state of Mexico.

"Detroit is ugly, stinky. But I am thankful to God for what it has given to me," says Vanegas, 32. He works 10-hour days for a cement company and has earned $32,000 annually for the past five years. It’s more than this immigrant with an eighth-grade education ever dreamed of making.

When he wears the belt outside the barrio of southwest Detroit, most people don’t know what Jalisco (ha-LEASE-co) means, and mangle the word when they ask about it. But in southwest Detroit, the state’s oldest and largest barrio, people smile.

Vanegas explains all this while standing in the long line of people waiting outside the pink cinder block Club International. Every weekend, an estimated 6,000 people pay up to $40 cover each to hear live Mexican bands. Numbers like those make this, by far, the most popular Latino club in metro Detroit. Few patrons are Anglo or black. Most of the men wear cowboy hats and gaudy shirts like the one Vanegas has on. The music is hard-core – banda, narco-corrido, ranchera, cumbia and nortena. Don’t expect it to cross over to MTV, or even WDET, anytime soon.

The honky-tonk is on an ugly, stinky part of West Fort Street. Until it opened a few years ago, a crowd probably hadn’t gathered there since the ‘67 riots.

Detroit connection

Meanwhile, back in Vanegas’ hometown of San Ignacio Cerro Gordo, Jalisco, the entire town of 12,000 pays homage to Detroit at an annual fiesta in late January. It is generally believed that at least one-third of the families from San Ignacio, as well as the nearby town of Jesus Maria, have a relative living and working in the Detroit area. (Neighboring Arandas has a similar if smaller link to the Motor City and, in particular, southwest Detroit.) In San Ignacio, thousands gather on the last day of January under the town’s pink Romanesque arches. They were built, in part, by U.S. dollars earned through jobs many U.S. citizens don’t want – nonunion and often seasonal construction and factory work, jobs as landscapers, maids, cooks, busboys and so on.

Two years ago, the fiesta’s procession began with a float built in the image of Tiger Stadium and I-75 (many of the town’s emigrants worked on the road crews). The town’s pristine church also underwent major renovation thanks to Detroit money – Vanegas and his family gave $150. In that church, the revelers thank God for the opportunities they have been given in Detroit, arguably the poorest and most blighted major U.S. city.

No wonder people in southwest Detroit smile at the belt. Vanegas is among tens of thousands of new Latino immigrants, predominately Mexican, who have arrived in metro Detroit in the past decade. More than 40,000 moved to Michigan last year alone, and most ended up in southwest Detroit, says Salvador Monroy, consul of Mexico in Detroit. Many believe the number of Latinos in the area is somewhere near 100,000. Southwest Detroit is ground zero.

In the last decade, every state and every major U.S. city witnessed significant growth of its Latino population, from 10 percent to more than 100 percent. In five years, Latinos will surpass African-Americans as the nation’s largest minority group, according to U.S. Census projections. By mid-century, they will account for about one-fourth of the U.S. population.

In places such as New York and the East, they are pioneers, expanding and diversifying the Latino presence. In places such as Los Angeles and other parts of the West and Southwest, they have become the majority and, in turn, often face severe backlash.

In southwest Detroit, they can be regarded as working-class heroes, a community which carved out what is arguably the first stable, vibrant blue-collar inner-city neighborhood Detroit has had in decades.

Southwest Detroit is generally defined by Michigan Avenue on the north, the Detroit River on the south, the Ford Rouge Plant on the west and Tiger Stadium on the east. Despite the community’s explosive growth, Latinos remain a small part of metro Detroit’s population, which is one of the reasons why southwest Detroit is so distinct. Nowhere else in the metro area does Latino culture dominate.

The sheer number of people in the area has inspired community groups, small businesses and even the auto industry to keep raising the bar on what is possible for the barrio. Statistically, the barrio has one of the lowest crime rates of any Detroit neighborhood. It is also the most densely populated and the one with the most densely developed commercial districts in the city, according to a 1998 study by the University of Michigan School of Public Policy.

Up from nothing

And yet, it is still inner-city Detroit. Many streets look embattled. Trashy slumlord properties and graffiti-marred empty houses fester alongside immaculate homes with Virgin Mary statues lording over small pampered gardens.

