Woodside Immigrant Owns Salon, Helps Others
NEW YORK (WOMENSENEWS)–Woodside, Queens.
Carmen Ledesma employs nine women in her Parisien Beauty Salon, a business she started 16 years ago on Roosevelt Avenue after moving to the United States from Paraguay.
For a mother of three with limited English skills, it turned out to be a good way to make an income, something the New York mayor’s office noted in early October at a press conference about the city’s efforts to support immigrant-owned businesses in New York, which hosts an estimated 130,000 Latino-owned businesses.
At the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, city officials asked Ledesma to precede Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the press conference’s speaker lineup to describe how she expanded her business, going from an employee at one salon to starting her own small salon. She has since added a spa and opened a cosmology school, a storefront with large glass windows in a multistory building, which she created with help from a government-supported small business initiative.
“Since I opened the door to my salon, many immigrant women have seen that they can open their own business,” said Ledesma. “I have achieved one of my dreams, and sent three children to college.”
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