Ethnic Enterprise Informality and Entrepreneurship in a Minority- Majority Region in the United States: Latinos in South Texas Michael J. Pisani Abstract By choice and necessity, Latinos engaged in informal entrepreneurship abound in the “minority-majority” region of South Texas. By choice, some South Texans work “off the books” in order to supplement incomes, support families, and improve lifestyles through self-employment. By necessity, many self-employed South Texans scrape together informal work in order to survive. South Texas is an impoverished region populated primarily by Latinos (90%), many of whom are recent immigrants, both documented and undocumented. This chapter explores Latino informal entrepreneurship in the region with a focus on the rationale for business start-up and enterprise persistence. Additional emphases on the changing border context in the “Age of Trump” including public policy implications are discussed. Keywords Latinos · Ethnic entrepreneurship · South Texas · Minority-majority region · Business start-up & innovation 1 Introduction Easter is a traditional holiday widely celebrated in Latino communities across South Texas. As part of the festivities, cascarones, or colorful confetti-filled hollowed-out chicken eggs, are thrown to the ground or smashed over another’s head by children and adults alike. By the dozens, paper-filled cascarones are purchased to meet their demise in family celebrations of Easter. Cascarones are often bought “off the books” and on the street side; half the consumers in South Texas have done so (Pisani 2013a). Ubiquitously, cascarones are made and stored all year long by informal entrepreneurs, often using family labor to dye and fill eggs, who seek to make a little extra money during the Lenten season. This is but one example of an ethnic product M. J. Pisani (*) Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI, USA e-mail: m.pisani@cmich.edu © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 V. Ramadani et al. (eds.), Informal Ethnic Entrepreneurship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99064-4_10 149