A Latino business owner looks to an uncertain future

The promise of America is as real to Manuel “Manolo” Betancur as when he came chasing it from Colombia in 2000 with $900 in his pocket. To hang on to it, however, the bakery and coffee shop owner in Charlotte, North Carolina, has learned he must be nimble about seizing opportunities.

“Too many immigrant-owned businesses are afraid to take the next step, or they don’t know how to take the next step,” he says early one morning at Las Delicias Bakery as he greets customers in Spanish and helps load a delivery van with fresh Mexican and Colombian breads, pastries and cakes.

Betancur, 40, who became a citizen in 2008, started the deliveries during the recession when the business was in decline, realizing that scores of Latino stores had sprouted in small towns of North Carolina and Virginia to serve a growing immigrant population hungry for familiar delicacies. Now his drivers, Miguel Angel Marín and Carolina Bejarano, roam as far north as Lynchburg, Virginia. Deliveries account for half of sales, which he says have grown to $1 million.

Betancur and his ex-wife, Zhenia Martínez, who came from Mexico, took over the bakery founded by her parents. Betancur and Martínez remain business partners and have two children born in the United States, ages 7 and 5.

Betancur, who also owns Mama’s Coffee House in Pineville, North Carolina, is always on the move. He pitches the owner of a restaurant chain on carrying his tamales and pastries, then heads to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for smallbusiness training. He is spurred by concern that Donald Trump might keep his campaign promise of mass deportations.

“My business depends 95 percent on immigrant labor and immigrant clients,” he tells the small-business coach. “What happens if everyone has to leave? I want to have a plan B.”

He knows the complexities of the issue. Two of his brothers have been waiting eight years to immigrate legally, yet he sympathizes with undocumented immigrants who fled violence and poverty.

“We don’t want bad people here,” he says. He would require the undocumented to “pay taxes, learn English, get involved in the system.”

However they arrived, he wants the newcomers to show the same commitment that he has to the common dream.

PHOTO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST BY LOGAN R. CYRUS Manolo Betancur, co-owner of Las Delicias Bakery in Charlotte, N.C., came to America in 2000. He knows that massive deportations of illegal immigrants could greatly affect his daily operations because he depends on immigrant labor and immigrant clients.