Mother and sons work small cafe to get by
Maria’s sons, Oscar Landeros, left, and Miguel Angel Landeros serve a couple of regular customers. They make Las Morenitas a family business.
Everything Maria del Consuelo Ramirez serves at the Las Morenitas Cafe near the east of Camelia St., is homemade by her, including the tortillas.
ROYAL CITY — When Maria del Consuelo Ramirez came from Mexico with her ex-husband and two sons, she was thinking only of orchard and other field work.
After the break-up she had to think differently. She started looking for a way to support herself and get her now-teenage boys through high school and on to successful lives.
When she saw the little yellow building on Camelia St. that had been a cafe before, she inquired. It could seat 8-12 people, and she could have it for $800 a month. So she took it and became owner of Las Morenitas.
“We’re making it,” Maria said. “We make enough for us to live and me not have to kill myself out in the fields.”
“They say a bad business will go under in six months,” she added. “We’ve been here three years.”
Maria and her family arrived in the U.S. – Warden to be exact – in 2001. She had relatives there. She went right to work in the orchards and warehouses and hoeing onions.
In 2013, she and her sister Lucero Ramirez decided they’d had enough farm work. They decided to partner up half-and-half. After a while, Lucero realized the cafe would not support both.
Lucero went back to the fields and left the cafe to Maria. Her investment in the venture is still there, but she has even suggested settling up with Maria.
“She’s my sister,” Maria said. “She hasn’t even brought it up. I owe her, and I will eventually pay her.”
The sisters have always been called Las Morenitas because of their dark complexion. That is their mother’s nickname too. It was appropriate for the cafe.
“I don’t cook a regional style; I cook my mother’s style,” Maria said. “These are my mother’s recipes, and everything is made home style.
Maria and her boys are Adventists. So they don’t operate between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. It works out well because competing Mexican eateries don’t operate on Sundays.
“I really enjoy the business because I don’t have to get up early any more,” Maria said.
Maria rises between 7 and 8 a.m. with enough time to prepare the cafe to a 10 a.m. opening. In summer she closes around 7 p.m. In winter she tries to close by dusk. Her busiest hours are 11-1 and 3-5.
Another woman comes in part-time for morning preparation and the lunch rush. But Most of her help comes from the sons who attend Royal High School.
“These boys are very good,” she said. “The teachers tell me they are very serious in school. That’s the way they are at home.”
Oscar (12th grade) and Miguel Angel (10th grade) are very quiet. They speak to few people at school or anywhere else. If they had time to do a school sport, it would be soccer. But they are willing to forgo that to help their mother and themselves.
“It is a lot that they help me,” Maria said. “They get out of school and come right over here.”