Patricia and Jose Cucufate bought their first computer 18 months ago, eager to keep their three children competitive in the classroom and gain them entry into the Information Age. But Patricia soon left her kids in the dust. With computer prices plunging, she purchased a second machine last year and kicked her business into high gear.
Today she receives about 30 online requests a week for shipments of her restaurant's pupusas--Salvadoran corncakes stuffed with cheeses, pork and loroco, a Central American palm blossom. The restaurant's Spanish-language Web site offers a menu and maps directing customers to Los Chorros' two locations in Inglewood and Hawthorne. An online order form will soon let Internet customers buy frozen pupusas with the click of a mouse. Queries have come from Panama and Mexico, as well as from homesick Salvadoran emigres in Washington state.
Cucufate boasts that Los Chorros may be the first Salvadoran eatery in cyberspace. But she is an unknowing trendsetter in other ways--part of a virtual Latino stampede into the online world.
Once separated from the American mainstream by a vast digital divide, Latino households are now purchasing computers at twice the rate of the overall population. They also are connecting to the Internet at record rates. Though only 2% of U.S. Latinos were online in 1994, 15% of Latino households--or an estimated 4.5 million users--were connected in 1998, according to one recent study. The surge moves Latinos closer to the roughly one in four American households online. Other studies reveal an even higher percentage of wired Latinos accessing the Internet through work, school and libraries.
The statistics have dealt a swift blow to the long-held notion of Latinos as low-tech, triggering a rush to cater to the new consumers both in Spanish and in English.
"The explosion has been just mind-blowing," said Arturo Villar, publisher of Hispanic Market Weekly, a New York-based trade publication. "There was a misconception . . . about Internet usage and computer purchasing by Hispanics in the U.S. and by Latin Americans."
A key pioneer of the Latin Internet is StarMedia Network Inc., a New-York based Spanish- and Portuguese-language portal that went public last month and saw its shares nearly double in the first day of trading. Monday the company's market value topped $2.6 billion. The company first gained its footing with customers in Latin America. Competitor Quepasa.com, a Phoenix-based start-up targeting U.S. Latinos, is expected to launch its public offering in the coming weeks after a months-long promotional blitz on Spanish-language radio and television.
