By Yuki Noguchi Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page F01
Elmer Arias whizzes through 5,000 minutes a month on his cell phone, racking up at least $200 in charges, which include the cost of daily phone calls to his native El Salvador.
"As a business owner and as president of the Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce, I call [El Salvador] maybe two times a day for 15 or 20 minutes each," says Arias, who owns La Hacienda Restaurant in Springfield. That doesn't include, of course, regular calls to friends and relatives, as well as his wife's calls to her family in Mexico.
Arias's cell phone rings and he pauses to answer it. "I get so many calls, you know," he says in lightly accented English.
On the other side of the Beltway, in Beltsville, it's almost a sure bet Charlie Rizzo's Nextel phone is either ringing or beeping.
"Hello? Hello? Helloooo . . ." he calls out through static on the other end, before giving up and closing the flip phone.
"This is probably from Ecuador or Nicaragua or something, because it says 'incoming call,' " he says, almost to himself, surmising that one of his vendors was trying to get in touch. The phone rings again, and Rizzo launches into a mix of Spanish and English.
Rizzo, a native of Ecuador and vice president of international food-distribution company Rio Grande Foods Inc., says he, like his employees, makes or receives a call every couple of minutes. Supplying the company's 45 employees costs, in an average month, about $2,000 for cell phone charges, $500 for domestic long distance and another $2,000 for international calling. That's a large chunk of the business costs for Rio Grande Foods, which imports jalapenos, pupusas and other Latin American goodies for U.S. grocers.
At home, Rizzo's monthly international bill comes to between $300 and $400 a month, because he calls family and friends in Ecuador at least three times a week.
"In Central America, mostly countries are still just getting up with e-mails and stuff," so the best way to reach out is still the old way -- by dialing, he says. Even after 18 years of living in the United States, he feels the pull of his roots, he says, echoing a sentiment often repeated by Latino expatriates and business people marketing to them. "We have the need to call."
Heavy reliance on phone service of all stripes -- basic local service through land lines, long-distance calling and cellular minutes -- is common among Hispanics like Arias and Rizzo, who say that strong linkage to families and business contacts back home have them getting on the horn constantly. The statistics bear that out: As a demographic group, Hispanics spend more of their monthly budgets on telecommunications -- 10 percent more than average on cell phones and $6 more on monthly long-distance phone service, according to Scarborough Research -- mostly, the experts say, to stay in touch with their far-flung families. Whether it's local calls to friends on the same block or international calls to those thousands of miles away, calling is a big business in the Latin American community.
