MUCHMORETHAN CUPSOF COFFEE
Food operation is run by women seeking asylum
There’s a theory in Latina studies, also known as mujerista theology, that revolves around the notion of “lo cotidiano,” or the quotidian.
The idea is that systemic change has the best chance of succeeding if it begins in the everyday life of women.
That is where the recently opened Café Cotidiano gets its name. The coffee truck and its neighboring food truck Las Catrachitas in downtown are run by asylum-seeking women, and all proceeds benefit them and their children.
Painted blue with sweeping, white birds, the coffee truck sits near the San Antonio Mennonite Church, alongside the food truck that sells pupusas, a Honduran dish, and El Peregrino, a minibus that soon will be a library for social justice reads.
“Our hope with these trailers is that these are forces of liberation and change for wom
en and families who have traditionally been excluded and have not had opportunities” to advance, said Pastor Katie Best-richmond, who devised the concept some months ago.
Many asylum-seekers can’t apply for a work permit until a year after they filed for asylum.
Under the Mennonite Church’s model, the asylumseekers are volunteering at Ca
fé Cotidiano and Las Catrachitas, and there’s no charge for the coffees and food, just suggested donations.
Proceeds go to the Mennonite Church fund for refugees and immigrants. The money is used to bond them out of detention centers, to maintain the church shelter and helps put the asylum-seekers on a
path toward“financial liberation,” Best-richmond said.
What once was an empty parking lot with a crumbling shack has been transformed into a quiet enclave, where asylum-seekers sheltered and cared for by the Mennonite Church, and community members seeking food or coffee engage with one another through the exchange of goods.
Bright, colorful chairs and potted plants decorate the space. There’s two murals: One says “Keep calm con puro amor.” Another is a green surface with white shoes, of different sizes and styles, glued to it.
“The shoes really represent the footsteps of the people who are immigrating. A lot of them walk from their home countries to our border, and they’re white in remembrance because a lot of them don’t make it here,” Best-richmond said.
Rosa Vasquez, 20, was in detention for seven months before she was released in June. Santos Pacheco, 35, stayed in San Antonio after she arrived with her child because border agents had arrested her other child, a 15-year-old daughter, and put her in detention for a month due to an error on her birth certificate.
Vasquez and Pacheco fled Honduras escaping violence. Now, the two petite women run Las Catrachitas, which means “little Hondurans,” together.
Kabibi Bamuamba, 44, who runs Café Cotidiano, fled Southafrica last year with her two children, who were 14 and 11 at the time, because her family was experiencing dangerous “xenophobic attacks” she said.
“It happened two times to my family, but the third time it was really bad. It happened in my house and I couldn’t take it. I don’t like talking about it,” the Congolese asylum-seeker said.
She was a social worker. Her husband was a pastor and store owner. She said that after they moved to South Africa from the Congo, they experienced racist attacks that put their lives in danger.
Two other pastors at her husband’s church were killed. So she took her children and fled.
“My children were crying, saying ‘What are we doing? Where are we going?’ I didn’t know what to say. I told them God is with us. I
couldn’t explain to them everything that happened in South Africa,” said Bamuamba, who goes by “Bibi.”
They flew first to Brazil, and then soon after, to Guatemala.
Fromthere, she paid for a small raft to cross the Usumacinta River with her children and waited in Mexico for three months, at first in a tent camp and later in a church shelter, for a Mexican government permit that would allow her to move freely in the state.
She then made her way to the border city of Matamoros, requested asylum at the port of entry, and eventually found herself blinking in the lights of the San Antonio bus station.
“Bibi and her children came on ( Jan. 7). I still remember the date. There was just something so special about Bibi and her children,” Best-richmond said, smiling at Bamuamba, who was working at
Café Cotidiano on a recent afternoon.
Bamuamba was helping care for another family’s child when Best-richmond, who had been volunteering for the church’s migrant program, showed up at the station.
Her fluent English stood out, and unlike many asylum-seekers who had family connections in other parts of the country, Bamuamba had none.
Best-richmond asked her if she’d consider staying in San Antonio, offering the church’s shelter, La Casa de Maria y Marta, which temporarily houses asylum-seeking women and children and provides them with an array of services including trauma healing therapy.
“I didn’t know what to do, but my children said, ‘We don’t know where we’re going, but here they’re saying yes to us.’ That’s when I decided to stay, for five days — until here I am now,” Bamuamba said.
She mans the coffee shop Tuesday through Saturday. She learned how to work the espresso machine and make the various latte drinks. The café also sells coffee cups and travel mugs.
“It’s making me busy, I have something to do. I’ve been very stressed but with this I push it aside, I don’t think about the other stuff,” she said. “I’m learning a lot here.”
Both of her children had little in-person schooling before the pandemic hit and their schools — Bonham Academy and KIPP — went virtual.
Bamuamba’s asylum case is working its way through the courts, which have been delayed by the pandemic. She talks to her husband in South Africa nearly every day, worried for his safety, exploring all the ways they one day could reunite.
She said she never would have imagined she would end up in San Antonio, working at a small coffee shop in the middle of a pandemic.
“My little girl always says, ‘One day I’ll write a story about us,’” she said with a laugh. “It would be good.”
The asylum-seekers are volunteering at Café Cotidiano and Las Catrachitas, and there’s no charge for the coffees and food, just suggested donations.