Florida’s immigrant entrepreneurs are creating jobs and prosperity in their communities

For more than four decades, Mary’s Café and Laundry has operated along Miami’s now-central and busy 27th Avenue. The business has remained in the same family across three generations. It traces back to Eumelia Morales Fernández, who immigrated to Miami from the town of Santa Clara, Cuba, in 1970. Like many immigrant women, she first worked as a seamstress. She then got a job in a shoe factory before buying a small supermarket with her husband on 32nd Avenue in Miami in 1988.