My name is Luis A. Santiago, I am a resident of North Tonawanda, and own a business in Buffalo.  My wife of seven years and I have a blended family, including three children from my prior marriage and two from her's.

My dad came here from Puerto Rico in the early 50's to look for a better life and found work in the fields of North Collins and Brant. When he got out he started working for a company that was cutting trees to make poles for the phone company.  He worked in several small towns from here to Schenectady and eventually settled in Utica, New York.  He went back to Puerto Rico, married my mother, had me and eventually brought us back.

I came to Western New York in 1974 to start higher education at the Rosary Hill College in Snyder which is now known as Daemen.  I graduated and found my first job in Buffalo handling insurance claims.  I loved the investigative part of it and after five years began working for a local private investigative outfit where I eventually became a supervisor.  I had always wanted my own business, so in 1979  I started as an Independent Contractor with State Farm.  My first office was in North Tonawanda, where I stayed for 12 years.  The company needed someone bilingual to work downtown, so in 2000 I came, bought a boarded up former convenient store and converted it into an office.  I have always been community minded and have served and still serve on a variety of NFP boards.

I came downtown to offer a service to an underserved population.  Underserved is not an ethnic statement, but more of a socio-economic notation. The things we may take for granted elsewhere are just non-existent here. Add to this the regions economic picture which has been here for so long that it has almost allowed the depression to become a culture. We find that the regular Joe on the street has less of an avenue for escape, much less of a chance to feel the empowerment. He becomes stifled, and if he is a minority youth, he has a higher chance to commit a crime.

Enter into this the small business man.  At times unsophisticated and at times not aware of the big picture or his/her connection to the greater good.  Their only hope may be to survive into the next quarter or the next year, but without knowing it he/she serves as a role model of someone who puts their personal survival in their own hands. This is a beautiful thing.  This is the American dream. Other people notice and then they may feel empowered to have their dreams too.

That dream however needs to be supported and a "Buy Local" campaign is of signal relevance. Larger corporations can afford to do market studies for traffic populations, dollars per capita, crime rates, etc, and if their choice of location does not work, they can afford to pick up and move.  The little guy cannot.  When I was a kid there was a small store on just about every corner offering cheap candy, slices of pizza, Italian pastries, etc.  There were one man pharmacies also. Both of these have been eaten up by the larger corporations.  Now we are seeing the specialty shops; nicer coffee, bistro styled cafes, niche offerings and nice presentations, small hardware stores trying to hang on, micro breweries, small book stores, etc, etc.  Commerce in the trenches, as it were.

But the dream needs to be supported collectively.