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The Rubio’s Baja Grill saga is well-documented. As a surf bum who often ventured south of the border to San Felipe, Rubio acquired a passion for a type of fish taco sold by a local vendor named Carlos. Rubio thought the tasty meals would be a hit in San Diego. One day he asked for the recipe, and Carlos simply gave it to him without thought of collecting one centavo, let alone future stock options.

Rubio scrawled the recipe on the torn cover of a tiny old address book—a cover that’s now framed just outside his third-floor corner office. What began as a single restaurant on Mission Bay Drive in 1983 has expanded into a publicly traded empire with 125 restaurants from California to Colorado.

“I was going to be a businessman,” says Rubio, swatting a golf ball back and forth across his desk. “That was my destiny. All along I was looking for the Big Idea.”

What is less well-known are the tales from the lean years—not counting a recent fourth-quarter stock slump—when Rubio, then 27, moved back into his parents’ house off Mount Soledad Road in Pacific Beach to operate the administration end of his fledgling enterprise. He talks about hard work, of years waiting tables and building on relationships forged while at San Diego State University. Yet surprisingly little in this Hispanic Horatio Alger parallel indicates Rubio faced the type of ongoing discrimination many of his fellow Mexican-Americans in San Diego report—incidents where race and ethnicity play a role in denial of access to education, capital and, in short, opportunity.

“Gosh, I never experienced any of that,” he says, sounding a little like a character from Mayberry RFD—the quintessential Caucasian television show of the ’60s. About the only brush with racism Rubio concedes were a few occasions as a kid, when some of his classmates would call him “taco vendor.”

“I didn’t realize at the time how prophetic that was,” he says with a wry smile.

Rubio credits his insulation from the chilling effects of discrimination to the fact that his father—who moved to San Diego from Mexico City at 17 and went on to create mini-economic empires of his own, in the fields of building materials and fish delivery—stressed the need to assimilate into mainstream (white) America. He adds his dad’s drumbeat on the value of a college education. “As long as you have access to a good education,” says Rubio, “for the most part, you can do just about anything you want.”

Indeed, a survey commissioned by San Diego Magazine and conducted by Viewpoint America shows that minorities of all stripes believe lack of quality education is one of the primary obstacles to economic advancement. The survey, a cornerstone of the magazine’s three-part exploration of local race issues, weaves a tapestry of San Diego where language barriers, cultural ignorance and lack of access to education and start-up cash still lock many into low-paying, unfulfilling jobs.

To be sure, interviews with dozens of ethnic business representatives indicate that economic times have improved for the area’s burgeoning minorities. Disparate threads in the local economic fabric reveal San Diego is an area of possibilities, a place where the American Dream lives for many cultures and creeds. From massive urban renewal efforts by the Southeastern Economic Development Corporation to entrepreneur training from the Union of Pan Asian Communities, ethnic minorities have more avenues than ever to better themselves. Yet sadly, Ralph Rubio’s success—and more important, his sense of immunity from economic discrimination—is an exception rather than a rule for many local immigrants and minorities.

More than two-thirds of Latinos polled here believe they suffer “a lot or some” economic discrimination, while 90 percent of local African-Americans say they feel the brunt of economic prejudice. One might be tempted to conclude this will change for the better in the coming decades: If current trends hold, minority groups, mostly Latinos, collectively will eclipse whites as a majority in San Diego County by 2018.

But this numeric superiority will not translate to greater economic and political clout, at least for Latinos, maintains Robert Villareal, executive director of the San Diego County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Economic prowess is linked directly to education, he says. And when it comes to the Latino community, there’s a disturbing lack of emphasis on education as a pathway for financial emancipation. One sign that Latinos disproportionately put education—therefore their futures—on the back burner: Of the 1,460 girls ages 15 to 17 who gave birth in San Diego County in 1999, at least 970 (66 percent) were Latino.

“The Hispanic community needs to come quite a way in terms of educating itself in the academic sense,” Villareal says. “We need to have a greater rate of high school and college graduates, and have these graduates educate themselves in terms of the political process.”

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