A few years ago, there was just low-wage job after low-wage job for Jose and Noemi Payan, recent arrivals in Minneapolis. Then they began peddling an unlikely product: fresh corn tortillas.
Today they have dozens of employees, three locations, a fleet of delivery trucks and 250 restaurants on their customer list. They make and sell more tortillas than anyone else in the city.The Payan family's rise from virtual nobodies to something more like royalty among the city's burgeoning Hispanic and Latino population is a reminder of the familiar narrative of the American dream, especially at a time of heated debate nationally over immigration. They worked long hours, took a few smart rolls of the dice, found fortune.Jose Payan, a native of Axochiapan in the Mexican state of Morelos, and his wife, Noemi, who was born in Puerto Rico, came to Minneapolis 12 years ago with five children and the sixth on the way.Their daughter Cynthia, now 20, remembers all of them packed into a one-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue."We started out with absolutely nothing," she said.They were among those who tripled Minnesota's Latino population during the 1990s to 181,959 today, or 3.5 percent of the state's 5.1 million population. It's easy to see the Latino influence along E. Lake Street now, but that wasn't the case 10 years ago."No one would give us a loan," said Jose, 43. "They were like, 'Who's going to eat tortillas,' you know?"
Plenty of people, it turns out. The Payan family business, Tortilleria La Perla, grossed about $2 million in revenue last year to surpass Georgia-based La Banderita, the next-bestselling brand in the Twin Cities, with $1.4 million in Twin Cities sales, according to market analysis from Information Resources Inc.
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