Southwest Detroit sits at the center of the largest wave of development it has seen in a generation, and at its annual Community Investment Breakfast on June 26, the Southwest Detroit Business Association asked a room of funders, business owners and civic leaders to make sure the neighborhood rises along with that development.
The breakfast was held at The Corner Ballpark, the Detroit PAL field on the old Tiger Stadium site at Michigan and Trumbull, and hosted by WDIV Local 4 morning anchor Jason Colthorp. Supporters gathered under the theme “New Beginnings: Rooted in Community, Rising in Opportunity.” The event doubles as a fundraiser for the association, which has served Southwest Detroit for nearly seven decades.
SDBA Board Chair Luis Ali opened the program. A graduate of Western International High School and contractor by trade, he was elected to lead the association’s board in 2025. He framed the morning as an invitation to invest in the neighborhood’s commercial corridors and its youth and cultural programming at a moment when the stakes are high.
Ali pointed to the new banners going up along Bagley and West Vernor as one sign of momentum, part of a corridor identity meant to support small businesses. But momentum alone is not enough, Ali said. “We need to make sure that as the tide rises, Southwest Detroit rises too.”
The association runs programs across the neighborhood economy, from a Small Business Advocacy Center that helps owners find grants and technical assistance to Mexicantown Main Street and COMPÁS, its dance and cultural arts ensemble.
Mark Moreno, executive director of the Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, connected the morning to his chamber’s nearly four decades of work for Hispanic-owned businesses across the state. Opportunity follows relationships, he said, and he urged the room to back SDBA’s next chapter through an introduction, an open door, shared expertise, or a contribution.
The breakfast honored three recipients for their investment in the neighborhood. Frank Venegas Jr. and Sylvia Gucken of Ideal Group received the Community Investment Award. See the profile of Frank Venegas, Jr. elsewhere in this issue of EL CENTRAL.
Rodrigo Padilla of El Nacimiento Mexican Restaurant received the Real Estate/Business Investment Award on the restaurant’s 25th anniversary, which fell on the same day as the breakfast. Padilla and his family landed in Southwest from California and grew the restaurant into a set of property investments across the neighborhood, with early help from SDBA facade and signage grants.
Maria Salinas, founding executive director of Congress of Communities, received the Southwest Champion Award for decades of advocacy in the neighborhood where she was born and chose to stay.
A panel moderated by Stephanie Peña of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation turned to the future of Mexicantown and the Main Street program. Peña noted that the Bagley-West Vernor corridor earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places this past year. She asked Ozzie Rivera, a Wayne State University lecturer and longtime cultural activist, what the designation meant.
Rivera used the moment to correct a record he said too often goes untold. Mexican Americans have lived and run businesses in the area for well over a century, he said, in a continuous strip that once ran from where the Lodge Freeway now stands east to today’s Mexicantown restaurants. The Lodge and Jeffries freeways later cut through that fabric in the mid-twentieth century and wiped out the original Chinatown along with the eastern end of Mexicantown.
What set Southwest apart, Rivera said, was that unlike Chinatown or Black Bottom, the neighborhood held on and kept growing. In the early 1990s, when residents and businesses were leaving nearly every Detroit neighborhood, Southwest was the only one that gained population, a story he said is rarely told.
Michelle Parkkonen, who oversees Michigan Main Street for the state, said Mexicantown should be a model for the rest of Michigan. The state spends a lot of energy worrying about talent leaving, she said, when Southwest offers a working example of sustained home ownership, business ownership and a community people want to join. The National Main Street conference returns to Detroit next spring for the first time since 2014.
In his closing remarks, Ali came back to the stakes he had laid out at the start. The goal, he said, is the kind of investment and partnership that lets Southwest help lead Detroit’s growth rather than simply be included in it. “When businesses, residents, nonprofits, government and community partners come together for a common purpose,” he said, “there is no limit to what we can accomplish.”
