Executive Director Lenore Estrada on Latinx Identity, Small Business Ownership, and Reimagining Community Care
Photo by Jessica Chou
Can you tell us a little about yourself? Where are you from? What are you passionate about?
I am from Stockton, a small city in California’s Central Valley, and am the fourth of seven children. Stockton is a diverse city, situated in the middle of a bountiful agricultural region and is home to one of the only inland ports in California. During my lifetime, it’s also been a place with few employment opportunities, was an epicenter of foreclosures during the 2008 mortgage crisis, and in 2012 filed for what was at the time the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history. My mom and dad shared a commitment to social justice and civic engagement, and while we didn’t have a lot of money, my parents were committed to education. My mother worked hard to find scholarships and other resources for my siblings and I that wouldn’t have otherwise been available and to give us a broad set of experiences to draw from. She wanted us to know that opportunities existed beyond the set of circumstances that surrounded us growing up. We had a large family and spent most of our free time working together and cooking. My father, who was also from Stockton, grew up in a family of migrant sheep shearers and made local ingredients and food traditions a central part of our upbringing.
While I have positive feelings about my childhood overall, my siblings and I were also raised in an environment steeped in poverty and violence. The ways that members of my own community and family were limited by the circumstances into which they were born were palpable. From the time I was a very small child, I was focused on working hard to create more opportunities for myself and my family, and helping to lift up other people in my community. The circumstances of my upbringing have certainly influenced my interests and work as an adult. I’m most interested in the alleviation of poverty, and in protecting and serving vulnerable people - particularly women, children and elders.
How did you get started with Three Babes Bakeshop, and what did that experience teach you about being a small business owner in SF?
I started Three Babes because I wanted to try entrepreneurship. I’d had a number of jobs I didn’t enjoy after college and was hoping to find work that gave me a strong sense of purpose. Starting a food business felt accessible - I’d spent so much time cooking and baking as a child - and the barriers to entry were low, which was important as I had no money. My best friend Anna and I ran a Kickstarter campaign to raise $10k to start the company, and grew it very slowly. We rented kitchen space from other people to keep our costs low and over time grew to a staff of 26 (pre-Covid). Being a small business owner in San Francisco, especially in the food industry is extremely tough. I didn’t have any idea when I started the company how few food businesses were actually making a real profit. I saw people with multiple, beautiful locations and assumed they were killing it. The reality, though, is that the high cost of living, lack of housing and reliable public transportation, and highly regulated environment here in San Francisco make it extremely difficult for small businesses to succeed, even without a pandemic thrown into the mix.
How have your experiences as a small business owner shaped the founding and development of SF New Deal?
My experience as a small business owner over the past nine years certainly has shaped the way we founded and have run SF New Deal. For one thing, it was important to me that the businesses that participate with us get long-term support in an amount meaningful enough to actually stay open. Several of the other restaurant support programs that began operating here in SF early on in the pandemic offered sporadic support to restaurants, which is helpful but doesn’t allow restaurants to optimize purchasing or even plan to keep on staff. I’ve certainly been in a place where I’m offered a huge one-time order and feel like I have to take it but don’t actually have the staff to fulfill the request very well. Spiky demand is extremely stressful and doesn’t help a business grow sustainably. I wanted SF New Deal to offer sustained support so that people could reliably expect to support staffing at a certain level. Additionally, the food community is very connected and supportive here, and I think my existing relationships with other restaurateurs, restaurant workers, farmers, and nonprofits such as CUESA allowed us to spring into action very quickly when we launched in March.
Tell us about your upbringing and background. How has your heritage influenced your work?
I am mixed race - my dad was Mexican American and my mother was White. My mother’s family lived far away, and I had more day-to-day interaction with my father’s side of the family as he was born in Stockton. (He was one of 13 children, so I literally had hundreds of relatives in Stockton). So much of my upbringing was steeped in food culture - my college roommate came to Stockton to visit me and afterwards remarked that one of the biggest surprises for her was how much time and focus our family spent preparing food. My father’s family were sheep shearers when he was growing up and they would supposedly slaughter a lamb every 3 days to feed the workers in their camp. We ate a TON of lamb and a lot of homemade flour tortillas (the kind my grandmother and father made are actually pretty specific to Northern California and contain leavener. They’re almost like pita bread), mole verde with chicken, chile colorado, enmoladas (but made with homemade flour tortillas rather than corn), fideo, and of course beans, rice, and guacamole. We made tamales at Christmas and had a seemingly limitless supply of conchas, turnovers, and little pig pastries from the Mexican bakery downtown.
As a kid, I just assumed that the food we were eating was “traditional Mexican food”. I also wasn’t exposed to Latinx culture outside of the Mexican American experience. Almost all of the Latinx people I knew growing up were Mexican or of Mexican descent and were Catholic. Here in San Francisco, the Latinx population is much more diverse than the population was in Stockton when I was growing up. In SF we have a huge population from Central America, a substantial population from indiginous communities, and many Latinx residents who are Evangelicals.
