Can Latinos save Detroit?
For over 80 years a magnificent fresco by famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera has covered the walls in the Detroit Institute of Arts as a…
Diego Riveras murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts have been designated as one of four new national historic landmarks.(AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
For over 80 years a magnificent fresco by famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera has covered the walls in the Detroit Institute of Arts as a tribute to the onetime automotive capital of the world and its labor force.
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But today, with Detroit in economic ruins, the fate of the mural is up in question, possibly to be sold in the future for a small fortune that could go a long way in shoring up the empty coffers of the largest American city to declare bankruptcy.
If so, then the Diego Rivera mural may simply symbolize how Latinos ? the fastest growing population in a city many are fleeing ? could ultimately wind up saving Detroit, where the population has plummeted by 26 percent since 2000 while its unemployment rate has tripled.
Wouldnt it be fantastic if Latinos seized that opportunity, came to Detroit, and became key players in the citys return to glory? wonders author Ulises Silva, who has witnessed the Hispanic influx into the city of the past generation.
Detroits Hispanic population
Over the last two decades, Detroits Hispanic population has grown by 70 percent, from 28,473 in 1990 to 48,679 and its young. The Hispanic community in Detroit has a median age of 24.
Most of those incoming Latinos are immigrants, meaning the hope they bring isnt necessarily political. But then Detroit is the one big city in America where political clout is easily trumped by economic power, and Hispanics there offer Detroit what it needs most: Money and plenty of it.
Over the last two decades, Detroits Hispanic population has grown by 70 percent. (Shutterstock)
More than 250 small businesses ? including Mexican restaurants, taquerias and bilingual storefronts line the streets of the southeast side of the city known as Mexicantown that is heavily populated by Latinos, many of them seeing better opportunities than in California or the Southwest.
We come starving for a better life, says Mexican-born Flamenco dance instructor Valeria Montes. We want to strive and we’ve found in southwest Detroit a place to do it. The opportunity was here for us, and we took it.
According to one report, more than $200 million in the past 15 years has been invested there, including an $11 million condominium development.
“We have enough money in the economy that businesses can sustain retail establishments by primarily relying on Latino customers and clients,” says Rodrigo Padilla, the owner of Mexicantowns El Nacimiento restaurant.
It is a telling note about the dramatic demographic transition of Detroit that most of the Sunday masses at the citys historic Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church are now said in Spanish, as 70 percent of its 2,200 member families are Hispanic.
The Latino influence on the church has been such that in 2005 Holy Redeemer High School was renamed Detroit Cristo Rey High. Elias Gutierrez, editor of the bilingual weekly Latino Press, believes Latinos hold part of the solution to the future of Detroit in part because he has lived the experience.
A recent immigrant from Chile in the early 1990s, Gutierrez had been working as a handyman and painter when he recognized the growing Hispanic population and the need for a Spanish-language newspaper.
When I decided to make this publication I didn’t think of it as a business, but a way for the Hispanic community to contact and communicate with each other, says Gutierrez. Later, it just transformed into a business when thousands of Hispanics began to arrive in Michigan. They wanted to know … where to buy from, to eat, hire a lawyer, a doctor or a place to dance.
Today, Gutierrezs newspaper is one of the few in the business that can say its thriving.
While American publications lose circulation and subscribers, we are going the opposite way, he says. This is due to the immigrants that keep arriving in Michigan.
Today, the irony may be that Diego Rivera, while living in Detroit painting his mural honoring the industrial worker, founded the Marxist-nationalist Liga de Obreros y Campesinos, organizing Mexicans in the city.
Rivera encouraged them to return to Mexico to help form revolutionary settlements in their homeland.
Those revolutionary settlements ultimately went belly up.
I no longer live in Detroit, says author Ulises Silva, who relocated to Chicago, but still believe in its revitalization and still believe that if the city embraced immigrants –particularly Latinos — the way other struggling cities have, the Detroit narrative would be rewritten dramatically.
