At Las Adelitas Café, it’s clear the owners took notice of every detail.
The colorful accents, ceramic mugs, murals honoring the process of coffee making.
The new downtown coffee shop, at First and Market, is owned by Flor and Oscar Pineda, who also own Esperanza Coffee Roasters.
With the new space, they’re able to bring their coffee to a retail store and infuse it with flavors from Mexico, such as horchata and mazapan.
“I want to embrace our culture,” Flor Pineda said. “I want people to see that we’re unique. We’re different from other coffee shops as well.”
Flor Pineda was born in Mexico but has been in the United States for more than 30 years.
She said Las Adelitas is named after the women who fought with their husbands during the Mexican Revolution in the 1900s. They also took care of the wounded and fed the armies.
Flor Pineda said that inspired her to empower her four daughters and son to go after their dreams while she chased hers: helping her husband, Oscar, with his coffee roasting business.
“They can go out there and achieve their goals,” she said. “So that’s what became for me to do the cafe… As a wife, I want to come out and help him out and like, I guess, life is a battle every day.”
Esperanza, which means “hope” in Spanish, started with a connection through Empower Evergreen — a nonprofit that supports Hispanic-owned small businesses.
Oscar Pineda began taking classes with Empower and was able to grow his coffee roasting business.
“It’s kind of like gas,” he said. “You have to go get gas in the gas station. People need coffee, too.”
Oscar Pineda’s connection with coffee began years ago when his mother started working at a beverage distributor. He also ended up getting a job there and eventually began roasting coffee, which he said opened more opportunities for him.
“As immigrants, sometimes we get stuck in certain levels in life,” Oscar Pineda said. “And so for me, that’s why I said coffee opened up a lot of opportunity.”
The Pinedas also received some help from Armando Minjarez with artistic details in the café, such as the ceramics, or jarritos, and murals on the back wall.
Minjarez is alsoKMUW’s featured local artist for 2023.
“They're a little different from the traditional in Mexico,” Oscar Pineda said, “but he gave it his own touch as an awesome artist.”
But it’s not just the Hispanic community that Oscar Pineda wants to bring together in the new space, it’s the entire community, according to Ariel Rodriguez, Empower Evergreen’s executive director.
“He’s thinking about the Black community and other groups out there, about how coffee and culture and small business kind of work together.”
The new café was also made possible through another community group that supports small businesses — The Garages retail incubator program. The idea behind the program is to help a small business grow in a temporary location and offer mentorship.
“There’s franchises popping up on every street corner, right?” said Jaimie Garnett, who works with The Garages. “So that right there indicates the demand for more locally owned coffee shops, and their approach to coffee is interesting and curates that community.”
Eventually, the couple said they hope to locate their business on the North End of town with other Hispanic-owned businesses and help draw visitors to that neighborhood.
“Let this be part of like a bridge to bridge the communities to the North End and have them come and visit us there and just kind of show them that it’s not a scary place,” Oscar Pineda said.
