Covid-19 has taken a toll on small businesses in the Mexican-American neighborhood, threatening the barrio’s recent renaissance.

With roots in Mexican and street art, murals can be found throughout Barrio Logan, a Mexican-American neighborhood in San Diego.

The comeback for businesses in the predominately Mexican-American neighborhood of Barrio Logan in San Diego is a case study in grit and perseverance facing off against decades of unequal access to capital.

Now the hard-fought survival of the past eight months hangs in the balance again amid surging Covid-19 infections, new business restrictions and the uncertainty of getting government relief anytime soon — if at all. At stake is the fate of a vibrant neighborhood of art galleries, shops and restaurants that was on an upwards trajectory before the pandemic hit.

“This threatens the ecosystem of Latino business we’ve struggled for years to build,” said David Favela, 53, who founded Border X Brewing in 2014 and built the brewery into a business of $1.8 million in annual sales by 2019. “There’s no knowing who will come and buy, and if they’ll preserve the Latino flavor of the neighborhood.”

In the decade before the pandemic, the number of Latino business owners in the U.S. had been rising much faster than the nation’s average, according to research by Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Latino Entrepreneur Initiative, and the unemployment rate for Hispanics had dropped to record lows.