Even on bustling West Vernor Highway, the main business strip, there remain ravaged storefronts and mean, ugly bars. The latter are sometimes referred to as malo muerto – bad death. Already this year, there have been reports of a drive-by shooting and an attempted robbery of the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church rectory. The gangs are also getting more organized and sophisticated in their drug-running, according to several nonprofits that do gang outreach.

Still, overall, no one denies el barrio is on a roll.

"What I find so refreshing is that so many seem happy,’’ says Rev. Marc A. Gawronski, pastor of St. Stephen/Mary, Mother of the Church, one of four Catholic churches with standing-room-only attendance at its Spanish-language Masses.

His church once was mainly Polish, but a few years ago it merged with the Puerto Rican-dominated Mary, Mother of the Church in order to survive. More recently, Mexican immigrants became the main group of churchgoers.

One of Gawronski’s parishioners, Ana Camerena, 24, explains why she is happy here. She says she and her husband left Chicago four years ago because the Mexican/Chicano community of Pilsen was expensive, dangerous and competitive.

Many recently arrived Mexicans seem to have first tried their luck in Chicago or parts of the Southwest, which might help explain all the cowboy types in el barrio.

Here, her husband quickly found steady work in construction. They were able to afford to buy a house for cash, which is common here. They now have a baby son.

At first, their street was populated by the type of families that often needed police to settle disputes. Now, half the block are young immigrant families from the same part of Mexico as Camerena and her husband.

It’s still a loud street. Lot of kids run around, and occasionally too many men gather at someone’s house to drink and blare ranchera music. But it no longer seems dysfunctional.

Camerena sums up: "Detroit takes a lot of getting used to. It’s very unfamiliar and it looks not so nice many times. We miss our families in Mexico. But we are very grateful (for Detroit). It has given us a lot."

History rebuilds itself

Southwest Detroit has been the starting point for immigrants for almost a century – Jews, Irish, Germans, Greeks, Eastern Europeans and then, beginning in the 1920s, Mexicans. The others stopped coming in large numbers decades ago, but Mexicans, some Puerto Ricans, and other Latino immigrants continued to trickle in even as the neighborhood succumbed to recession in the ‘70s and then the crack-infested, abandoned-home plague of the ‘80s and early ‘90s.

The turnaround began six or seven years ago, thanks to the booming U.S. economy. And as the number of people moving here increases, so do the ambitions of businesses and neighborhood organizations.

The auto industry has played a role in the revival, and the effort is being fueled in part by such public incentives as renaissance zones, where most taxes in a given area are waived for a period of 10 to 15 years.

The largest project is the Clark Street Technology Park, where four Detroit businesses – General Motors Corp., Farbman Group, Walbridge-Aldinger and SHG Inc. – are redeveloping the former headquarters of Cadillac Motor Car Company into an 88-acre research and manufacturing center at the corner of Clark and Michigan. In terms of people, Mexicans are the driving force, but Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and Central Americans have a growing presence. Young bohemians and struggling artists are also beginning to reach critical mass.

Sundays on Vernor

All this comes to the fore on Sundays on West Vernor Highway. The bustle starts when people pile out of the 9:30 a.m. Spanish-language Mass at Holy Redeemer, and does not end until after the 7 p.m. Spanish-language Mass at St. Gabriel’s.

In between, different sections of the 46 blocks of West Vernor Highway are abuzz. Everyone from low riders to suburban families in SUVs clog the street.

Everything looks jam-packed: The stores that sell most items for a dollar; auto repair shops and small grocery stores with money wire services and Mexican music and videos, most of which seem to be about men with guns and pickup trucks.

The authentic, inexpensive taquerias and bakeries have ever-shifting demographics. Sometimes half the crowd is black and then it’s black/Latino and then it’s white and Asian and Arab, and then back to all Latino.

E&L Mercado took it to another level last year. Right behind its old store, it built a new $1 million-plus supermercado. That was the first of several ambitious projects planned by small businesses in the barrio.

A young Latino couple, Leonard Artola and his wife, bought half a block of storefronts on nearby Springwells Avenue. The Olde Coffee Shop, the kind of place that has poetry nights, has opened. One entrepreneur is planning a jazz club and someone else a martini lounge.

