Alma Lorena Monzón Germán immigrated, on foot, from Sinaloa, Mexico to Arizona, with the goal of making enough money to help her daughter finish her education. Eight years later, she has founded her own party-decorating business and is among the many Hispanic/Latinx entrepreneurs receiving expert business assistance through the community-based organization RAIL CDC. Supported by LISC Phoenix, the work is one way LISC seeks to unleash talent and level the entrepreneurial playing field. As Hispanic Heritage Month comes to a close, Monzón Germán shares the story of her journey and of the heritage she hopes to pass on to her daughter.
Phoenix resident Alma Lorena Monzón Germán has some steps to take before she can say her party-decorating business is truly launched. But it’s hard to imagine the road that lies before her could be any harder than the one she’s already traveled.
That journey began eight years ago in Sinaloa, Mexico, more than 700 miles from Phoenix. “I’m Mexican,” says Monzón Germán. “I’m a woman who wants to make a better life in this country. I came to the U.S. by walking through the desert, for 15 days, by myself.”
Though she traveled alone, her objective was an escape from poverty for both herself and the daughter she’d left behind in Sinaloa, 21-year-old Carmen. The daughter’s job was to finish her education. The mother’s, to make that possible by earning money in America to help cover tuition.
Once in Phoenix, Monzón Germán picked up whatever work she could find—cleaning, performing odd jobs, selling homemade tamales on the street and to local businesses. She particularly enjoyed the work she found with an event venue, decorating the space for festive occasions like weddings and quinceañeras. It called on her creativity and sense of style.
“It was part of my job to discuss with the clients what color scheme and theme they wanted,” she says. “Then I would choose the colors and do the decorations for parties of as many as 400 people. That includes decorating the tables, setting up the seats, setting the tables for the guests of honor with center pieces, tablecloths, cutlery, glasses, plates, napkins, everything.”
The day of a special event was typically a marathon for Monzón Germán. She’d arrive at the venue at 5 a.m. and not leave until late afternoon, having earned just $100 for her labor. It was nothing new for her to work long hours for a fraction of Arizona’s legal minimum wage, currently $13.85 an hour. But early this year Monzón Germán discovered the venue owner was charging clients up to $12,000 per event. That brought her up short. “It seemed really unjust,” she says. “I said to myself, ‘No. I’m working hard and I want to move forward, and I’m not going to move forward like this.’”
The way forward, she decided, was to start the business she now calls Parti Passion. And it wasn’t long before she found a trusted community-based organization, RAIL CDC, that connected Monzón Germán with bilingual business consultants who could help her get that business off the ground.
RAIL is a longtime partner of LISC Phoenix, which supports the technical assistance to entrepreneurs like Monzón Germán as part of its efforts to promote economic justice and invigorate underinvested Phoenix-area commercial corridors.
“Providing culturally competent advice and support to entrepreneurs of color and immigrant business owners is a very clear win-win,” says LISC Phoenix executive director Terry Benelli. “It not only helps these entrepreneurs build security for their families, but also allows them to contribute enormous productivity and diversity to our local economies.”
Monzón Germán is a member of two groups, Hispanics and immigrants, that launch businesses at disproportionately high rates, often seeing independent entrepreneurship as a more accessible path to earning income and building wealth than a labor market rife with barriers and inequities. Latinas in particular have high workforce participation but are concentrated in low-wage jobs, with those working full-time, year-round earning just 57 cents on the dollar compared with non-Hispanic white men.
And while being undocumented leaves Monzón Germán without important workplace protections and benefits established under state and federal law, her immigration status does not bar her from creating a new business and charging what the market will bear for her services.
Here, too, there are plenty of hoops to jump through, and that’s where RAIL’s consultants come in. They helped her register her LLC and apply to the Internal Revenue Service for an employer identification number (EIN), come up with a business name, design a logo and business cards, brainstorm about publicity, and devise a business plan for Parti Passion. “They didn’t charge me anything,” says Monzón Germán. “They were always there to give me a hand in anything I needed.”
One setback: Although she already had an individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) and had been paying taxes on her tamales sales, she couldn’t demonstrate the steady income required to get a small-business loan from a local credit union. Her recent application was turned down.
Monzón Germán needs that upfront capital to invest in decorating materials, so the loan denial means there’s more work to do before she can get Parti Passion going full steam. With the help of expert advice, she’s laying the pieces in place, building an earnings record by decorating for several different event venues, at minimum wage.
Despite sometimes working seven days a week and still struggling to make rent, Monzón Germán has come a long way toward fulfilling the dream that led her across the desert nearly a decade ago.
She’s been able to send money back to Carmen in Sinaloa, helping her to finish school and start a teaching career. Monzón Germán could not return to Mexico to attend Carmen’s wedding, but three times so far Carmen has obtained a visa to visit her mother in the States.
And Monzón Germán has built a rich life in Phoenix. She met her partner in 2016, then got married and had another child, Aitana, now five. Does she aspire to one day involve this small American-born daughter in Parti Passion? “I want to teach my youngest daughter all the good things I’ve learned,” replies Monzón Germán. “She’s been admitted to an academy where she’ll be getting the very best [education] and good values. She says she’s studying so she can work and buy us a little house. But I also want my daughter to realize her own dreams.”