When Miguel Diaz first started his coffee roasting business in Norfolk, he made just $3,000 in his first year of operation. 

Suddenly, quitting his job as a banker to chase a dream of building something himself was looking dicey.

But he leaned on his community, placing his coffee in the Latino markets - called tiendas - that have proliferated in Hampton Roads in recent years.

“We were in like 12 Latino stores in the area. So now people would start walking by like ‘I've seen your logo,’” Diaz said. “That was my marketing in a way. I didn't have a budget for marketing.”

Now, Diaz is roasting coffee for everyone from professional wrestlers to the Virginia Zoo, as well as under his own brand, Rich Port.

Ten or fifteen years ago, Diaz acknowledges that he wouldn’t have had that network of tiendas to get his brand off the ground. He’s part of a burgeoning Latino population and business community in Hampton Roads that’s increasingly asserting itself outside of Hispanic and Latino circles.

“Neighborhoods are changing. Schools are changing … Population and businesses and the diversity of the businesses are changing,” said Patricia Bracknell, who runs the Hispanic Chamber of Coastal Virginia.

Diaz said Rich Port is the only Latino-owned coffee roaster in the state and he’s the only one around who’s roasting Puerto Rican beans.

But he chose the name - the English translation of his birthplace of Puerto Rico - because it would be instantly recognizable to Spanish speakers without seeming specifically marketed as Latino coffee.

“I need to compete against non-Latinos and Latinos and whoever,” Diaz said.

Most cities in Hampton Roads have seen steady growth in their Latino populations.

In 2000, just 3% of Hampton Roads identified as Hispanic, according to Greg Grootendorst. He's the deputy director of the Hampton Roads District Planning Commission, which tracks demographic changes in the region

“Population growth in the Hispanic community in Hampton Roads has outpaced that of the Commonwealth and the nation,” Grootendorst said.

Regionally, that percentage has more than doubled in the last two decades. In places like Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Hispanic populations are now closer to 9%.

Areas like Suffolk have developed sizable Hispanic populations when there was none to speak of 20 years ago.

Now, local governments are finally taking notice of the accelerating shift and trying to get ahead of the growth curve.

The Hispanic Chamber of Coastal Virginia recently hosted an event with the City of Norfolk to help Latino entrepreneurs set up their businesses or get existing businesses through the paperwork process for things like permits, taxes and more.

“We don't want to miss the boat. We don't want to miss all of the opportunities and all of the new folks that are coming to our community,” said Aleea Slappy Wilson, who runs Norfolk’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

“We don't want to be the afterthought, or folks then think ‘This city isn't open to me or not welcoming to me.’”

Across the Hampton Roads of today, you can see the stamps of Latino culture that didn’t exist 20 years ago. There are more taquerias and tiendas than ever. Large cultural events have taken root, like La Fiesta, the Virginia Beach festival that drew 15,000 people in June.

“It's this huge movement that I've been talking about for a few years now that there's this big tsunami of people that look just like me coming in. Nobody was really ready for them,” said Bracknell, who moved to the Southwest United States from Mexico when she was young.

A taste of home

Jorge Romero and his family have watched the Latino community swell over the last two decades from their store and restaurant in Ocean View.

Romero’s father founded Jessy’s, which started as a Latino market in 2003. It’s now a tienda and restaurant in Ocean View, with another restaurant in Ghent and a third near Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach. (A fourth Jessy’s, owned by Romero’s uncle, is open near the Oceanfront).

He was surprised his father was coming up to Virginia from the family’s home in Wilson, N.C., to open his store.

“When he told me I was like ‘The beach? Are there any Mexicans at the beach?’” said Romero, who moved with his family from Mexico City when he was a child. “I don’t know if I ever told him that or not, but that was my personal take on it. ‘What's he doing up there?’”

Romero said his father’s tienda was one of only two in the area catering to the Latino population 20 years ago. He found a small but growing Latino population with plenty of pent-up demand for a taste of home.

A couple of years after opening, his father added a take-out taqueria counter to the Ocean View tienda, which Romero says was the first in the region. Soon, customers were flocking from Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, Newport News and elsewhere for a taste of home.

