All Adriana Moran wanted was a campechana. Growing up in Guatemala, the baker’s most beloved breakfast was a single sweet, flaky pastry—a rectangle of filo-like dough that’s a staple in bakeries across her native country.
On mornings when Moran’s single mother of seven did not have time to make breakfast before school, she would give Moran two quetzales (about 25 cents) to buy one at the local panaderia. But the bakery would sometimes run out of her favorite morning treat and she vowed to open her own business one day so she’d have an infinite supply of her favorite pan dulce.
After moving to the United States as a young woman and hustling for years as a Pizza Hut manager and baking apprentice, Moran finally realized her childhood dream.
She opened La Esperanza Bakery in Torrance the summer of 1994 selling Guatemalan and Mexican pastries and breads, and later expanded it into a full kitchen serving Guatemalan and Salvadoran food (her second husband is Salvadoran), along with Mexican dishes to cater to Southern California’s largest demographic from Latin America.
Last month, La Esperanza celebrated the grand opening of its second location, a colorful storefront on Orange Avenue that serves banana-leaf-steamed tamales, pumpkin-seed sauces and dozens of other traditional, indigenous-rooted dishes familiar to Long Beach’s small but growing Guatemalan community. It’s already cemented itself as the first, full-service Guatemalan restaurant in the city.
“This is a restaurant more for second- or third-generation Guatemalans,” Moran says of her new location, which does not currently have a bakery on site. “Not a lot of people come in from our generation, but the newer generations do…[because] people speak English and they can chat with other young people, and that’s what’s beautiful.”
While Moran says she has seen an “impressive” number of chapines (an informal name for Guatemalans) dining at the new La Esperanza, the diversity of her clientele reflects the diversity of Long Beach’s Latino population, which has only grown over the last few decades.
Census data shows that Hispanics make up 44.5 percent of Long Beach’s population, a nearly 10 percent increase over the past 20 years. About 80 percent of Hispanics living in the Los Angeles/Long Beach/Anaheim region are of Mexican descent, followed by Salvadoran at 7 percent and Guatemalan at 5 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.
The city of Long Beach follows the regional trend, according to a recent report.
Long Beach immigrants create thousands of jobs, pay millions in taxes, new report finds
A Cuisine Apart
Though guatemaltecos are a significantly smaller demographic than Mexicans, their food businesses in Long Beach are carving out spaces for locals and visitors alike to experience the Central American country’s unique mestizo dishes.
Some traditional Guatemalan foods share names with their Mexican counterparts, but remain vastly different, a consequence of the indigenous and European cultures that collided on its tropical landscape.
Guatemalan enchiladas, unlike Mexican ones, are served as appetizers. And rather than warm, soft, rolled and stuffed enchiladas, chapines do theirs fried, cold and crunchy. Guatemalan enchiladas are more like tostadas, topped high with lettuce, pickled vegetables, and sliced egg, with the option of ground beef. They are finished with recado, a tomato-based sauce made of sesame and pumpkin seeds that serves as part marinade, part mild salsa.
Then there is pepián, a meaty, molé-like stew widely considered Guatemala’s national dish and thought to be one of the country’s oldest, borne out of a fusion of Mayan and Spanish cultures.
According to Maira Ramirez, La Esperanza’s kitchen manager and the restaurant’s culinary matriarch, pepián is the most well known dish in Guatemala.
“It’s the dish that every person that arrives to the country goes to eat,” she says.
To make it right, you have to grill the seeds before blending them then add a touch of cilantro, Ramirez says. Her traditional process is what draws customers to the restaurant.
“I love that I can have an actual traditional Guatemalan breakfast here because I didn’t get to have that growing up,” said Suzette Gomez, a second generation Guatemalan-Mexican from Long Beach who was eating at La Esperanza recently. “We used to have to drive to L.A. for it.”
Cementing traditions with pan
While Moran isn’t bringing La Esperanza’s full Guatemalan bakery concept to Long Beach yet, the city is in no shortage of them. Xelaju, Mana and Marilus bakeries make up the area’s old-school, seasoned Guatemalan businesses and have been recreating the moist and doughy Central-American breads for decades.
Mario “Tony” Lush, owner of the family-owned Xelaju Bakery in Wrigley, has sold Mexican conchas and pan guatemalteco for 17 years—the former to satisfy his large Mexican clientele and the latter because it’s what he’s always known.
He’s considered selling the business several times, but says he loves his customers too much to make that call.
On bustling Seventh Street, inside the inconspicuous Mana Bakery on a recent Saturday morning, owners Italo Vasquez and Olegaria Morales were busy scrambling to prepare a large order of Guatemalan pan dulce, which customers drove hundreds to pick up.
It’s much harder to find chapin sweet bread than the Mexican version the couple says, but their 12-year-old business makes it right while also offering Mexicans in the neighborhood the buttery taste of conchas they know and love.
At Marilus Bakery in Central Long Beach, not only can locals order large, decorative cakes for weddings and birthday parties, but they can also find fresh juices, tortas the size of a forearm, brick-sized tamales chapines wrapped inside banana leaves, and several display cases housing all kinds of pan dulces familiar to guatemaltecos y mexicanos.
It took the latter some time to give chapin food a chance, Marilus owner Eva Hernandez admits.
“In the beginning, Mexicans who walked in here didn’t like Guatemalan food,” Hernandez, who hails from Guatemala City, says in Spanish. “But then they tried [our food], like our Guatemalan tamales. Now we sell so many every day.”
The positive response that Hernandez and the other Guatemalan business owners in Long Beach are receiving affirms their long-ago decisions to migrate to the United States and dedicate their lives to selling the flavors of their motherland.
It’s part of their American dream.
“The quality of life in Guatemala is very poor, so you look for how to overcome that,” Hernandez says. “They said [the United States] is the country of opportunities, and it is of opportunities. We came searching for a better life and we achieved that.”
