Jennifer Rivera started cooking when she was just nine years old. While growing up in Puerto Rico, she and her cousins flocked to her grandmother’s house after school each day for a meal. There, she fell in love with her grandmother’s recipes.

Rivera, 39, came to Western Massachusetts in 1997 when she was 11 years old. Growing up in poverty, she was no stranger to struggle. Like many people of color who have historically been pushed into self-employment, her mother sold perfumes to support her family. She recalled taking trips to New York as a teenager to sell lip glosses, purses, sneakers, and clothes with her mother. As she got older, she began selling fruit arrangements instead.

“The low-income family always has to have a hobby or something that can bring in extra money on the side,” Rivera said.

When she was 18, she gave birth to her first daughter. As a young, single parent, she did not have the means to go to college. For over a decade, she worked overnight shifts as a certified nursing assistant to support her daughter. Then, she landed a job at the Springfield Police Department as a domestic violence advocate making $40,000 a year.

But Rivera’s love for Caribbean cuisine never dwindled, and in 2016, she began catering on the side to make extra money.

“As a young adult I did a lot of cooking for people, but I never thought of myself as a business owner,” she said.

Slowly, she developed a name for herself, and in 2022, she established her LLC. By 2024, she had given birth to her second daughter and quit her job at the police department. While taking care of her disabled father in Holyoke — where 27 percent of residents live below the poverty line, which is 17 points higher than the statewide average — she found a downtown storefront that was up for rent.

With a $60,000 loan from Common Capital — a small community development financial institution in Western Massachusetts that lends to low and moderate-income entrepreneurs like Rivera — she opened Jenni’s Kitchen on Maple Street in March 2025. She often jokes that she gave up a nine to five to instead work 24/7.

“Opening up the business was kind of like a guarantee that I was going to be able to have a future where I can live comfortably and do something for my kids,” Rivera said. “I don’t go to sleep overthinking if I can afford something.”

She made $130,000 from the bistro in the first year. Now, she is a soon-to-be homeowner and has been able to pay for her 21-year-old daughter’s college education — an opportunity she herself didn’t have.

“I want a legacy for my family,” Rivera said. “I am a first-generation homeowner, first-generation business owner, and my daughter is a first-generation college student.”

Gateway Cities — regional urban centers that suffered from the decline of manufacturing in the decades since World War II — are where many families, immigrants, and minorities like Rivera begin their climb to the middle class. Yet high levels of concentrated poverty in these post-industrial era cities — home to 40 percent of the state’s foreign-born residents — often serve as obstacles to a middle-class lifestyle.

“Those entry-level, traditional manufacturing jobs went away, college started to become less affordable, and a lot of these bigger businesses left the area — so what opportunity is there for people in the middle class? It’s starting their own business,” said Aaron Vega, president of the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council.

For years, small business ownership has served as a gateway to the middle class, particularly for residents in Gateway Cities like Holyoke where economic mobility is otherwise limited and educational attainment is low. These groups shoulder the accompanying risks and heavy demands of entrepreneurship, often because poverty and discrimination have left them with fewer career alternatives.

“Entrepreneurship is frequently a chosen path for women and BIPOC residents to build economic security and professional growth outside of traditional systems that may have become inaccessible or unaffordable,” said Samantha Carr, program manager at the Center for Women and Enterprise.

Small businesses create jobs, keep money circulating locally, and support inclusive economic development, making them a key driver of middle-class growth. Reviving the blighted downtowns and main streets that were once the booming hearts of Massachusetts’s industrial cities also hinges on small business growth.

But since the pandemic, experts and advocates have warned that Massachusetts’s small businesses are struggling to survive as rising costs, insufficient access to capital and affordable loans, and other challenges have hindered growth.

While entrepreneurship can be a path to building generational wealth, it is, for some, simply becoming a way to make ends meet.

“We open up businesses out of need. It’s not like we wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to quit my job to make wigs, or sew clothes, or make cookies,’” said Sheila Coon, a Puerto Rican business owner and mother of seven who opened Hot Oven Cookies in Holyoke in 2016. “We do it because we have to feed our kids, and we do it because we have to survive.”