Norfolk’s Latino population is heavily concentrated in the city’s northeast along the Little Creek corridor, from JEB Little Creek-Fort Story, into Ocean View and down Little Creek Road.

Romero says Jessy’s core customers were a concentration of Latino folks living on Pretty Lake Avenue, behind the taqueria.

“As time passed, I realized that was the jumping spot. They would arrive there, (it had) low enough rent to where they could save money, and as soon as they got money, they would go out and search for something better,” Romero said.

He said he’d stop seeing the regulars. When they eventually came back, they’d tell him they had moved from the nearby neighborhood, freeing up space for more new arrivals.

“That the incoming traffic has never stopped. It has been growing and growing and growing to the point that now there's probably eight taquerias in the seven cities, maybe more, and many more tiendas.”

In Hampton Roads, the largest concentrations of Hispanic residents are around the region’s military installations. More than 20% of people living in the census tracts that include Naval Station Norfolk, JEB Little Creek-Fort Story and Oceana are identified as Hispanic, per the U.S. Census Bureau.

Affordable housing surrounding the bases provides a hub for new immigrants and their families, a similar jumping-off point to the neighborhood behind Romero’s flagship taqueria.

Early on, Romero said he learned where the Latino populations were concentrated based on where his customers said they were coming from - Chesapeake or Virginia Beach were the big ones, along with the locals from Norfolk.

But, he said, there’s been a tangible shift.

“Right now it feels like all of (the cities) are packed to where if you went and opened a restaurant or a taqueria or a bakery, it would thrive because there are enough people there,” he said. ”It definitely feels a lot more packed than it used to be back 16 years ago.”

Vida en Español

While Romero has marked the Latino community’s growth in tiendas and taquerias, the expansion is also evident in the types of services that have become available in the region.

Lorena Mendoza and Gabriela Revak, both originally from Peru, run Spanish Driving School in Virginia Beach.

The school provides the DMV-required classes to get a driver’s license, in Spanish.

The pair started the business up as Virginia announced in 2020 the state would permit undocumented immigrants to obtain licenses for the first time.

“That was like a light for me. … This is our mission,” Mendoza said. “When you come here as an immigrant and you don't know how to drive, you don't know where to get help, and especially because you have that language barrier.

She said many immigrants arrive without speaking English and they don’t know who to go to for help navigating government bureaucracies. 

Since that went into effect in 2021, Mendoza and Revak said they’ve helped more than 1,000 customers learn how to drive and navigate the process of passing the test and getting a driver’s license.

Mendoza said this need is especially great in sprawling Hampton Roads, where transportation is critical but getting around on public transit is difficult.

Bracknell, the Hispanic Chamber head, said language barriers remain a problem for many Latinos moving into Hampton Roads, particularly in official realms like filing business paperwork. 

“The cities are trying to adapt to those services. So, you know, a big plus to all of them for wanting to take ownership of the changes,” she said.

One important change: The Virginia Department of Health has recruited Spanish-speaking public health workers in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a dearth of public health resources in Spanish helped fuel massive disparities in Covid infection rates between the Latino population and the rest of America.

At the same time, the culture and language are being celebrated in bigger and more public ways than ever.

Earlier this month, an international Spanish-language soccer tournament drew more than 60 teams from all over the Western hemisphere to Virginia Beach.

Edith Moncada runs Ligue Internationale de Futbol in Virginia Beach - known locally as La Liga - with her husband. They’d seen similar tournaments in Houston or Chicago, and took a leap of faith to bring one to their own community.

La Liga’s first International Super Cup was a modest affair last year, with just 16 teams. This year’s 60-team tournament was a blowout that attracted nearly 2,000 spectators.

“It was a soccer fiesta for two days and people were there from open to close.”

For many immigrants who can now only watch teams from their home countries online, Moncada said these kinds of events mean a lot.

“It's exciting because that means everybody's getting together and that they have a special place to go for two days and enjoy the soccer that they love and see their professional player or see the team that they only watch through livestream on Facebook and actually be there face to face, feeling those goosebumps when they get the first goal,” she said. 

“Words don't even describe the feeling that people feel when they travel to come see these types of tournaments.”

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