By 
On a wall in her apartment in New Orleans, Lara has pinned a chart of hair color swatches — blonds, browns, coppers and blacks — alongside her scissors, styling tools and a business card printed with her name. She ran her first salon in Venezuela for five years, then opened another in Bolivia, and later in Chile, learning each time how to build a clientele in a new place and keep a business running on discipline and craft.
“Since I was little, I have loved making people look their best,” Lara said. “It’s fun to change the color of someone’s hair and, in the process, help build their self-esteem.”
When she arrived in New Orleans in September 2024, with her husband and her 11-year-old son, she had every intention of doing it again.
Moving between countries had taught Lara that the financial system is always the first door to open — because everything else comes after it. In the United States, that door is credit. It determines whether you can rent an apartment, qualify for a loan, open a business or buy a home.
So she did what she had done before: she studied. She watched financial educators online and read everything she could about building credit.
What she found was a system with a barrier built in from the start: you need a credit history to access credit, but you can only build that history by using it. It’s a loop that has little to do with effort or knowledge and everything to do with where you begin.
For immigrants arriving without a U.S. financial footprint, that loop can be nearly impossible to break. And for Latinos, who are twice as likely as the average American to have no credit on record at all, being locked out of that system means being locked out of the path to building wealth for their family.
What Lara hadn’t found yet was someone who could show her a way in.
A community without access
Lara’s story is not uncommon. Across the United States, Latino immigrants arrive with education, experience and drive — some holding advanced degrees and professional licenses, others with years of experience running salons, building homes or managing small businesses — only to find that the U.S. system does not recognize what they bring. Their credentials don’t transfer. Their financial history doesn’t count. The tools they need to start over are locked behind requirements they have no way to meet.
Nationwide, Latino entrepreneurs are starting businesses at a growing rate — the number of Latino-owned businesses grew 44% between 2018 and 2023, while the number of White-owned businesses slightly declined — yet only 21% of Latino entrepreneurs report receiving full funding for their ventures, compared with 40% of White entrepreneurs.
In New Orleans, where the Latino population has nearly tripled since 2000, that gap is especially visible — and for a long time, largely unaddressed.
Building a financial path
Lindsey Navarro grew up in Houma, Louisiana, the daughter of Panamanian immigrants, and spent eight years as a bilingual loan officer, traveling across the South to expand micro-lending services to Spanish-speaking communities.
City by city, she saw the same gap: financial education tailored to immigrant entrepreneurs, offered in Spanish, simply did not exist between Birmingham and Houston. She saw people who arrived with years of professional experience working minimum-wage jobs because nothing they had built elsewhere counted here.
“You have doctors, lawyers, nurses – people who are highly educated, former entrepreneurs – working jobs just to make ends meet,” Navarro said. “I don’t want that story to continue.”
She sees the community she serves clearly: people who arrive with professional experience and an entrepreneurial spirit.
In 2018, she launched El Centro in New Orleans to provide financial education and business coaching in Spanish so that Latino immigrants could access the tools needed to build here.
With support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, El Centro has since grown into a full suite of programs — financial and business accelerators, tax preparation, business coaching and a women’s leadership series — all free of charge. The organization has served more than 10,000 people, prepared 1,141 tax returns totaling $1.2 million in refunds, and helped participants raise their credit scores by an average of 20 points within three months.
“I founded El Centro because I wanted to make sure that it was there for those who come behind me,” Navarro said. “My parents had a tough time here. We should always be leaving the world a better place than how we found it.”
She is clear about how she is doing so in the current moment.
“Despite the rhetoric that’s happening nationally, it’s important for the community to know that there are still organizations that are here in solidarity with them — we want to encourage them to continue dreaming,” Navarro said.
Seventy points
Lara had a single credit card and was pregnant when she enrolled in Camino Financiero, El Centro’s financial wellness program.
The four-session program walks participants through the fundamentals of the U.S. credit system: how credit reports work, how scores are built and damaged, how to budget, reduce debt and access capital.
Before the first class begins, El Centro holds an orientation designed to surface and dismantle common misconceptions, including one many immigrants share: that the U.S. system works in the opposite direction from systems they grew up with. In some countries, Navarro explained, people start with a strong score that drops as they borrow. In the United States, people start with nothing and build their way up.
“That’s not how I thought credit worked,” participants often say.
For Lara, one revelation in particular stayed with her: “People with good credit actually pay less, for utilities, for insurance, for nearly everything they need to get ahead.”
El Centro showed her how.
With guidance from a counselor, Lara built a personalized plan: keep her Discover card balance below 30%, save $25 per month through a credit-builder loan, resolve an outstanding balance at T-Mobile before it reached collections, and report her rent and utility payments to credit bureaus.
She put it to work immediately. Managing her household’s fixed expenses — electricity, internet, phone and rent — through a single $500 credit line, she tracked her spending carefully, paid on time and applied what she learned each week.
By the time she completed the program, her credit score had risen 70 points, from 660 to 731.
“I felt so proud,” she said. “I said, I have to take advantage of this — because now I know how to take on good debt.”
Her dream was disrupted
Lara dreamed of opening a salon, but then her family’s circumstances changed suddenly. In December 2025, two months after her daughter was born, her husband – an industrial engineer who had been working as a delivery driver to support his family – was out on a route when immigration authorities took him as part of an enforcement sweep that separated hundreds of families across the region, some of whom, like theirs, had entered through government programs that were later terminated. The car was left on the side of the road.
Overnight, Lara became the sole provider for a newborn and a teenager. And her salon dream — carried across three countries and pinned to a wall in New Orleans — suddenly was on hold.
She moved quickly into problem-solving mode, scrambling to find a lawyer and cover basic expenses. She registered an LLC and launched a courier and delivery business to keep her family stable. It was not the path she had planned. She took it anyway.
Lara is still advocating to bring her husband home so they can raise their children together — and so she can finally open her salon.
In the meantime, she is passing on what she has learned at home. Her son, now 13, knows how a credit score is built and what can damage it. Lara has added him as an authorized user on her accounts so that by the time he turns 18, he will already have a credit history in place.
“In my house, money was a taboo,” she said — something adults kept quiet, and children were not meant to understand. In her home, it is a conversation she starts herself.
“I am clearing a path,” she said, “so that it will be a little easier for them than it has been for us.”
Explore more
- El Centro: https://elcentrola.org/
- “CFPB report finds 26 million consumers are credit invisible,” Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-report-finds-26-million-consumers-are-credit-invisible/
- State of Latino Entrepreneurship 2024, Stanford Graduate School of Business / Latino Business Action Network: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/decade-data-shows-latino-entrepreneurs-growing-adapting
- “Who lives in New Orleans and metro parishes now?,” The Data Center: https://www.datacenterresearch.org/data-resources/who-lives-in-new-orleans-now/
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