In January 2001 a meeting was held in a small savings and loan in Little Village that would change the way U.S. banks dealt with undocumented immigrants who wanted to send money home to their families. Being in the country without papers, the immigrants had no social security numbers and therefore couldn’t open bank accounts. So they usually relied on money orders and wire services–which cost $20 or more for every $300 sent home.
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Second Federal, with its five branches, is a rare example of a community bank that ignored all the feverish consolidation going on around it and refused to merge with a large, faceless chain or expand into the suburbs. Instead it remained independent and stuck with its neighborhood, even as the neighborhood was changing.
In the 70s the local chamber of commerce named the area Little Village in a desperate attempt to create a small town atmosphere. But the area was already a ghost town. Businesses had been boarded up. Fires had gutted many homes, and others were poorly maintained. Then large numbers of Mexicans started moving in, and by the late 70s Little Village was becoming La Villita.
After the branch opened, all Second Federal locations began flying the Mexican flag, which enraged many white residents of Cicero. Town president Betty Loren-Maltese and the town’s trustees wrote Doyle demanding that the flag be removed. One man called the bank and said he’d shoot the first person who walked into the branch if the flag wasn’t taken down. (The FBI investigated the threat, though it never caught the guy.) “A lot of people say we did it for business,” says Doyle. “That’s not a bad reason, but we do it out of respect for the community.” The Mexican flag still flies over the Cicero branch. And on Mexican Independence Day it now flies even at Cicero’s city hall.
To win the unbanked as customers, banks are having to change the way they do business. They can’t hope that the unbanked will come to them. They can’t rely on signs in the window in Spanish or Chinese or on ads in ethnic papers. They’re having to make personal contact through outreach programs and services, such as hiring more bilingual tellers who can help customers fill out deposit slips.
Doyle, who is soon to be married to a Mexican woman, makes frequent trips to Mexico and attends Mexican rodeos in Joliet and Kankakee. He talks about finding a way to open a Second Federal branch in Guadalajara. “I’d certainly never want to work in a Michigan Avenue Loop location,” he says. “Here it’s almost like going on vacation. You come down 26th Street, it’s almost like going to Mexico City. On a day like this–when it’s hot and muggy, and the buses are coming up and down, and you hear La Ley radio station, mariachi banda, music on the street, and people selling paletas–it’s a very festive environment. The whole summer is like that.”
