The American dream ... on wheels

BY: Denise Clay

Even if you walk away from the pink truck that houses Denise’s Caribbean Soul Food, you can’t get away from the smell.

Take Denise Severe. She started selling platters of her trademark dishes – including fried fish, oxtails, jerk chicken and collard greens – from her Philadelphia home when she first arrived here from Haiti. The food was such a hit with those who came to her home for weekly dinners that she decided to take the show on the road.

“I bought my first food truck in 1996,” she said. “I have two now.”

She’s not alone. At a time when Americans are willing to try any type of food at least once, immigrants looking for a way to make their mark in their new home are taking a variety of foods – including sushi, lo mien, curried chicken and quesadillas – to the streets to satisfy that need.

Some, like Dien Vinh, owner of Tommy’s Food Truck on Temple University’s main campus, are even adding their spin to American food to try and get consumers to see it in a different way. Vinh, a native of Vietnam, decided to take a chance on feeding the university’s students through the help of a friend.

“A friend of mine sold me this truck,” he said. “It had been here for a long time and we do well here, especially at breakfast.”

People like Severe and Vinh are part of a growing trend, according to Future of Small Business, a report released by Intuit Inc. and the Institute of the Future. Immigrants make up the fastest growing segment of small business owners, according to the report, and immigrants will make up a sizable portion of the small business base by 2017.

According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, small business startup rates are higher among the 36 million immigrants in the United States than they are among the native-born. Immigrant women like Severe are 57 percent more likely to start a business than native-women, and immigrant men, like Vinh, are 71 percent more likely to do so, said Robert Fairlie, an economist who produces the Kauffman Index.

Part of that willingness to take a chance on creating a business on the part of the immigrant community comes from the barriers that meet them when searching for a job. Language, skill sets, and other things sometimes cause immigrants to forge their own path, according to the report.

But once these immigrants figure things out and start a business like a food truck, it not only helps the immigrants’ community, but it also helps the nation’s economy, said Steven King of the Institute for the Future.

“Because immigrants can easily navigate “soft trade barriers” – culture, language, unusual rules or ways of doing things overseas – they increase trade and foreign investment in the United States,” he said.


Denise can be reached at nuttyprofessor64@gmail.com