This Wednesday, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Metro St. Louis will host a lunch event—the first of six lunches planned for this year aimed at helping St. Louis businesses “effectively engage the Hispanic market as potential customers, employees, and suppliers.” The bimonthly schedule is a big escalation from last year’s two lunches, total. And it’s just one sign of the 43-year-old business group’s growing ambitions.
Marketing and development manager Maria Rosario says the chamber now has 500 members—and is flexing its newfound muscle, as the Latino community has been one of the few groups in St. Louis to grow in recent years. While still a comparatively small population within the metro, the community saw a 14 percent jump from 2022 to 2023, Census data shows, and now numbers 110,391 strong.
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Cherokee Street has long been a hub for Latino-owned restaurants, but the community has seen real growth in the suburbs as well. Of the region’s three core counties, St. Louis County actually boasts the largest Hispanic population. Says Rosario, “We’re kind of everywhere.”
The chamber wants to help local businesses tap into that growing market, but it also wants to help entrepreneurs within the community flourish. Its Hispanic Business Success program, which launched last year with 11 companies, aims to take businesses that have at least $20,000 in revenue and help guide them to $1 million. Applications for its second cohort close Thursday.
Entrepreneurs in the program can access workshops, as well as one-on-one consulting in areas such as human resources, marketing, and bookkeeping—all bilingual. Says Rosario, “That Spanish portion of it has been a game changer for a lot of them, because they’ve been part of other programs, and they’ve been able to go to them, graduate from them, or being able to talk with someone in your language who understands those cultural nuances that are related to business world has been really helpful for them.”
While the first cohort is still underway, Rosario says it’s seeing results. She mentions a woman who owns a cleaning company: “Thanks to the support we provided her, she was able to lock in her first commercial client.”
Why It Matters: The Trump administration’s focus on immigration enforcement has caused anxiety within the community. More than 40 local Latino-owned businesses closed for a week from Feb. 11–18 to protest deportation policies. But Rosario remains hopeful. “Changes and shifts in politics have had certain people kind of scared and on pause,” she acknowledges. “But we are still receiving support, and people still are coming up to us, saying, ‘Hey, we want to continue working with the chamber, with your community.’”
What’s Next: This year’s lunch series theme is Unlocking Opportunities: Engaging the Hispanic Market. Rosario stresses that you don’t have to be a member to attend: “We especially want to see people outside of the Hispanic community, so they can understand, ‘Hey, the Hispanic market is one you want to work with.’”
