In nearly two decades at Mercado Central, a hub of Minneapolis’ Latino community, vendor Mirian Aguilar has seen the market’s highs and lows.
Boom times. Recession. A pandemic. The unrest after the murder of George Floyd.
The downturn in business since the election of Donald Trump has left her with days where she doesn’t make a sale at her streetwear stall.
But there are signs of hope for the city’s oldest Latino-themed public market. Rumors of immigration crackdowns have slowed traffic, but it still fills at lunchtime with students, families and workers looking for aguas frescas, tacos and tamales, fresh conchas from the panaderia.
And city officials are trying to help the vendors, who own the market in a co-op model, stay afloat.
Last December, Council Member Jason Chavez pushed through a motion to give Mercado Central a $250,000 grant as part of the city’s 2025 budget.
“It’s a central hub and such a historic and important asset to us on Lake Street,” said Chavez, whose Ninth Ward includes the market.
Then in February, the city forgave a $276,500 loan that was set to kick in. The decision was set in motion last year, but came at a moment when many vendors would have struggled to pay higher rents.
Council Member Aurin Chowdhury, who visited Mercado Central with U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar in March as part of a Lake Street tour, said the city has a role to play helping businesses weather tough times.
“It can be a very vicious cycle of people being fearful not going to these businesses, the people in the businesses feeling fearful of losing their livelihood, and then we start seeing businesses shut down,” she said.
“We want immigrant-owned businesses to thrive, because we know that’s the livelihood of our immigrant communities.”
The market’s board is also considering a marketing campaign to reach Twin Cities visitors, highlighting the cultural markets on Lake Street.
Juan Linares helped bring vendors and funders together to launch the market on a blighted Lake Street corner three decades ago. He said the ingenuity that brought Mercado Central to life will help members survive its latest challenges.
“Given all the barriers that we faced, we were able to endure that,” said Linares, who now works as a consultant to the Mercado board. “And become a resilient population that no matter what will succeed.”
An anchor on Lake Street
When Linares arrived in Minnesota from Mexico in 1977, there weren’t many Latino-owned businesses in the Twin Cities.
But the community was growing rapidly in Minnesota, filling jobs in local restaurants, factories and other industries during the economic boom of the 1980s.
By the early 1990s, Linares was working with a Spanish-speaking congregation at St. Stephen’s Catholic Church in south Minneapolis. Surveys of the congregation revealed a pent-up demand among those who wanted to start their own small business.
At a series of entrepreneurship classes through the Neighborhood Development Center and the Whittier Community Development Corp., the idea for what would become Mercado Central emerged. Linares and other Latino community leaders began looking for a home for the market.
In an oral history of the project, Linares and Mercado Central co-founder Sal Miranda described how the group settled on a dilapidated 28,000-square-foot complex at Lake and Bloomington Avenue as their home.
“The entrepreneurs looked at that building, took a tour of that building, and said, ‘No way. No way, this is not us,’” Miranda said. “It was taken over by squatters on the second floor, there was all kinds of litter and grunge, it was just out of control.”
But Linares had done a feasibility study on the area that found about 9,000 Latino residents lived in a 3-mile radius of the area.
Several partners, including Project for Pride for Living, which had redeveloped a bank on an opposite corner, kept courting the group of 40 Latino business owners.
“They promised to develop the building if we made the commitment to be the tenants,” Linares said in the oral history. The entrepreneurs eventually agreed, on the condition that they could “rent with the option to own the building.”
Following a $2.6 million overhaul of the site, Mercado Central held its grand opening in July 1999 with 47 small businesses and helped transform the corner of Bloomington and Lake into a bustling hub that inspired investment up and down Lake Street, according to city officials.
Over the years, it has served as a business incubator, launching Latino-owned businesses that later expanded, such as Manny’s Tortas.
But the market, and the cooperative behind it, have also struggled.
When Mercado Central was first established, there were multiple owners, including community partners, but a clause was added in the contract to allow the tenants to buy out the other partners 10 years down the line, according to Linares.
Those 40 families were asked to buy a minimum of 10 shares, at $100 each to buy into the project.
However, 10 years after the mall’s opening the housing market crash saw some business owners leave the organization.
Aguilar said she remembers struggling to pay her bills during the recession of 2008, she also remembers the sleepless nights during the civil unrest after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis more than 10 years later.
Through community support and grants, the owners were able to rebuild but some vendors depleted their savings account trying to get back on their feet, according to Aguilar, who said that makes weathering the current downturn even tougher.
She said now the Trump administration and its immigration policies are affecting business.
