How Hispanic-owned businesses are finding a home in Indianapolis amid a population boom

The Morales family’s Indiana story begins with cherries, tomatoes and the summer sun.

Manuel Morales first came to the state as a migrant worker, traveling 1,300 miles from his hometown on the southern Texas border to pick summer crops for the season. After six years of making the hard journey, Manuel decided to stop migrating and plant some roots of his own in 1955 Indianapolis.

At the time, Indiana’s Hispanic population was somewhere between 0 and 1 percent. When Manuel lay dying of cancer several years later, he asked his son, Tomás, to give back to the city’s small Hispanic community. Tomás took his father’s words to heart and formed Morales Group in 2003, now one of the largest Hispanic-owned staffing agencies in the city.

“He challenged my dad to really give back to the community,” said Seth Morales, Tomás’ son. “And one way of doing that was giving them a job.”

In the last 20 years, the Hispanic population in Central Indiana has grown by almost 500 percent, and some say jobs are the reason for it. A stable job market and quality of life may have contributed to the quiet settling of a Hispanic community in Indianapolis in recent decades.

And as the Hispanic/Latino population in the city has grown, so has the Hispanic business sector.

Almost 5,000 Hispanic-owned firms contribute just north of $1.1 billion in overall revenue each year to the region, according the most recent data from the Indy Chamber’s Hispanic Business Council. Although the Council does not keep data regarding the growth of such businesses in Indianapolis, 2016 research from the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative found nationwide, Latino-owned businesses were growing at a rate double or triple the national average.

“The economic impact of this community is very significant,” said Joe Pellman, director of marketing and communications for the Council. “And it will only, as far as we can tell, continue to grow in the future.”

Morales Group now employs about 4,500 employees weekly. Seth Morales, current president of the company, said it fulfills him to know the company is making good on his grandfather’s wishes for the community.

“We’re living out the mission of building a better future one story at a time for the people that we support and employ,” Morales said. “And we’re passing along the challenge that (my grandfather) gave my father and the legacy that he lived out. It’s very powerful.”

A rapidly-growing community

In 2017, about 10 percent of the population in Marion County was Hispanic or Latino, according to U.S. Census data. Based on data from the Hispanic Business Council, when Gustavo Escalante immigrated to Indianapolis from Venezuela in 1995, that number was closer to 2 percent.

Escalante first came to the state to practice his English and to visit his brother, who went to school in Indiana. He decided to stay, a difficult decision for the self-proclaimed “tropical bird” who loves the heat.

“It’s been 24 years, and I’m still here,” Escalante said, laughing. “I found out that this was a great place to raise a family and I fell in love with the city.”

Escalante is the director of the Hispanic Business Council. He predicts many of the Hispanic families who moved to Indianapolis did so for similar reasons that he did: the job market was good, the quality of life was good and Hoosiers were nice people.

Matzine Sánchez-Gutiérrez, president of the Indianapolis chapter of the Hispanic professional organization Prospanica, is from Mexico originally, and said she moved to Indiana because she heard there would be job opportunities.

Sánchez-Gutiérrez has six brothers and two sisters in Indiana, and most of her aunts and uncles are business owners. Many of them, she said, worked in the construction business because they thought they could find success there.

“After the (economic) downturn that we had in 2008 and 2009, the construction business was really coming up,” Sánchez-Gutiérrez said. “I think that’s what brought a lot of people here … and with that comes a lot of people moving into the city and bringing their children.”

Escalante said he has noticed many of the first-generation Hispanic and Latino families in Indianapolis have children who also want to stay in Indiana, including his own son.

“A lot of second-generation Latinos now … are multi-cultural, they’re bilingual, and they feel like Indiana is home,” Escalante said. “The Latinos that are here, the age group is young, very young. The message with this is that we’re here to stay.”

Finding footing, then success

After growing up in a strong Hispanic community in Michigan and living in Corpus Christi, Texas, Kathy Cabello said moving to Indianapolis in 1989 gave her “quite a culture shock.”

“The Hispanic/Latino community was almost nil," Cabello said. "It was nonexistent.” 

It wasn’t until Hispanic professional organizations started showing up in the early 2000s that Cabello said she saw the community change. Among others, she said the appearance of the National Society of Hispanic MBAs, now called Prospanica, showed Hispanic/Latino Hoosiers they could break into the business sector – and succeed.

“(Those organizations) really helped transform the face of the community and helped others realize there are Latinos here, there are Hispanics here, and you can thrive here,” Cabello said. “For the non-Hispanic community, I think it really opened their eyes and exposed them to the fact that there are Hispanic professionals.”

Cabello founded marketing agency Cabello Associates in 2002, and it has since become the largest Latinx-owned business of its kind in the state, she said.

“This industry is really not dominated by women or by minorities, so it’s quite thrilling,” Cabello said. “The obstacles are really getting in the door, getting to the table and people considering you a viable option. That’s always the challenge for a women-owned business, a minority-owned business.”

The next generation

Most Central Indiana Hispanic/Latino-owned businesses — about 22 percent of them — are in the construction sector, according to most recent data from the Hispanic Business Council. The Hispanic/Latino-owned businesses that employ the most employees are in transportation and warehousing, at an average of almost 14 employees per firm.

Industries such as information or manufacturing, however, are not as well represented. Both combined represent just over 2 percent of the Hispanic/Latino-owned businesses in Central Indiana.

Pellman, however, said he believes this won't be the case forever. Companies such as Emplify, an Indiana-based employee engagement software business led by Santiago Jaramillo, are breaking into that space even now, he said.

"With the growth of more companies like Emplify ... and with continued focus on growing the entrepreneurial culture of our region, I believe more Hispanic tech businesses will arise because there are proven examples of success," Pellman said.

Pellman said he expects to see the workforce diversify, especially as more in the community earn degrees in higher levels of education.

“I think you’ll start to see Hispanic-owned businesses establish themselves in more and varied industry sectors just because the natural growth pattern for the community is really establishing itself,” Pellman said. “Now we’re getting into some second-generation individuals from a Hispanic business community and their interests are going to be quite different from what we have even right now.”

Building on that growth using mentorship is a common theme within the city’s Hispanic/Latino business community. Many of its business leaders, including Sánchez-Gutiérrez, Morales, Cabello and those in the Hispanic Business Council, devote their time to programs supporting burgeoning Hispanic/Latino startups or encouraging higher education.

“Because of (these programs), we’re expecting to see more Hispanics enter the workforce on a much higher level in years to come,” Sánchez-Gutiérrez said. “We are seeing more Hispanics get their master’s degrees and even PhDs … and that’s really good.”

When Morales’ grandfather planted his family in Indiana in the 1950s, the Hispanic population in the state was just beginning to build. Now, Morales said, he notices an established, educated Hispanic community that is increasingly taking entrepreneurial risks.

“I see more and more Hispanic leaders stepping up and creating pathways for new business owners, new business growth in this population,” Morales said. “I definitely see this minority population, this Hispanic community, having a larger footprint in the community overall.”

Contact IndyStar reporter London Gibson at 317-444-6043 or lbgibson@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter @londongibson.