San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Businesses left behind in city’s rush to tech
At West Side cafe, breadth of digital divide on display
For three decades, Maria Elena Gomez Peña has been running Elena’s Café on a street now lined with auto body shops, barbers, mobile phone stores and a Sonic DriveIn. The single mother of two adults works seven days a week with a handful of employees who cook and serve plates of huevos rancheros with pork chop, beef fajita tacos and chicken mole to loyal customers — mainly families and construction crews from the neighborhood.
There’s no cable TV. People eat, talk and listen to Spanishlanguage radio stations. A few scroll through Facebook and YouTube pages on cellphones. Most pay in cash.
Like other business owners on San Antonio’s West Side, Gomez Peña and her customers don’t have access to online ordering, touch-screen point-of-sale terminals, pay-at-the-table technology or digital receipts. It’s a world apart from the restaurants just a few miles away in downtown San Antonio, a city pushing to brand itself as a tech-savvy hub for innovation.
The divide between the city’s digital aspirations and Gomez Peña’s reality were apparent after a recent lunch rush as she collected receipts from the cash register. With no computer, Gomez Peña penned the December date on each slip of paper and stuffed them into envelopes to save for tax-filing season. After closing at 2 p.m., she ran errands to H-E-B and her bank to get ready for the next day. She blamed the hectic schedule for not leaving the time it would take to step across the digital divide by learning how to digitize her records, create a website or update social media pages.
She’s accustomed to operating the restaurant on pen and paper. But the 61-year-old’s lack of digital tools put her in a financial bind through the pandemic, helping helped her realize change is necessary to keep the restaurant going long enough to pass it on to her children and, eventually, her grandchildren.
“The city is growing tremendously,” Gomez Peña said. “I have to keep up with technology because technology is moving the economy. If you want to hire someone, you need the internet. If you want to buy something from the food suppliers, you need the internet. I need to educate myself. If I don’t do that, I will never be able to grow the business.”
S.A.’s digital divide
Among the nation’s metropolitan areas, San Antonio has one of the lowest rates of internet access, with 20 percent of its 1.5 million residents lacking broadband internet access at home, according to the Census Bureau. The rate mirrors that of Texas as a whole but falls behind the national rate of 15 percent of homes without broadband subscriptions.
The lack of household internet access is particularly prevalent in the city’s Hispanic and Black neighborhoods, where 1 in 4 residents don’t have home broadband subscriptions, according to a 2020 study by the University of Texas at San Antonio. By comparison, only 1 in 8 white residents lack such subscriptions.
The study also showed residents have widely different access to home broadband depending on where they live. Residents in City Council Districts 1 through 5 had access rates ranging from as low as 62 percent to 77 percent, while those in Districts 6 through 19 had rates from 82 percent to 94 percent.
Elena’s Café is in District 5, a Hispanic West Side neighborhood with 125,593 residents. The district’s annual median income is $28,952 — a little more than half of Bexar County’s median of $54,000 per year. At least 38 percent of the district’s residents don’t have home broadband subscriptions — the lowest rate of connectivity in the city.
Ramiro Gonzalez, CEO and president of the nonprofit economic development group Prosper West San Antonio, said most of the neighborhood’s businesses are Latino-owned and operate on cash. About 90 percent of them employ four or fewer workers, about half of whom don’t have high school diplomas.
The small businesses “aren’t very digital or up to date on trends,” he said. “But they’re very resilient.”
Still, there exists a lack of basic internet access or digital literacy — the ability to use technologies. In some cases, they
also lack access.
Lacking infrastructure
“Some of them just don’t have the hardware infrastructure in their neighborhoods,” Gonzalez said. “As a result, you see the poorer areas being left out of that digital infrastructure.”
San Antonio’s West Side doesn’t present the challenges of rural Texas, where distance is a hurdle to providing technology infrastructure to far-flung communities. Elena’s Cafe is only a few miles from the digital hubs of the downtown area, the Pearl and Port San Antonio. But service providers may be hesitant to invest in extending service to such areas because it’s unclear they’d get enough subscribers to pay for the investment.
Gonzalez questioned whether business owners themselves could afford to build out the infrastructure needed — the cost yet another barrier in bringing them up to digital speed.
“They’ve been operating so long without it they sort of got used to it,” he said. “But they don’t realize until it’s too late and can’t compete.”
Roger Enriquez, a West Side native who’s an associate professor of criminal justice at UTSA, co-authored the study, which found the digital divide affects the ability of residents to bank online, apply for jobs and apartments, and pursue educational opportunities. The lack of access bleeds into lower rates of understanding how to use computer programs like Microsoft Word and Excel or identify phishing attempts.
