With its Latino customer base staying home, Mercado Central gets a lunchtime boost from retirement and church groups

At midday inside Mercado Central, Juan Linares asked a room full of diners to take a look at itself.

The Latino business cooperative on Lake Street was built by and for Latino families, the Mercado Central project manager told two lunchtime groups gathered around back-to-back rows of tables. For 26 years, “that’s been our primary market,” Linares said.

But on a Monday at noon in a Minneapolis on edge, Linares asked if his new customers noticed that something was different.

“Do you see any Latinos sitting in the room?” he asked.

Heads shook “no.”

Since the first federal immigration raids in Minneapolis, Linares said, the longtime customers who once supported the Mercado’s daily business — from its food and shops on the ground floor to legal and financial services and a salon on the second — have been staying home. Many are afraid that leaving the house, even with documents, could put them at risk, Linares said. “Obviously, fear is a factor.”

The Mercado’s doors are now kept locked, with customers let in one by one. Several storefronts are dark, with candy displays and jewelry mannequins visible behind accordion doors.

A chiropractor hands out her business card as people exit. An inspector from Minneapolis’ Third Precinct stops in for his daily coffee.

Fewer than half the market’s food vendors are open, and most of them don’t have enough staff to run them. Individual owners and their children are keeping the meat on the grills sizzling and the tortillas warm, even if it takes a little longer than usual for the orders to come out.

But on this weekday afternoon, two separate groups had come to help fill the void. About 20 people arrived by bus from Becketwood Cooperative, a retirement community in south Minneapolis. Another 20 or so caravanned from Mount Olivet Lutheran Church.

They hadn’t coordinated with each other, but both had the same idea. If Mercado Central’s regulars couldn’t safely come in to eat, these groups could.

Becketwood resident Iric Nathanson organized his group’s visit. The retiree spent his career working with nonprofits that financed small businesses, including some along Lake Street. His business relationship with Linares went back decades.

In a presentation to his lunchtime guests, Linares was upfront about the Mercado’s costs and struggles. It takes close to $64,000 a month to operate the three connected buildings that house the cooperative’s 38 businesses and service providers. Right now, he said, the Mercado is bringing in around $20,000 a month in rent.

A single lunch outing like this one might generate $600, Nathanson said. If groups like his came regularly, he told his fellow diners, the Mercado might just keep the lights on.

But Linares knows even that won’t be enough. The regulars need to come back. He’s hoping by the end of February, ICE activity will relax a bit, but “it’s going to take probably quite a few months, if not years,” for most people to feel safe enough to return. “I don’t want to think in years,” he said.

At the next table, members of Mount Olivet Lutheran Church crowded together over plates of pupusas and quesadillas. Associate pastor Rebecca Wold Freeman said the group came to support the Mercado’s community — and to learn from it.

“We’re actually learning from Mercado about what it means to be hospitable, about how to be inclusive and full of grace in a world where it would be easy to put up armor and barriers,” Freeman said.

Behind the counter at the Best Tacos Del Sol, Emma Escobar kept up with the lunch rush, an extraordinary surge of business in times like these. The daughter of the owners, she is working alongside her parents because there is no one else.

Most days, Escobar said, the building is painfully quiet, but when groups come for lunch, everyone feels it. “You can definitely see the difference in your day,” she said with a smile.

The meal wound down, the plates stacked up. Some customers headed back to the parking lot to get on the bus. Others lingered, talking and making plans to come back next week.