It took Marlyn Gonzalez over 3 years to line all adult for her business.
She had found a ideal mark off of El Cajon Boulevard, between City Heights and Talmadge. She had gotten a permits, a loans, lerned and hired her staff and lined adult a roaster. She had finally staid on a name — GEM Coffee.
All she indispensable to do was open — that was scheduled for late March. And afterwards a pestilence hit.
“It was, oh my goodness, it was really treacherous times to contend a least,” she told KPBS.
Reported by Max Rivlin-Nadler
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Video by Matthew Bowler
Gonzalez motionless to go forward with opening anyways.
“While we were perplexing to pull a open, a lot of businesses around us were shutting so that felt bad in a way,” Gonzalez said. “But afterwards we kept meditative of how tough we worked, and we had a group on board. We were ready.”
Gone was a seating section, a seat stowed divided in a back.
She felt she due it to her neighbors and her dual baristas to open up.
“We were means to do both use and say a reserve of a public,” she said.
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Marlyn was propitious — as a coffee shop, a transition to take out was easy.
Her idea is to offer peculiarity coffee during reasonable prices and act as a overpass between a working-class City Heights neighborhood, and a gentrified Talmadge neighborhood.
“I see ourselves apropos that anchor to both communities. And hopefully merging those communities, either there’s activities we can horde that are some-more common in one village than a other. And carrying dual communities join one,” she said.
Business has been steady, she says, featuring a brew of people looking for coffee and flowers to lighten adult a homes they’re now cramped to.
She has no regrets opening up, while it seems like a rest of a universe is shutting down.
“Full speed ahead,” she said, laughing.
Speak City Heights is a media collaborative with partners KPBS, Voice of San Diego, The AjA Project and Media Arts Center San Diego with appropriation from a California Endowment, directed during amplifying a voices of residents in one of San Diego’s many different neighborhoods.
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Max Rivlin-Nadler
Speak City Heights Reporter
I cover City Heights, a area during a intersection of immigration, gentrification, and neighborhood-led health caring initiatives. I’m meddlesome in how this singular area deals with mercantile inequality during an rare tellurian health crisis.
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