The belief that the sound of Spanish spoken by valley residents is an economic liability originates within the many local nativist/nationalist groups that strenuously push an English only agenda. The ideas bleed into the general population where they are readily stoked by the local media. Because it is in the interest of the Sunnyside city’s department heads to devalue bilingual skills (Maslow’s hammer corollary: when you DON’T have a hammer, you DON’T want anything to look like a nail) thus, the misconceptions that Spanish-language skills are liabilities instead of our community’s greatest strengths become solidified into an opaque reality.

Resource focused methodologies like “asset based community development” can help to puncture such misconceptions. Those who argue that English is this country’s de facto official language are actually inadvertently placing Sunnyside’s Spanish-language skills atop any community asset inventory. It is the Spanish capabilities of Sunnyside residents (the size and proficiency of its bilingual labor pool and market demand for their skills) that differentiates our community and defines our local culture. Citizens with Low English Proficiency are, themselves, a vital community asset, since a reservoir of LEP speakers is a necessary sustenance to a bilingual population; if the number of first generation Americans wither, so will the size of a truly bilingual labor pool.

An asset becomes capital when it is invested, when it is used to build additional assets. Asset mapping can be used to identify community resources with each asset linked to demographic patterns, regional economic clusters, and macro-environment trends to reveal their potential values and help prioritize investments. Examples in the case of our community’s language skill assets:

Latinx Retail Center

A concentration of retail enterprises targeting Sunnyside’s predominantly Hispanic population already exists. If searching for products and services related to ethnic music, food, or celebrations - consumers in Sunnyside can find a rich presence of Hispanic restaurants, food trucks, tequila bars, night clubs, djs, bridal shops, event halls… These types of small business are crucial for communities composed primarily of first and second generation citizens whose only other employment opportunities may be limited to labor markets that discount their home country experience and offer little upward mobility. Ensuring a healthy business environment in which these ethnic enterprises can thrive, unleashes assets that would otherwise be locked within the biases and communication disjunctures of secondary labor markets. In addition, Spanish language fluency provides more than a transactional advantage, it signals an intimate knowledge with the regionally endemic Hispanic culture, providing another competitive advantage for local vendors over large national chains trying to tap into the Hispanic market. This knowledge is what draws customers from much larger but less concentrated Hispanic populations in Yakima and TriCities, as well as those in Seattle, Portland, and Spokane. As such, the city’s Latinx retail sector furnishes the foremost means of converting Sunnyside’s most important community asset into economic value. Any credible redevelopment strategy will focus on strengthening and building upon this sector:

1. use the competitive advantages our local Spanish language entrepreneurs enjoy to reverse Sunnyside’s outward consumer shopping flows,
2. thus building retail mass which reduces the agglomerative cost advantages realized by our larger metro neighbors,
3. thereby making Sunnyside Downtown a more attractive location for broader market retailers.

Bilingual Call/Contact Centers

Important clusters of call centers have grown around the Seattle, Portland, and Boise regions with Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon, Comcast (in addition to BPO service companies like Convergys and Sykes) locating their main customer support facilities in these areas. Yet, invariably their Spanish language call center branches are located in Texas, Florida, or Costa Rica requiring managers to frequently travel between these distant locations. Recent trends to reshore and consolidate call centers show that telecommunication innovations did not kill geography or make distance frictionless; no matter how seamless interoperability between remote sites appears, locating an ancillary call center on the other side of the country or across the globe still incurs significant travel costs just to oversee training and ensure quality control. Given the slew of entry level jobs that one call center provides, this industry has become the object of fierce competition among local economic development organizations looking to lure big-name companies to invest in such facilities that are environmentally clean with relatively small footprints and that offer year-round employment with starting salaries averaging over $30,000. Besides our proximity to existing call centers and corporate headquarters, Sunnyside could easily tout its low cost of living, and abundant availability of cheap land. Unfortunately, Sunnyside’s primary competitive advantage - its large supply of labor with bilingual skills - is the one core competency that city officials refuse to even recognize as an asset.

Multicultural Marketing Creatives

Portland has become home to many international marketing firms including such advertising titans as Wieden+Kennedy, R2C Group, Roundhouse who have been behind famous campaigns for Nike, Budweiser, HBO, Reebock, Old Spice, Red Bull and countless iconic commercials that have become part of contemporary culture. In fact, Portland’s ad agencies generate over $1.1 billion in revenues and support the infrastructure of creatives (artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, performers) for which Portland is famous. These companies recognize that the Spanish-language market represent their clients’ biggest growth opportunity - globally Spanish speaking consumers possess a combined purchasing power of 10% of the world’s GDP and is predicted to reach $1.7 trillion inside the United States by 2020. Moreover, a study by Nielsen showed that 54% of Spanish-language ads had a greater ROI (up to 4 times) than English-language ads. Most notably, the Spanish-language ads that were more effective were those created to reflect Latinx culture rather than just translations of general market English ads. As companies ramp up their Spanish language marketing budgets, Portland’s ad industry remains regrettably unaware that Sunnyside sits silently in their backyard - what could be a cost effective gateway into the Spanish-speaking universe, a valuable multicultural test market, and an untapped pool of talented multicultural creatives.

Language skills, cultural relationships, and similar community resources will always be under-appreciated, under-utilized, often demonized when traditional needs-based approaches to economic development are followed. Starting with a needs assessment puts the focus on problems and overlooks the community’s many strengths. What emerges is a downward spiral that begins with city leaders denigrating their community by emphasizing the severity of problems in order to attract funding or beguile taxpayers. As negative views become internalized, the city naturally turns outside the community for solutions. Thus, as funding comes into the community or is appropriated from thriving businesses, it goes back out to external consultants and service providers who are only able to provide cookie-cutter solutions that mimic big city strategies for which small towns necessarily have diseconomies of scale and operational inefficiencies.

Not only are the community’s core competencies not leveraged to compete with larger cities, efforts become fragmented as celebrations of individual projects take precedence over resolving the larger problems. Any short-term successes cannot be sustained since they will be quickly replicated with overwhelming force by larger communities with significantly more resources available. By defining the community as a long list of deficiencies and failures, you turn it into a perpetual consumer for outside consultants who specialize in preying on smalltown naiveté - all the while starving the local assets that differentiate our community and provide its competitive advantages.

Failing to utilize our community’s language assets has consequences beyond the opportunity costs of allowing valuable resources to remain idle. Bilingual talent will not lie fallow, outside companies willing to pay a premium for language skills are whisking away our young adults. Surveys show bilingual skills result in 5%-20% higher salaries, 88% of executive recruiters consider speaking multiple languages to be an influential skill regardless of position, and 79% of recruiters cited Spanish as the additional language most in demand by employers. So for local youths who speak Spanish and earn a degree, their skillset is not just a golden ticket out of town, it is a one-way rocketship.

This brain drain shows up in Sunnyside’s normalized age distribution that reveals a relative dearth of young adults because of a continuing outflow of residents as they reach 20-25 years old. This only exacerbates generational conflicts, removes residents who comprehend the world through the most contemporary eyes, deprives the community of leaders with local knowledge best able to apply their education to local needs, and forces the city to pay a premium to recruit outside professionals. Therefore, investing in Sunnyside’s Spanish language assets has NOTHING to do with providing alms to the Hispanic population - it is about driving economic development for the entire community (including the English only minority) to make Sunnyside competitive again in a regional and national market place. Removing all languages but English from the public sphere amounts to throttling an important economic engine and depriving the next generation of a resource that is rightfully theirs.