“Not knowing the ins and outs of a new country and how everything functions makes us second-guess ourselves and our value… We know we can do things… we just don’t know how or where to reach out for help.”
For Gabriela Ramírez-Arellano, the lowest point in her life turned out to be a turning point. As she entered her 40s, she found herself in the middle of a divorce and without a job.
“I had sunk as low as I thought anyone could sink!” she said. “It was a blow to my ego and self-esteem to think that just a few weeks back, I was playing golf at one of the best country clubs in the area … and now here I was, asking for government assistance for food and living expenses. What if I didn’t survive?”
These days, Ramírez-Arellano is a respected business consultant for the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis. In her role as counselor, she works primarily with foreign-born entrepreneurs to navigate the challenges of getting a business off the ground. And she’s quite good at it. She’s even started “Auténtico,” a podcast that provides resources and support for small-business owners and professionals.
But her 40-year-old self would have found all that hard to believe. As she sat at the unemployment office back in 2010, Ramírez-Arellano was penniless, and had to borrow her sister’s car to take the children to school and look for a job.
Though she was a college graduate and had an MBA, she had never held a paying job. After graduating from the University of Missouri, where she met her first husband, the couple moved to Detroit. There, he worked as an executive for General Motors, while she stayed at home to raise their growing family.
After 20 years, the marriage fell apart, and Ramírez-Arellano found herself at the unemployment office, desperate for work.
“Here I am at the unemployment office, telling the lady, ‘I need a job today! I can only do two things: I can speak Spanish and I can be a Girl Scout leader,’” she recalled.
As fate would have it, there was a position available at a translation office; then, a position for a Hispanic coordinator with the Girl Scouts opened up. It didn’t take long for Ramírez-Arellano to find her groove and discover a special knack for engaging those around her.
“With the Girl Scouts, I started helping them figure out how to reach out to Hispanic moms to become part of the organization, and to try to get the organization to understand the Hispanic community, where girls are not necessarily trained to be leaders,” she explained.
From there, Ramírez-Arellano found more opportunities to become involved with Detroit’s Hispanic community.
“During that time, I really saw what skill sets I had,” she said. “I started volunteering for a financial literacy initiative, and I also helped develop the curriculum for the ProsperUs Detroit program, and started teaching the class in Spanish.”
Things were looking up. Ramírez-Arellano eventually started her own business consulting company, specializing in helping organizations reach Latino and Spanish speakers. In addition, she assisted immigrant entrepreneurs with accessing resources to grow their businesses and ensure their success. She also found love again with Victor Arellano, whom she calls “Corazon,” which means heart in Spanish. The couple married in 2014.
It was around this time that Ramírez-Arellano was contemplating another major life change: moving back to the St. Louis area.
“Victor’s dream has always been to own a restaurant. His family had owned a bar, so he always wanted to do that,” she explained. “Detroit is already saturated … and my parents are still here … so we thought, ‘Hey, what if we looked here?’”
And that’s exactly what the Arellanos did, and within months, they found a spot in O’Fallon, Missouri, for Don Emiliano’s, their Mexican restaurant that opened in 2015.
While her husband kept busy with the new restaurant, Ramírez-Arellano began carving out her next chapter by opening a dialogue with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan St. Louis, whose mission – to promote and support Hispanic small businesses through programs, services and legislative advocacy – was tailor-made for what has become a lifelong passion. She knows all too well that the odds are against minority small business owners – even before she became one.
“They have many challenges. One is language. If you don’t speak the language, there’s question and doubt. One is access to capital. We were lucky when we opened the restaurant, because O’Fallon had a dedicated person to do this. But because I knew English, I was able to have this conversation with him. If it were just my husband, it would have been a struggle,” she said. “And then once things get started, it’s always access to capital. Is your personal credit ready to take on a loan? Are you personally ready to take on a loan? When we first moved here, Victor couldn’t take anything in his name. His Social Security was new, he didn’t have credit history … ”
Even as a young child, Ramírez-Arellano understood how a complicated situation can be made even more so when someone doesn’t speak the language.
“As the eldest, I was the family interpreter – at the doctor’s office, or when a form came in the mail … ” she said.
She was only 5 years old when her family came to the United States.
“My dad was a police officer in Mexico, but as our family grew, our parents wanted a better opportunity for us,” she said. “First, he worked at a cannery; eventually, he worked at a mechanic’s shop, which led to work at the GM assembly plant in Fremont. When that plant closed in the mid-1980s, he transferred to the plant in Wentzville, Missouri. By then, the family included me, my mom, my four siblings, my grandma and my aunt.”
Moving from the West Coast to the Midwest needed some getting used to, the then-teenager would soon find out.
“Coming to Missouri in the ‘80s was like a culture shock,” she said. “We moved to Troy. My sister had purple hair … you could imagine what it was like. We were asked, ‘What are you? What are you mixed with?’ It got better when we moved to O’Fallon and bought a house and finished high school at Fort Zumwalt North.”
And since moving back to the area in 2016, Ramírez-Arellano’s life has come full circle. She and her husband are fully involved in running Don Emiliano’s, and she is completely immersed in her career.
“I try to work with businesses and meet them where they are – whether it’s helping them get their documents in order or offering ServSafe classes in Spanish for restaurant employees,” she said, adding that there’s a great need for bilingual aid throughout the St. Louis metro area. “In 2017, Hispanic businesses in St. Charles alone grew by 159 percent.”
Ramírez-Arellano hopes that her work in the Hispanic community gives encouragement and hope to those who seek it, and embolden them to realize their dream.
“Not knowing the ins and outs of a new country and how everything functions makes us second-guess ourselves and our value,” she said. “There are cultural and language hurdles, and it’s the ‘not knowing’ that causes angst, stress and frustration when we know we can do things, but we just don’t know how or where to reach out for help.”
