Just about every apartment in the neighborhoods off of 16th Street has a small black grill sitting beside its door. After work and on weekends, the apartment lawns, which have been pounded to dirt, fill with families.
"Sometimes it's so many you can smell the meat cooking at night from over there," says Rascon. "The spices we put in the marinated meat can make the smoke so strong."
Kevin Scanlon
Luis Ibarra views Southwest's opponents as racists.
Kevin Scanlon
The old and the new: Left, a Southwest Supermarkets store on 16th Street features a section with all Latino music. The new SW Desert Market, above, hopes to appeal to both Anglo and Latino shoppers.
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The long meat cases of both stores hold reddish mounds of ground chuck, chorizo and bulging beef and pork sausages made on site. They also specialize in the thin filets of pork and beef that Latina cooks and barbecuers prefer -- laid out in tidy overlapping stacks of smoked pork chops, and dense red filets of beef cut ranchera and milanesa style.
"Hispanics aren't the only ones who like the meats that way," says Lom's daughter-in-law, Marjorie, who along with Lom's son, Gustavo, runs the family's second store, on Osborn Road. "We've had a lot of other American customers in here who see these thin cuts for the barbecue and like them."
The comfort and "my store is your store" friendliness of carnicerias like Lom's and Rascon's are a throwback to an era when bringing home the bacon was as much a social ritual as a practical one.
The store was the place to catch up on local and family gossip, says Olivas. "It was a central part of the community. You got to see cousins. Moms caught up with gossip about who was born, who got married, who died. Dads caught up with who was working where and what they were doing on vacations. It came to the point where the butcher knew your cut, knew what you wanted without having to say anything."
Such intimacy and service are a far cry from the anonymity and "paper or plastic?" query that typifies the shopping experience at most large modern markets.
Yet, ironically, they exemplify the mood of comfort that Gioia tells people he wants the new downtown store to have.
"I shopped at a neighborhood store with my mom and dad for over 20 years when I was younger," he told an audience of downtowners not long ago. "So I have a sense of what it is to have a local grocery store that satisfies and meets your interests and wants and needs."
He plans to stir the neighborhood's ethnic pot by offering Mexican cooking classes in the store's spice section.
In recent months, he brought in Donna Neill, who heads the grassroots neighborhood organization NAILEM, to advise Southwest on how to make its stores more community friendly.
But it isn't clear whether these and other moves will attract the crossover shoppers for which the store has been designed. Since opening in early June, the store's numbers have been below Southwest's projections. In late July, Gioia asked neighborhood leaders to encourage residents to give the store a try.
"The reality is we know how cross-marketing works," says Gioia. "We do that all the time, getting people to mix and match things. But what we're trying here is cross-ethnicizing. That takes time.
"Two generations ago," he says, "back in the 1940s or 1950s, America wasn't conditioned to like Italian food. Well, in the last 25-30 years, it's become an American cuisine. Latino items are going to go the same route. Just give it one more generation."
