CHOCOLATE AND PERSEVERANCE

ANDREA PEDRAZA came to the United States as a young undocumented worker in the early ’70s.

She became a union seamstress, sewing dresses for Neiman Marcus and Oscar de la Renta, when clothes were still manufactured in the U.S.

When the Reagan administration granted amnesty to about 3.2 million undocumented workers in 1986, Pedraza and her husband were among them.

Now she is a small-business owner operating CocoAndré chocolate shop in a building she and her family own on West Seventh at Adams.

Recently, she and her daughter, Cindy Pedraza Puente, were guests at the White House as part of a conference on Latinas and education.

Pedraza learned the chocolate trade in 25 years as production manager at Morgen Chocolates, the first

European-style chocolatier in Dallas.

After the economic crash of 2009, she was 52, out of work and under-skilled. Her daughter, Cindy, had just been laid off from a bank. So they decided to start their own business.

“We weren’t foodies,” Puente says. “We didn’t know anything about the culinary world.”

They found a small space on West Davis at Tyler, where the rent was cheap in 2009, and their landlord didn’t start charging them until they’d opened their doors. Pedraza’s husband, Rey, and her brother Martin fixed the place up in seven weeks, and they opened with one small table of perfect chocolates a few weeks before Christmas.

“Every year, the business kept building, but we knew the rent was going to increase,” Pedraza says.

So two years ago, they bought their building on Seventh. It took a year to renovate that building and obtain city permits to open.

Pedraza spent 12-hour days working with city code enforcement, making chocolates and overseeing construction.

“I didn’t stop and feel sorry for myself,” she says. “I just said, ‘What is the next step?’ ”

Once the building was ready to go, however, the Pedrazas lacked operating capital. So they applied for and received a low-interest loan from the Tori Burch Foundation.

“This isn’t just about us. I represent so many other women who work so hard to achieve their dreams,” Pedraza says.