My father’s childhood was not an easy one. Terrible things happened to his family, particularly the children, and he and his siblings were certainly scarred by racism and unfair treatment, in addition to physical and sexual violence (both from within our own community and family and without). Notably, neither my father nor any of his siblings chose to teach my generation Spanish (despite the fact that it was the only language they spoke with their own parents). While my father was interested in his own family’s lineage and made trips to Mexico and Spain to trace various relatives, he eschewed cultural studies (which he viewed as overly narrow), and encouraged us to focus instead on math, science, politics and the history of ancient cultures. At the end of his life he became more interested in celebrating Mexican culture, and began planning events that celebrated Mexican food, music, and dance.
Much of my personal experience of being Latinx intertwines with my experience and observations of systemic poverty and racism - my upbringing exposed me to many situations that made me more aware of how vulnerable so many people are. Throughout my childhood we heard apocryphal stories about various characters from my father’s past, only to meet them later in life and learn as we grew older that their real stories were so much more brutal than the versions we’d heard as kids. A traffic stop over a missing set of windshield wipers that led to arrest and deportation. A child who dropped out of school in 5th grade to work in the fields after her mother died of tetanus caused by a rusty nail she’d stepped on in a field. Events that would be nonissues for some people set off chain reactions with life-altering consequences for others. Once you see this snowball effect in action again and again you can’t unsee it - I think it’s made me more empathetic and over the years more open to the range of experiences that are possible for people.
Many of the Latinx people who live here in San Francisco (including my own employees at Three Babes and hundreds of workers who are employed by SF New Deal businesses) are recent immigrants who have overcome challenges that would be unimaginable for most of us, in order to come to this country and have a chance at safety and prosperity. During Covid they haven’t been able to receive government aid as a result of their immigration status. One of the core motivations for me (and for many of the SF New Deal chefs and restaurant owners more broadly) is to help support these workers by preserving their jobs - many, many chefs are forgoing pay so that more funds will be available for their workers.
As we all know, Covid-19 has disproportionately affected communities of color - specifically Black and Latinx communities. Watching the Covid crisis unfold, I can’t help but see the same snowball effect I witnessed as a child. Foodservice and agriculture are sectors that employ large numbers of Latinx workers - these jobs don’t afford people the opportunity to work from home and don’t pay enough to allow people to build meaningful savings. As a result, Latinx families by and large can’t afford to shelter in place. According to a 2017 report from California Latino Legislative Caucus, Latinos earn less than non-Latinos, are underrepresented among higher income brackets, overrepresented at lower income brackets, and are more likely to live in poverty. Latinos had a median household income of $47,200 between 2010 and 2014, compared with a median household income of $69,606 for non-Latinos. Here in San Francisco, exorbitant housing costs have led to crowded housing situations for many Latinx workers. The combined effect is a set of conditions that make it much more likely that members of the Latinx community will be infected with Covid-19, and once infected, that they will suffer disproportionate health and financial consequences. Our work at SF New Deal aims to help ease some of the challenges these communities face, both by distributing food to low income communities and by providing a means for restaurant workers to make meals without having to invite customers into their dining rooms.
What does it mean to be a part of the Latinx community in San Francisco?
First of all, the Latinx community is incredibly diverse - I think that too often people forget about the range of backgrounds and experiences that fall under the “Latinx” umbrella. Here in San Francisco we have recent immigrants from Central America and Mexico, a large population of men who have been living here on their own for 10-15 years sending remittances back home, young people living apart from their parents after being separated in detention centers, Latinos who were born here in SF and who live among large extended families, a small but mighty Brazilian population, and a wide range of religious and cultural practices. As someone whose family has dispersed - my parents are both gone and my siblings live across the US and in the UK at this point, it is nice to be able to experience some elements of home here in my adopted city. For years I lived on 23rd and Shotwell in the Mission, and it was very comforting to visit La Palma Mexicatessen, La Reyna Bakery, Casa Lucas, and dozens of other locally owned businesses. I also fully acknowledge that as a third generation Mexican American who is college educated, an entrepreneur, and doesn’t have extended family here in San Francisco, my experience as a Latinx woman is most often that I am the only Latina in the room in social and professional settings.
In your opinion, how can we move toward more diverse representation at every level of community care?
I believe that to build more diversity at every level of community care we need to move in on addressing problems from a number of angles at once. At the grassroots level, people with direct understanding of their own communities are best positioned to come up with effective solutions, and to know whether or not solutions are actually working. Matching up funders and policymakers with grassroots change makers and offering room and resources to experiment allows people who are often left out to lead the way in addressing their own challenges. Top-down solutions (even those designed with equity in mind) don’t yield diversity. Including stakeholders in designing solutions does.
What role do you see Latinx leaders playing in the future of your industry? What advice do you have for young Latinx people who want to get more involved in their community or start a business?
I look forward to seeing more people who identify as Latinx (especially women!) enter business careers, as well as careers in law, finance, medicine, tech and politics. Some amount of this will happen organically - the Latinx population in this country is massive and growing - but it also takes mentorship, sponsorship and support. It can be hard to be the first in your family to attend college, to have the courage to start a company, or take on debt to complete your degree if you aren’t coming from a well-resourced background. Resources exist to help you on the journey - it’s important to advocate for yourself and not to be afraid to reach out to pitch your ideas, ask for “informational interviews” or introductions. The Latinx community has a long history of organizing and mutual aid, so I think many Latinx youth are already well-poised (and well-versed) in activism and engagement. The first and most important step is always just to get started!