La Curacao Cashes In

“After Teresa Rodriguez arrived in Los Angeles from El Salvador in 1984, she started shopping regularly at the La Curacao department store a few blocks from her apartment. With no credit history and her only identification documents issued by her home country, Rodriguez applied for and received a credit card with La Curacao two years later.

Eventually, Rodriguez began working as a nurse’s aide, and she and her husband used the card to buy kitchen appliances, televisions and furniture from La Curacao for their family, which now includes three children. She made timely payments and established a credit history good enough to obtain JCPenney and Sears credit cards and financing for a new car ”” all within five years of arriving in the United States ”” and went on to get a Visa and Mastercard and buy a house in 1998. She even used La Curacao’s export services to send a refrigerator and television to her mother in El Salvador.”

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