Dulcerias offer Santa Rosa Latinos a taste of home

Paper-mâché replicas of Batman and the beloved Disney character Olaf line the ceiling, the piñatas dangling above stack after stack of candy.

Milk Duds and Jujubees are nowhere in sight. The shelves at the Dulceria Las Tapatias in southwest Santa Rosa, instead are stocked with sweets more traditional in Mexico.

Adrian Zepeda opened the store in late October, one of at least two that have popped up in Santa Rosa in recent months to satisfy to the sweet tooth of the growing Latino community. Another store opened a few months ago at Coddingtown Mall. It offers a similar treats found at Las Tapatias, including tamarind-flavored candies and multicolored marshmallows and lollipops.

Unlike the Mexican markets found throughout Sonoma County, these stores are dedicated to providing a wide selection of candy and party supplies that include classic star-shaped piñatas, hand-painted paper lanterns, papel picado and gift bags bearing images of popular television characters, including from the Mexican sitcom “El Chavo del Ocho.”

The colorful, jammed-pack aisles at Dulceria Las Tapatias resemble the candy stores more commonly found in Zepeda’s native Mexico, which he left in 1991.

The shelves at his store are stocked with mazapanes, sugary guava rolls, chili-covered suckers, bags of plump pink and white marshmallows, and cocadas, soft coconut candy sometimes shaped into rectangles and colored green, red and white to resemble the Mexican flag.

Nearby are the pocket-size pinewood containers filled with cajeta - a thick caramel sauce - and stacks of half-pound blocks of “alfajor de coco,” another classic coconut confection imported from San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco. Meanwhile, the Moreliates fruit pulp rolls come from the neighboring Mexican state of Michoacán.

A large container filled with candied pumpkin, sweet potato, figs and other fruit sits at the front counter. In the center of the store, a giant piñata bears the store name.

Zepeda said he offers more than a hundred varieties of candies that come from many different regions of Mexico, beloved by both Latinos and non-Latinos. Many of them are candies that he enjoyed in his childhood in San Martín de Hidalgo in the state of Jalisco. Some are well-known brands that have been around for years, such as Dulces de la Rosa, Lucas and Vero. Others are not as common.

“Some you’re not going to find elsewhere,” he said while standing behind the front counter, next to his wife, Araceli, and two of his four daughters, Andrea, 22, and Aileen, 13.

“A lot of people like it here because of the variety,” said Andrea Zepeda, who studied psychology at Sonoma State University and currently helps her parents run the store. “We try to have something for everybody.”

“My favorite is anything that’s spicy,” added her baby sister, Aileen.

It’s not the first time the family has sunk its teeth into the sweets business.

For several years, they’ve been selling candy, snacks and other Mexican products at the flea market in Sebastopol. They also owned a small warehouse nearby on Sebastopol Road, selling chips, candy and other snacks to local grocers and street vendors with push carts.

With so many people coming in off the street, looking for a taste from their homeland and treats for their children’s birthday parties, the family decided to invest in a dulceria.

“That’s where we developed a customer base,” Adrian Zepeda said, adding that many have followed them to the store.

He spent much of his childhood helping his family with their business, distributing beverages such as Corona and Pepsi products throughout San Martín de Hidalgo.

“I helped my father since I was in primary school,” said Zepeda, one of 10 children.

When he first arrived in Santa Rosa, he went to work as a gardener for a landscaping company. He quit two years later after they refused to give him a raise and started going neighborhood to neighborhood in Santa Rosa, selling cheese and sausage, his wife’s special family recipe.

Her parents were butchers in El Tepehuaje de Morelos, a small town in Jalisco. They also owned a snack shop in town, which she manned as the youngest of eight children.

“That’s what (our parents) showed us,” she said about running a business, a skill they’re passing on to their children.

Before they started selling candy, Andrea Zepeda said there were few places to go for these kinds of items. Many customers had to drive to Oakland and San Francisco on the weekend, she said.

While there are several dulcerias in that part of the Bay, she said, there are none on this side of the bridge.

“The customers were urging us to open a store,” she added. “They wanted to come (shop) during the week.”

The demand for these businesses comes as no surprise for Juan Carlos Davila, the Hispanic market general manager and senior vice president at Nielsen, a global market research firm. Many supermarkets don’t carry a wide selection of sweets despite the desire for treats from back home, he said.

“These are things immigrants long for: mazapanes, cocadas… (and) especially, the spicy candy you wouldn’t find anywhere else,” said Davila, who’s originally from Mexico City.

Like him, Davila said, many parents also introduce those flavors to their U.S.-born children.

“My kids were born here, but they are familiar with all these products,” he said.

That creates an important client base for these businesses. In California, he said, more than half of the youth are Hispanic, compared to 23 percent nationwide.

“They are the main consumers of these products,” he said.

Meanwhile, Davila added, U.S.-born Latinos are enrolling in college at greater rates and landing high-paying jobs, helping boost Latino spending power in the U.S. In 2014, Latinos spent $1.3 trillion, about $320 billion in California alone, he said.

Latino spending nationwide is expected to reach $1.7 trillion by 2019, Davila said, adding that much of the growing buying power has to do with population growth.

In Sonoma County, Latinos make up more than a quarter of the population, compared to 17 percent in 2000.

As for the Zepedas, they hope that as the population grows so will the craving for Mexican treats. They plan to soon serve snow cones, similar to the ones they enjoyed back home.

“It’s cool to see how my parents have progressed, from selling on the street to this store,” Andrea Zepeda said.

You can reach Staff Writer Eloísa Ruano González at 521-5458 or eloisa.gonzalez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @eloisanews.