Motherhood and Enchiladas
Mother shares her challenges, successes as a businesswoman
Editor’s Note: In this edition, Random Lengths News features a woman balancing motherhood and entrepreneurship. She is an example of how humanity will find a way to survive, if not thrive, even in the midst of a pandemic. She owns Las Palmas Cafe, a Carson restaurant serving authentic Zacatecas cuisine. The restaurant itself celebrated its 60th anniversary at the start of the pandemic.
Sonia Rodriguez-Fuentes, 51, is a vanguard of a second generation of entrepreneurs. From her youthful appearance and staff uniform of blue jeans and black Las Palmas T-shirt, she is virtually indistinguishable from the staff with whom she works alongside on a daily basis.
Rodriguez-Fuentes is a woman who, despite her sense of guilt about the amount of time the restaurant takes from her and her children, enjoys working sideby-side with her staff, making the restaurant’s longtime clientele happy.
“It’s a strange feeling because I want them to know I’m working just as hard as they are,” Rodriguez-Fuentes said. “I have always done my best to understand my employees’ needs, and I try to make our working environment harmonious.”
Her two children, 17-year-old Brian Dean Pearson and 9-year-old Jacqueline Fuen“Wage
tes (whose father she married) watched their mother’s struggles firsthand, balancing the struggles of entrepreneurship and motherhood.
Rodriguez-Fuentes talks about her biggest disappointments, noting that they include prioritizing the restaurant high enough to cancel family plans to address an emergency. Her children recount the specific instances in which their mother had to go to the restaurant instead of vacationing with them.
“It is upsetting, and when my kids were younger they didn’t understand but now they’re used to it,” Rodriguez-Fuentes said. “Running a business is a full-time endeavor and I do my best to navigate both my career and my family…. I carry guilt about my role as both a mother and a businesswoman.”
The cafe is a few blocks north of the train tracks separating Wilmington from the City of Carson. Established in 1960, the restaurant is a classic old-style place with red tuck-n-roll booths. Originally operated by the Reyes family, the Rodriguezes purchased the restaurant from the Reyeses in 1985 and Rodriguez-Fuentes has worked there in one capacity or another ever since. You could say she grew up there.
Dreams and Ambitions
The fourth child of six, which included three brothers and two sisters. Rodriguez-Fuentes attended local schools, and earned degrees from Cal State Long Beach in business administration and international business. She once aspired to work in international trade and worked for three years at Liberty Mutual insurance in the workers compensation department. Her younger brother was running the restaurant at this time. But when the opportunity to become a full fledged member of the ILWU arose, he took the opportunity. Her father, Benjamin Rodriguez, the family patriarch who originally established the family’s restaurant holdings, offered her a choice: continue the path she had taken or take over the restaurant.
Rodriguez-Fuentes took the reins of Las Palmas Cafe and shortly after she became a single mother of her first child. Most of her 12-member staff have been with the restaurant for a long time. Rodriguez-Fuentes noted there are employees who have been with the restaurant for 40 years and have retired. A significant part of the restaurant’s clientele have visited the restaurant since the days it was operated by the Reyes family and still remember the restaurant’s prior proprietor. The restaurant is an institution and Rodriguez-Fuentes works hard to maintain this atmosphere.
“I’ve made friends [who] have become as much family to me as I am to them,” Rodriguez-Fuentes said. “I’ve always been told that I created an atmosphere where it’s like the TV sitcom Cheers, a place ‘where everyone knows your name.’”
Rodriguez-Fuentes has hired locally, high school and college students, and the down-andout out of a sense of civic duty. She also created a food delivery program for families with a loved one stricken with cancer, called Irma’s Meals. The program is named for her elder sister who died from breast cancer.
“We feed a family who is going through cancer to relieve them of the burden of cooking and enable them to gather together to enjoy their loved one who is dealing with cancer,” Rodriguez-Fuentes said. “I created Irma’s Meals as a way to honor my sister’s memory and a way to give back to others who are battling cancer.”
Beginnings of the Family Enterprise
Benjamin Rodriguez started off in the United States as a bracero worker picking fruit. “Bracero” references a World War II-era guest worker program that brought millions of Mexican guest workers to the United States. The program ended more than four decades ago. The pay was low, but Benjamin had greater aspirations. He eventually found work as a busboy at the Velvet Turtle, a high end Torrance steakhouse, back in the 1960s. He worked, he learned and he saved his money and purchased Rodriguez Billiards and placed a little taco stand right next to it. From there it expanded.
Benjamin eventually opened a second Pollo Lico in Wilmington before finally purchasing Las Palmas. The values of family first, hard work, commitment and perseverance are apparent.
Rodriguez-Fuentes had just turned 15 when she had entered high school and her family had purchased Las Palmas Cafe from the Reyes family in 1985. Right off the bat she started helping out on the weekends ringing up bills as a cashier.
“No questions asked. I just knew back then,” Rodriguez-Fuentes said. “Your parents told you what you had to do and you had to do it.”
A conversation with her son quickly revealed that the values of family hard work had clearly passed down to him. Brian, a strapping 6-foot young man who’s serious about his future and his family, worked at the restaurant just like his mother did before him. When his father fell ill with prostate issues, he elected to move to San Bernardino to care for him. That meant changing schools and getting a part-time job on his own and contributing to the household. Pearson described himself as lackadaisical about life before he encountered this season of his life.
“I really had to grow up,” Brian said. “My dad was having a hard time going to work and so he was like calling out. He went on disability because he couldn’t move at all.”
Before joining his father, Pearson was an average student carrying a 2.8 GPA, who just helped out around the restaurant. After leaving to care for his father, he became a 4.0 GPA student, graduating near the top of his class with honors.
“Before everything happened I was just like dangling,” Brian said. “[I thought] this is really what reality is.”
Like many children of immigrant parents Sonia Rodriguez-Fuentes has worked hard and endeavored to make a place for herself and her family even with all of the impediments that life has thrown her way. In short she has persevered through it all and doesn’t expect a hand out but has received a hand-up.