His rags-to-riches immigrant journey and good business sense crowned Juvenal Chavez the king of Latino supermarkets in the Bay Area, but now the CEO is fighting a harsh attack on the reputation of his 21-store Mi Pueblo Foods grocery chain.
Mi Pueblo stunned some of its more than 3,000 employees last month when it told them it had joined E-Verify, a Department of Homeland Security program that screens the immigration status of new hires.
Now, with union activists accusing Chavez of betraying his own undocumented immigrant roots and threatening a consumer boycott if he doesn't pull out of E-Verify by October, the entrepreneur is fighting back in a war of words against the union and political opposition.
A protest outside the chain's San Jose headquarters on Thursday was "part of an ongoing campaign against Mi Pueblo (to) damage our good name," said spokeswoman Perla Rodriguez, who accused labor unions of an underhanded campaign to distort the company's record of advocacy for the Bay Area's Latino community.
Lauded by city leaders around the Bay Area for buying up vacant or rundown big-box supermarkets and transforming them into colorful, festive Latin American food markets, Chavez is now confronting one of his biggest public-relations challenges since he founded the company in 1991 on San Jose's Eastside.
Among Mi Pueblo's most prominent critics is Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese, who said in December that armed security guards escorted him from a San Jose store when he paid a visit after hearing complaints about work conditions. The company had said the visit by Cortese, a likely 2014 candidate for mayor of San Jose, was a union-organized "media stunt."
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