n increasing numbers, Hispanic immigrants are putting down roots in the Roanoke Valley. They're pouring concrete, opening hair salons and filling classrooms. Some employers, meanwhile, are attributing their success to this new labor pool. In this occasional series, The Roanoke Times explores the local impact of the national debate about immigration.
During a busy Friday night dinner waiter Jesus Malaga serves an armload of food to their Anglo customers. Malaga came to America four years ago from Mexico and, like many Mexican immigrants in Roanoke, first landed a job at El Rodeo.
'What was he thinking?'
Arellano, 64, is now a wealthy man. He has a second home in Mexico, 350 employees, and owns or has part-ownership of about 30 restaurants in five states.
“I’ve never actually counted them up,” he said recently, in Spanish.
Though he understands English and speaks a little, he still prefers for his sons to translate when he talks to Anglos.
Gallery 
Employees at the El Rodeo on Brambleton Avenue wait for the orders to come from the kitchen. They will soon move to the new restaurant under construction across from Cave Spring Corners. The restaurant will be Jesus Arellano's largest to date, seating 300 people.
His youngest daughter, Cristina , just graduated from the University of Virginia, and a 13-year-old grandson in Pennsylvania is already showing symptoms of the entrepreneurial gene, having purchased a share in one of the family restaurants there. (Seven of his nine children work in the business.)
One windy June morning, Arellano stood on the under-construction terrace of his soon-to-open El Rodeo across from Cave Spring Corners. His largest restaurant to date, it will seat 300.
With an oversized checkbook bulging from his shirt pocket, he bustled around inspecting the crew’s work and periodically stopping to help describe the family’s ascent from a dirt-floor, bathroom less adobe in central Mexico.
Jesus Arellano had known hunger. As a child, he was able to attend school only once — for three weeks — at age 10.
Gallery Antonio Lopez (at right in photo), shown with his son Miguel in 1988, and Jesus Arellano opened the first El Rodeo in an old Ray’s Kingburger building on Williamson Road. The Arellanos and Lopezes parted ways in 1990, with each going on to open subsequent El Rodeos and El Toreos in the Roanoke Valley and beyond.
He first migrated to the United States to pick tomatoes on a temporary work permit in 1961, traveling back and forth between his home village, San Jose de la Paz, and Asuza, Calif., for several years.
The family moved to California to stay when Agustin was 6. “When we were little our father worked three jobs at once,” Agustin Arellano said. “We were lucky to see him for a few minutes on Sundays.”
A family friend had opened a Mexican restaurant in sprawling Atlanta in the mid-’80s and encouraged him to try the business. Jesus Arellano drove all over the Southeast looking at cities and was lured in by the Mill Mountain Star, he says — and a dearth of competition.
Daughter Ana Rosa Arellano, No. 7 in the lineup and now a social worker/translator working with Hispanic families in Roanoke, said it only occurred to her recently:
“He was 40 when he came here. What was he thinking, leaving a wife and nine kids behind — to open a restaurant on the other side of the country?”
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