Owners of Viva Oaxaca speak about love, pain, and what it took to start their businesses

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Editor’s Note: Hispanic Heritage Month is celebrated Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 to acknowledge the contributions of Americans with roots in Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean and Spain. The mid-month start date coincides with the independence date of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua from Spanish colonial rule. Mexico’s independence day is celebrated Sept. 16. This week, in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we profile a local couple.

Once a month Lino Alberto Arango drives thousands of miles from Petaluma to the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, often crossing via El Paso or Laredo.

A one-way trip takes three days, he said.

This journey follows a similar route he’s taken for nearly three decades that includes border crossings, encounters with federal police, and the underlying hope that this was all worth the sacrifice.

He and his wife, Edelia, own Viva Oaxaca, a store and restaurant that specializes in offering Oaxacan food, spices and goods – and Lino transports most of those goods himself.

They also are in the midst of opening a Oaxacan restaurant in San Francisco and own a “paqueteria” (pack-eh-ter-ee-uh) – a shipping business.

The journey to opening the restaurants, store and shipping business began in the early 90s, as Lino transported gifts, money and letters from husbands – working here, in the U.S. – to their wives and families in impoverished towns of Mexico.

Edelia was one of those wives, too.

Lino first came to the U.S. in 1988 and stayed in the U.S. for a year. For the next five years he split half his time in the U.S. and Mexico. In about 1996, Lino stayed in the U.S. but began to fly back and forth more frequently, about once a month.

“It’s very hard to be separated,” she said as she recalled playing the role of both mother and father to four of their children for several years.

They sat together inside the store between stacks of tlayudas (cleye-yu-duhs) and trays of sweet bread. In the background, the speakers hummed with dance music similar to the boisterous, multi-instrumental ensembles that now play at the festivals in their hometown of Tejas de Morelos.

But, in the late 90s, life was different. Some families in their hometown didn’t have enough for diapers, nor food, so their long-distance relationship, like so many others, was a willful sacrifice, Edelia said.

Their hometown is small and peaceful, “but you suffer because you can’t make money,” Lino said.

Seeing as it took weeks, if not months for mail to arrive and long-distance phone calls were often arranged weeks in advance and conducted over spotty signals at businesses in larger, neighboring towns, Lino recognized a gap in these connections.

“I was the one who helped them with the things (fathers) sent – their clothes, shoes, and I brought them their letters and I was... the communicator between the families,” Lino said. “In those times there was no Facebook, no FaceTime, nothing like that.”

Edelia chimed in, repeating “nothing.”

During that era, he also brought goods from the U.S. for Edelia to sell at a small store she ran from their home in Tejas de Morelos, Oaxaca – just another experience that defined their future entrepreneurial endeavors.

Mothers and children eagerly waited for him to bring letters and toys for the children from their fathers in the U.S.

Meanwhile, he returned with tortillas, bread and other treats for the families from his hometown of Tejas de Morelos and other neighboring towns who lived in the vicinity.

Lino regularly traveled back and forth until 2002 when Edelia and their four children settled in the U.S. and he worked a few years at a local horse ranch.

He did that until he heard about a government program that would train him to become a truck driver – or, as he called it, a “trailero,” (try-lair-o) a Spanish-English amalgamation based on the English root word “trailer.”

“I’ve been a person who doesn’t like to be stuck in one thing,” he said.

He then began to bring items from Oaxaca that Edelia could sell here and they started “little by little” to form the base of what would later become Viva Oaxaca.

But, there were troubles along the way.

They lost their home during the Great Recession, and about 10 years ago, on one trip back from Oaxaca he was in a nasty car accident in Mexico where they lost their truck and all the merchandise it carried inside.

“When one is already dead, there is no solution, but as long as one is alive, there is a solution for everything,” he said with a grin.

And the family regrouped, stuck by their close ones and continued forward.

In 2015 they formally opened Viva Oaxaca on Petaluma Boulevard North and in early 2021, they moved to the location further south on Petaluma Boulevard, in the former location of Karina’s Mexican Bakery.

Today the family continues working together – about half of the employees are family. Both Lino and Edelia look forward to the new chapters as they reflected on the past sacrifices that led them here – to this long time dream.

“There was a time when we went off track, but I returned to the path. It is like a curved path … You almost get lost, but up ahead it leads you in the same direction. We go up and down, and there we go, but we are on the same route … focused on the same thing ahead,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Sawhney at 707-521-5346 or jennifer.sawhney@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @sawhney_media.

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Owners of Viva Oaxaca speak about love, pain, and what it took to start their businesses

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