La Gloria Looks, Tastes, Sounds Like Home to Latinos

With one hand on a grandson’s shoulder and the other clutching a plastic bag of tomatoes, Ana Funes swayed to the beat of a six-piece brass band whooping it up in the produce department of La Gloria Market in Oxnard.

The 62-year-old grandmother from Los Angeles could buy groceries anywhere, but when she is visiting her son’s family in Oxnard, Funes shops at the store where she can dance by the tomato bin.

“It’s really fun here,” she said this week, surveying the airy market that brings to mind the teeming mercados of Central America. “There’s always something happening, and the children love it.”

Funes, who moved to California from El Salvador eight years ago, is typical of customers drawn to the colorful grocery on U.S. 1, where pinatas hang from the ceiling, great tubs of corn for tortilla dough sit in the corner and caged birds chirp in an alleyway that links the market’s two wings.

Most patrons are Latin American, many are homesick and all are faced with inducements to turn a trip to the market into a social occasion.

Squeezing the Tortillas

They are the sort of shoppers who know what to do with a waxed yam from Puerto Rico, who don’t mind paying an extra couple of pennies for a tube of Colgate so long as the box is printed in Spanish and who squeeze corn tortillas before buying them to see whether they’re still warm.

They find nothing incongruous in buying gold chains at the same time as dishwashing liquid, and their idea of a special treat is Coca-Cola bottled in Mexico--not because it tastes any different, but because of what store owner Enrique Ibarra calls the “Oh, it’s Mexico” factor.

“Nostalgia” is the one-word explanation the 29-year-old Jalisco native gives for the success of the market, which opened a year-and-a-half ago in a 4,800-square-foot building and expanded in December to include a neighboring building twice as large.

A longing for the old country--whether it’s Mexico, El Salvador, Puerto Rico or the Philippines--brings recent immigrants to the market that Ibarra said is the only one like it north of the Grand Central Market in Los Angeles.

“The second generation,” he said, “shops at Von’s.”

Ibarra, who used to run a produce and seafood wholesaling business in Chula Vista, knows how to pull the heartstrings of the homesick. Thousands of customers showed up at a three-day celebration for the December expansion, which featured 18 bands and a raffle for tickets to Guadalajara, the capital of Ibarra’s home state. The event was timed to coincide with the day honoring Mexico’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Although Ibarra readily acknowledges that he held Saturday’s amnesty drive as a promotional campaign--he paid for advertising and entertainment in exchange for the foot traffic drawn to his business--the drive’s sponsors said they could not have found a better place.

“It’s a focal point and center point of social life for a lot of Hispanics all over the whole county,” said Raphael Ramos, manager of the South Coast Alien Legalization for Agriculture, one of the groups organizing the effort. “Everybody in the county in the Hispanic community knows where that place is.”

Former carpet store

The market, in downtown Oxnard across from the city’s new Transportation Center, occupies what once was a carpet store and a melodrama theater. Plenty of sunlight pours through windows set in exposed brick, and an absence of interior walls makes La Gloria as alluring to strollers as to shoppers.

Stands ring the market’s two wings, giving the impression of independent vendors hawking their wares as they do in the Grand Central Market on Broadway in Los Angeles or at downtown Guadalajara’s public market, Ibarra’s inspiration.

However, all of La Gloria’s stands are owned by Ibarra and his partner, an engineer in Mexico.

Shoppers slip between a fish counter and a meat counter that is heavily weighted in favor of such organ meats as tongue (both pork and beef) and tripe. In the produce section, they pick among fresh coconut, cactus, chiles, Mexican papaya and grains used to make such Mexican beverages as horchata , a sweet, milky concoction made with barley. Above the jewelry cases hangs a likeness of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Some shoppers snack on such finger foods as tacos of carnitas, or fried pork bits, purchased from a Mexican delicatessen that adjoins a tortilleria, where freshly milled corn is flattened all day long into smooth, golden discs.

They wire money home at an outlet for the Mexican bank Bancomer, mail letters at a U.S. Post Office outlet or drop into an office offering immigration counseling.

Brass Bands on Sundays

On Sundays, the place becomes “a circus,” Ibarra said, with shoppers dressed in finery promenading to a brass band reminiscent of those that play at village plazas in Mexico.

“It’s like Mexico in here--the people, the food, the music,” said Francisco Gutierrez, a 28-year-old electronics technician shopping Sunday with his wife, Rosa.

Many shoppers make an outing of their weekly trip to La Gloria. Take Salvador Patino, a 37-year-old Santa Paula resident, and his wife, Rafaela. On Sundays, they dress up their two young daughters in frilly dresses and take them to the market for some musical entertainment and a paleta, a Mexican Popsicle.

“There’s nothing like this in Santa Paula,” he said.

And it’s not only recent arrivals who feel transported in La Gloria; Norteamericanos also make the connection.

Janette Jamieson, a vocational rehabilitation counselor in Ventura who lived in Mexico for nine years, reminisced as she dropped tomatoes into a bag and showed La Gloria to a friend.

“I feel at home here,” she said. “It takes me back.”