La chamba nunca para. Roughly translated, this means the hard work never stops.
I learned this when I fell in love with the child of Mexican immigrants — my querido, my cherished one. But this isn’t a love story. It’s a story about hard work.
Even as children, my querido and his older sister spent all their free time in their parents’ restaurant. In their words, the two of them slept on literal bags of beans in the restaurant’s storeroom after school. My querido was helping his parents in the restaurant when we first met. He was a boy of just nine at the time, all shining brown eyes and a smile like an open secret. I was equally enchanted and embarrassed when he trotted over to my family’s table and delivered a basket of fresh chips and salsa.
His parents were settling into a new country, learning English, and raising two kids who straddled cultural lines in a dance they couldn’t always follow. Despite all this, his parents were energized by the prospect of building a welcoming space for their community. The food at the restaurant was flavorful and hot. The staff remembered customers’ names. The background music was full of plucky guitars and declarations of love in a language most of the clientele did not know. It was a place for birthday parties, first dates, celebrations of life, and everything in between. Regulars felt like family; tourists wrote glowing reviews. The restaurant hosted many fundraisers for the local schools, sports teams, and faith-based groups. I learned later that those events were seldom profitable; in fact, sometimes they resulted in losses for the restaurant, but you’d never know it by the way my querido’s family consistently spoiled the Little League Teams and doted on the wrinkled church ladies.
As my querido grew into a teenager, he began working officially at the restaurant alongside his older family members. Many Friday and Saturday nights, he worked at the restaurant instead of going out with friends. He grumbled about this at first but later, looked back on it fondly for teaching him the real value of hard work and family. When my querido and I started dating our senior year of high school, I’d go over to the restaurant in the evenings. I’d sit at a table by the window and watch him and his family welcome people at the front door, wait and bus tables, carry steaming plates of food, and ring up customers’ bills. They were all smiles, despite the occasional unpleasant customer or spilled drink. I joke now that some of my favorite dates involved me sitting in the restaurant, eating a free serving of his dad’s famous fried ice cream, and admiring my querido as he charmed the clientele while wearing his little black apron with a pocket full of straws.
Even as a teenager, he understood entrepreneurialism. He knew the hard work that went into running a small business, often demanding long hours and additional jobs on the side to make ends meet. He knew about lease hikes, supply chain hiccups, and hiring challenges. He knew the bravery and the heart required to look at an empty space and dream up something to fill it. When his family’s restaurant finally closed during his college years, it was bittersweet. The entire venture had been a double-edged sword for his family: it gave them so much, and it also demanded so much from them.
When my querido, years later, decided to start his own entrepreneurial venture, I was surprised. But I shouldn’t have been. In 2025, Latinos had the highest rate of new entrepreneurship among racial and ethnic groups, and immigrants were about twice as likely as native-born Americans to start a business.
Like so many other entrepreneurs, my querido’s family dreamed big, took chances, and worked hard. They brought our small, rural community the colorful flavors and warmth of a country they had left behind so they could build a better financial future for their children. In the process, they made our community better, and they made me better. It was an honor to watch them build and sustain a small business with nothing but imagination and will power.
And now, when times get tough at work or in life, my querido turns those shining brown eyes in my direction and reminds me of the restaurant, the strength of community, the taste of the fried ice cream, and the fact that la chamba nunca para.
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Source for stats as a link: Kauffman Foundation, May 2026
And as a full citation (Chicago): Fairlie, Robert. National Report on Early-Stage Entrepreneurship in the United States: 2025. Kauffman Indicators of Entrepreneurship. Kansas City, MO: Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 2026.
Elizabeth (Liz) Layman is the Director, Health-Wealth Innovations at National Disability Institute. She has subject matter expertise at the intersection of health, financial empowerment and accessible technology. For more than a decade, she has developed curricula for FDIC’s Money Smart and CFPB’s Your Money, Your Goals; managed user experience research for tech giants; and collaborated with community development organizations like Prosperity Now and Financial Health Network. Most recently, Liz led a national study on the impact of autonomous vehicles on employment and entrepreneurship for people with disabilities. Liz earned her bachelor’s in English and Disability Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her master’s in Public Health at the George Washington University.