Mexicantown Community Development Corporation is busy as well. It plans to build an $8 million Mexicantown International Welcome Center and Mercado, pinned around the Michigan Department of Transportation’s construction of a pedestrian bridge that will rejoin Bagley Avenue where it was severed by I-75 near the Ambassador Bridge. The first phase of streetscape improvement begins this spring.

Many consider this project quite a victory for el barrio. It could mean that the first thing visitors from Canada see when they arrive in Detroit would be a thriving open-air marketplace and retail area based on Mexican culture. It would not only be a validation of el barrio, but also of the sheer force and scope of Latino culture in the United States these days.

Cosmopolitan charm

All of these big dreams are based on the idea that the charm of southwest Detroit can be translated to outsiders.

Pilar Uribe McMurray moved to Birmingham from her native Mexico City eight months ago, after her husband Jaime, a marketing executive, was transferred here. She has been to Vernor on at least a dozen Sundays. On one recent visit, she begins her day at one of the taquerias.

It is not just the food, she explains. The warm smell of the kitchen, the stark decor and coziness of the eateries remind her of home. She sits there and writes a letter to a college friend, whom she met during a semester in Paris, and tells her that "every stereotype we held towards the U.S. suburbs is sadly the truth."

At E&L Supermercado, she enjoys being chatty in Spanish with the people at the deli. As she pushes her cart down the aisles at a leisurely pace, she hums along to the Luis Miguel bolero playing over the store’s loudspeakers. While looking over the avocados, she runs into the couple, Alex and Juan, she met at Eastern Market a month ago. Big hugs and kisses.

She will finish her Vernor trip by going to one of the bakeries to buy Mexican pastries, but, really, for one last chance to soak up the atmosphere.

"I cannot imagine having moments like this in the suburbs," she explains. "If we stay here, Jaime and I have decided to move downtown. (He) is from Madrid and so we are both ... urban people. We do not prize conformity above all else. We enjoy architecture, cultural events and crowded market places. That is the way to feel together with a city."

For the future

Even so, many residents – including arty types who’ve moved here for the combination of rich community life and inexpensive housing – mix their optimism with concern about the future. There are formidable obstacles, one of which is the task of getting acknowledgment from the larger community.

The first vital step will be Census 2000. The vast increase in population is obvious to anyone who lives in the barrio, but, traditionally, Hispanic communities are sorely undercounted. If that occurs this time around, it will sharply undercut the neighborhood’s ability to get the kind of services it would need to ensure stable, continued growth.

There are educational and social issues, too. A number of local educators, who request anonymity, say promoting college is still not a major priority in this community.

Says one local high school teacher: "I worry about the cultural gap between the children raised here and their parents. Many of my students are very bright, well-behaved and have bilingual skills. Those are tremendous assets, but too many parents want the sons to work construction, or go into the family business, and the daughters to get married shortly after high school."

Says another high school teacher: "It’s easy enough to get the students excited about the Internet. (But) their parents still think it’s a toy" that their children do not need.

Then there is the task of keeping the barrio real. Some residents are starting to worry that the place may soon be in danger of becoming trendy, which means it will no longer be affordable for many artists and immigrants. Already, parts of Corktown, a historic enclave near Tiger Stadium, is beyond the reach of most here, with lofts that rent for $1,000 a month and some new houses selling for as much as $189,000.

That aforementioned potential jazz club is currently the headquarters of the Xicano Development Center, home of the Brown Berets. They are a small group of 20-something leftists who do things such as support the United Farm Workers, take all-night bus rides to Washington to march for immigrant rights, and speak out against police brutality. They appear to be the only group of young Latinos here attempting to raise social and political consciousness.

In January, they were told they had 60 days to vacate. They have found temporary shelter above the Olde Coffee Shop, and are attempting to raise funds for a permanent space.

It seems an example of the next stage for the barrio. Southwest Detroit and the Latino community have gained a larger presence in Detroit. Now, they have to learn to fight for power. That will be the story of this decade.

Louis Aguilar, a native of southwest Detroit, is executive director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Latino Film Festival in Washington, D.C. He and photographer Hector Emanuel are working on a book about the Mexican immigrant community in southwest Detroit.