DALTON — Dim lights flicked on overhead, revealing hundreds of door frames, packed sideways against one another like books on a shelf. In this frigid warehouse on the outskirts of town, Magdaleno Perez Alvarez snaked through the rows and the shadows, pointing out different kinds of doors — new doors, broken doors — alongside window frames and flooring materials and then, once he’d stepped outside into the whipping wind, an impressive collection of heavy machinery.
Was this all his too, a visitor asked.
“Todo lo que está aquí es mío,” he replied: Everything that is here is mine.
Recently sold to him, he said, as a way to help settle a debt, this nondescript warehouse across from a massive junkyard is the site of Alvarez’s latest endeavor in this North Georgia town, which has been transformed in recent decades by thousands of entrepreneurial immigrants like himself.