Viva Las Pepe Vegas

Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful American Latino, Dec, 2002 by Anita Savio

"And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, and near a thousand tables pined and wanted food." (From Guilt and Sorrow or Incidents Upon Salisbury Plain by William Wordsworth.) it is certain that Wordsworth did not have the immigrant experience in mind when he wrote these lines in 1793 to 1794, the words could be meant for anyone who has come to live in a foreign land the experienced the hunger--both the emotional and stomach-growling varieties for all that is dear and familiar to us and that we have left behind.

It must have been just such a yearning that prompted Francisco Vega, patriarch of Sonora Produce, to recognize the market for Mexican produce and groceries back in 1970, and to begin importing them to the then-tiny Mexican community of Chicago.

Pepe Vega, son of Don Francisco and successor to what is now a multi-million dollar company with sales to major supermarket chains, recalls that when he joined his father in 1974, his customer base consisted of about ten neighborhood markets.

"They were the little corner groceries that served what was then a community of about 15,000 Mexicans, which were the gathering places for that community.

"I would go to the owners and ask, 'What do yon need?' And they would ask for chocolate and cookies, dried chiles, herbs and spices, cinnamon sticks, and so on.

"It was very emotional," he adds.

Pepe Vega is a food salesman, not an expressive man. So we can only imagine the typical scene when he made his rounds: "Can you get me move Gamesa cookies?" a corner store's owner would ask. "I sold the last lot in three days. Some people almost cried when they saw their favorite galletas on the shelves.

And what about chile guajillo? The senoras are asking me for it so they can make menudo and pozole rojo. Oh, and Senora Cuquita wonders if you can get a hold of a metate for her; she'll pay you whatever it costs."

Vega would note the orders down and, not too long afterward, Gamesa cookies would be disappearing from the groceries' shelves again. Mexican families would be beating the Chicago winter blues with steaming hot bowls of their favorite soups, and for family parties and festivities, Senora Cuquita would be preparing tamales made of corn, which she had hand ground the way Mexicans have done since before the Spanish conquest, on a stone metate.

Of course, it was not quite as simple as all that. There were all kinds of hurdles to overcome, including ethnic and commercial rivalries at the Terminal Market, where Chicago area wholesalers display and sell their produce.

"We came up against barriers from European ethnic groups who had it in for us. The Jews and the Italians had a lock hold, and we couldn't get spaces."

But, like the new kid on the block who has to bloody a few noses to prove himself, the Vegas eventually won over the other ethnic groups.

"They saw that we worked hard. We were pretty unorganized at the beginning, but we learned from our mistakes. And also, we weren't really in competition with them, because our products were completely ethnic. Finally, the other sellers at the market began to accept us."

Another hurdle was the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Remember that this was in the mid-seventies, before the latest, great wave of Mexican immigrants had begun to pound American shores.

Most Americans were completely ignorant of Mexican culture and customs and, of course, food products. What, for instance, is huazontle? Animal, vegetable, or mineral? And all the different varieties of dried chiles; are there even codes for them? That really had the boys over at the FDA scratching their beads. (This was also before the women's liberation movement had gathered steam.)

"You have to have an FDA code to identify everything you import, and we ended up helping to teach them what the products were used for, like the dried chiles, and how salsas were made. They practically had to learn along with us."

But the arduous climb up the learning curve eventually began to pay off.

"Our business expanded along with growth in the Mexican community. Consumer demand grew and, along with that, the stores selling Mexican products. There were ten in the early seventies, but that bad doubled by the end of the decade. In the eighties, there were 40 or 50, and by the end of the nineties, 300 or 400."

"In the decade of the seventies, ours went from a company with $1 million in sales to one of $4 million. In the eighties we grew to $9 million, by the mid-nineties to $14 million, and by the end of the nineties we were turning over $30 million to $40 million a year in sales."

Sonora Produce also found markets for its products among other ethnic groups, such as Greeks, Italians, and Arabs. Btu what bodes truly well for a future of spectacular growth for Sonora Produce is that the market for all kinds of Mexican food has begun to generalize to mainstream American culture, thanks in part to the efforts of people like haute cuisine Chef Generoso "Geno" Bahena (see page 30 of this issue), who are bringing the best of Mexican regional fare to American palates.