“The advantage that many of us have had here [is] we have survived on the savings that we have had, because during good times we have been able to save a little to survive the bad times, but now I think that all those savings have been spent,” Aguilar said.
An aging building and rising costs
It’s not the first loan restructuring for the Cooperativa Mercado Central (CMC), the board made up of vendors which took over full ownership of the market in 2019.
In 2020, just before the full impact of the pandemic, the CMC asked the city to defer the remaining payments of a $320,000 Community Development Block Grant so the market could take out a private loan to pay to replace its roof.
“An old building always has old stuff,” Linares said.
When the loan in 2020 was restructured and payments paused, Mercado Central was able to repair their roof and install solar panels to cut down operating costs.
“We’re paying 10 grand a month now we’re down to probably close to seven [for electricity],” Linares said.
Then two years ago, the co-op instituted a rental increase for tenants that helped reduce the net operating loss in 2023 and in 2024, according to city documents.
However, Mercado Central is still operating at a loss and needs to maintain and soon upgrade its 25-year-old kitchen and ventilation system.
Linares said having the loan forgiven frees up money to work on other projects that could benefit the mall since they don’t have to begin paying the loan.
Monica Romero, an economic development specialist for the city of Minneapolis, said conversations about forgiving one of Mercado Central’s loans started last year, before Trump was elected.
According to her, Mercado Central’s financial situation would see them burdened by having to begin repayment of the loan but the city took recent events into consideration.
“Many businesses and certain corridors got affected because of COVID, economic restraints or civic unrest,“ Romero said. “Now I would say Mercado Central has worked with their entrepreneurs to succeed within those circumstances.”
Aguilar started her business by renting one stall at the mall. She remembers paying $635 per month for her unit when she started in 2007.
Today she has two adjacent stalls where she focuses on selling street gear, including T-shirts, backpacks and snapbacks. Between the two stalls, plus insurance, Aguilar said she pays nearly $2,000 a month.
However, three decades since the mall opened its doors, repair and renovation costs are increasing and greater than the money pooled from rent.
“It’s not enough. Maybe it would be enough if they doubled the rent, but we wouldn’t do it because we can’t even afford the current one we have,” Aguilar said.
Chavez said he pushed for the $250,000 city grant to help vendors update the aging building and keep customers coming through the doors.
He said a 2024 WalletHub study, which ranked Minneapolis in the bottom tier of cities for Latino entrepreneurs, inspired him to look for ways to help small business owners in his ward.
Plans for the future
Looking towards the future, the mall’s board of directors have been planning ways to increase business, including additional marketing.
One example is plans for electronic billboards, including the idea of having some near the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
“Any visitor that comes to Minnesota, they come to see the Mall of America, then we say, ‘Okay, how about another mall — a cultural mall — come and visit Mercado Central on Lake Street,’” Linares said.
Other efforts are also underway.
Minneapolis hosted its first Latino Business Week in October 2024, and Chowdhury said bringing that back in 2025 will give businesses, including at Mercado Central, a boost.
Current tenants at the mall said they’re optimistic about the future. Although the current climate on Lake Street has resulted in at least one closure.
Luceritos Fashion at Mercado Central, owned by Marina Lopez, closed in February, according to Lopez’s husband, Leopoldo Sanchez, who also owns a business at the mall. Lopez will continue to sell some of her Mexican-inspired clothing online.
Sanchez said he’s hoping things get better as most businesses are still recovering from recent years of financial struggles.
After seven years in business, he said a few bad months could lead to disaster.
“This little business doesn’t provide enough for us to be millionaires, it’s day to day, so it’s hard sometimes,” he said.
Sanchez’s wife suggested he open up a business next to hers at Minneapolis’ Mercado Central selling brightly colored Mexican piñatas and candy after health concerns sidelined his career as a truck driver.
At 57, Sanchez said one of the few things that brings him joy now is seeing people coming and going off the Lake Street corridor, sometimes stopping by to chat with him and buy his products, but that joy is now at risk and not just because of a lack of foot traffic.
“Cancer,” he said.
He was diagnosed three years ago. And six months ago, doctors delivered more news.
“Stage 4,” Sanchez said. “There’s nothing they can do.”
Fighting back tears Sanchez said he’d like to see his business, Dulceria La Piñata, survive.
“They don’t cost much,” he said pointing at his candy section. “Some are 25 cents, they don’t amount to much.”
It’s a business Sanchez never expected to own, but he said fate had other plans for him.
“I have to come to my candy shop to distract myself a bit and not be at home just thinking ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die’,” Sanchez said. “I think it’s destiny that led me to this candy shop.”
This story has been updated into include a 2025 city grant to Mercado Central and quotes by Council Member Jason Chavez.