“If there’s one Elena, there’s plenty,” he said while visiting her restaurant. “Tire shops, beauticians, landscaping, all these folks here can benefit from the use of tech.”
The study found the usual
reason for such shortcomings are a community far removed from digital infrastructure, he said.
But in San Antonio, that’s not the case.
“Instead, the driver of this digital divide is the systemic social exclusion and structural opposition of marginalized communities left out in the past from opportunities and resources,” the study said. “This seems clearly linked to racial, socioeconomic, and geographic discrimination and the coronavirus pandemic has further exacerbated these inequalities.”
Digital wall at Elena’s
Amid the coronavirus pandemic in April 2020, Enriquez became executive director of UTSA’s Westside Community Partnerships, which is aiming to address neighborhood challenges “in the heart of San Antonio’s Mexican American working class community.”
Two months later, Diane Sanchez, founder and CEO of local nonprofit Micro:SA, another advocate for small businesses, worked with the center to drop off flyers, in English and Spanish, offering a website link for business owners seeking help filling out applications for federal Paycheck Protection Program loans.
Gomez Peña, who rents her café building, recalled finding a flyer at the time she was offering to-go meals and having trouble hiring workers. She needed help filling out the loan applications — but hit a digital wall.
“I couldn’t do that,” she said. “I didn’t know how to connect to the website on the internet. My skills are very limited.”
Then she noticed Sanchez’s phone number on the bottom of the flyer. She called, and the nonprofit head connected her with Westside Community Partnerships.
Gomez Peña drove the halfmile to the center on Guadalupe Street near Interstate 10. There, she handed her enveloped receipts to a handful of UTSA undergraduate students called ambassadors.
“They said my accountant’s numbers were not right,” she said. “I had a feeling they weren’t right. It was in the middle of the pandemic and the numbers didn’t make sense. They projected double the amount from what we actually made.”
The students showed her how to use Excel spreadsheets to organize her receipts and eventually digitize her own records. They walked her through the loan application so she could afford to pay her staff, including her adult son and her 18-year-old grandson. They suggested she buy a desktop computer or a laptop and offered to assist her with online advertising.
“I would’ve closed the business if I didn’t have the help,” she said.
‘Ongoing process’
Inside the Westside Community Partnerships center, UTSA students Jazmin Arroyo and Caitlyn Deleon spent much of the year helping neighborhood residents, mostly women older than 55, many of whom speak only Spanish. One needed help translating an eviction notice on her home. A man asked them to teach him how to turn on his laptop, browse the internet and create a Gmail account. Others sought assistance with online résumé builders and job applications.
Small-business owners, mostly men or their wives, have frequented the center to access its on-site computers. They ask for help filling out PPP loan applications and learning how to use office programs such as Microsoft Word and Excel.
While San Antonio is pushing for tech innovation, Deleon said, the West Side neighborhood’s residents are “just focusing on the basic foundations technology — your email, your phone, maybe your basic laptop.”
“San Antonio is making advances, but this area is getting left behind,” Arroyo said.
Enriquez, a former defense lawyer, likened the experience of West Side business owners adopting tech to that of inmates being released after years in prison.
“We assume that incarcerated people were connected to their communities in the first place, but these folks didn’t have access to such options,” he said. “Now we’re dealing with a lot of structural tech issues here on the
West Side. It’s not just about devices and connectivity. It’s about them getting integrated into the digital framework and fabric, the interconnected city paradigm.”
He added: “It’s not a lightning strike and people go full on digital. They see the utility of it and then adapt to the technology. It’s an ongoing process of help.”
He continues to ask Gomez Peña to buy a laptop and begin using Excel to help organize her receipts. But what may come easy for some can be difficult for others, he said — especially those with pandemic-shortened incomes where every dollar counts.
“We can say it’s a few thousand dollars,” he said. “But it’s a few thousand dollars.”
‘Small steps are sure steps’
At Elena’s, Gomez Peña ended another shift and sat down in one of the cafe’s booths. She sighed with relief as she recalled how PPP loans helped her get through the past year.
But now there are more challenges as prices rise amid short supplies. Pointing out the broken lights, delayed paint job and roof in need of repair at her rented building, she was preparing to meet Sanchez to discuss seeking financing that would let her find a building of her own — hopefully in her West Side neighborhood.
“I’m tired,” Gomez Peña said. “At this point, technology is very difficult for me to understand. I’m ready to pass on the business to the next generation.”
She paused and folded her hands. Then she told herself out loud that she needed to learn Excel.
“Small steps are sure steps,” she said.
Her grandson walked over and handed her his cellphone, showing newly posted images of the restaurant on social media pages. Gomez Peña smiled as she thumbed through photographs of her customers’ favorite dishes.