Full Menu of Setbacks : ...

Carlos and Lucia Alcantara own a struggling Mexican restaurant here, where they work at least 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

For the past three years, they have toiled in an effort to prosper and provide their children a better life. Offering such dishes as carnitas and taquitos de pollo has filled the cash register with small bills and change.

Yet, despite their perseverance, the Alcantaras and their four children lost their apartment when they couldn’t pay the rent. Now they are on the verge of losing their restaurant--even though they grossed $87,000 last year.

The Alcantaras, however, have found hope through the Fullerton Interfaith Emergency Service, where sympathetic officials found the family’s situation so compelling that they have not only provided temporary shelter but have set up a program to help the Alcantaras stay afloat.

“Our goal is to help them to keep going,” said Adolf Vartanian, a retired engineer and businessman who volunteered to serve as the Alcantaras’ business mentor, advising them on basic business practices.

The couple had no prior experience in running a business before opening TacoMex restaurant on Commonwealth Avenue. They sank their life savings--about $30,000--on the eatery, buying kitchen equipment, fixing, painting and bringing the restaurant up to city code. Carlos Alcantara gave up a full-time job as a truck driver and two part-time jobs as a traveling disc jockey and home repairman and his wife gave up being a homemaker to devote the time and energy needed to run the restaurant.

“We know deep in our hearts that we’re doing something good,” said Carlos Alcantara, whose mother owned and operated a restaurant for 42 years in Mexico City until she and Carlos immigrated to the United States in 1973.

Like many other small business owners, the Alcantaras were not prepared for the uphill struggle.

It takes more than will and determination to make a small business successful, said Gerald Breitbart, a California Business Assn. consultant on small business issues and government regulations.

“It’s typical for many small businesses to fail because the owners don’t know anything about managing money,” Breitbart said. Carlos Alcantara “has got to learn money management. That’s really the crux of his whole problem, and there’s just no getting around it. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have any assets, so he wouldn’t qualify for” a Small Business Administration loan.

Last June, the family moved into a vacant building next door to their restaurant after being evicted from their apartment, where they could no longer afford to pay the $650-a-month rent. About a month later, they were forced out of the vacant building by a city code enforcement officer, who told the family it was not zoned as a residential site and they could not live there.

Homeless, the family was offered temporary housing through the Fullerton Interfaith Emergency Service, which operates the New Vista Shelter. Officials also launched a mentor business program about three months ago in which the Alcantaras are the first to participate.

The aim of the program is to help business owners like the Alcantaras so they can “get back on their feet and afford to live in a home of their own,” said Barbara W. Johnson, executive director of Fullerton Interfaith.

“This family is not eligible for any kind of government assistance, and it’s quite a unique situation,” she said. “We have the unique opportunity to really help them and offer the same service to others who may one day be in the same situation.”

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Vartanian and other volunteers are helping the Alcantaras figure out how much money TacoMex has made and spent over the past three years. So far this year, Vartanian said, the business is beginning to show a meager profit--about $100 in January.

Carlos Alcantara, 36, tried to get a loan last year to pay off living and business expenses, but was turned down because his establishment was “too new and I had no assets to offer for collateral,” he said.

So, he applied for welfare benefits but again was turned down, this time for “owning a business that makes too much money,” he said.

“All the money (TacoMex earns) goes toward paying the (restaurant’s) rent, buying the food and just barely keeping the business open. So the business is taking care of itself,” he said. “The problem is, it’s not producing enough for shelter, and if I take the money out of the business--there goes our opportunity to succeed.”

Angelo Doti, director of financial assistance of the Orange County Social Services Agency, said the Alcantara family is an example of needy people who are “shut out of the system.”

“They have the right to apply for welfare benefits, but the working poor are generally ineligible,” he said. The Alcantaras “will remain excluded as long as they are entrepreneurs.”

The Alcantaras suffered a financial setback two years ago when two of their children needed medical treatment. The son had to have 16 stitches in his arm after running into a tree while riding a bicycle. A daughter was treated for a stomach infection and, later in the year, for an ear infection. The family spent a year paying off the $1,200 in medical bills with money borrowed from friends and relatives.

“We didn’t qualify for Medi-Cal, (but) I had to pay those bills because the banks won’t loan money unless you have good credit, so I can’t have debts,” Alcantara said.

The business must prosper on its own for his family to survive, he said. And the help it is receiving from the Fullerton Interfaith volunteers is giving him and his family something to look forward to, he said.

Johnson said Fullerton Interfaith paid for 5,000 flyers that were distributed last month to homes and businesses throughout the area to lure customers into the restaurant. The Alcantaras have hired a part-time cook to help out during the heavy lunch hour.

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Because of the volunteers’ intervention, Alcantara said, he has changed the way he manages the business and constantly consults with Vartanian for advice. For example, he used to go to local grocery stores to buy food every morning and take the day’s earnings to buy more food the next day. Now he buys food once a week from a wholesale grocer in Los Angeles.

“We still have the fear that we may have to close down the business someday, but with all the help we’re getting now, we feel like maybe we can make it,” Alcantara said.

Meanwhile, the Alcantaras keep to their daily routine. The parents get to work at 5 a.m. Lucia, 37, takes her children, Aurora, 11, Breeze, 10, and Charlie, 8, to and from school each day in the family’s faded blue 1977 Chevrolet station wagon. Carla, 2, stays with her all day.

On weekends, Aurora helps out as a cashier and waitress at the restaurant.

On a recent afternoon, the children sat in four of the restaurant’s 19 plastic chairs doing homework as their mother watched from behind the tile and wood counter that her husband made.

“Sometimes I wonder why we’re working so hard for not even $1 at the end of the day, and that makes me feel sadness and dread, even though the people at the shelter are taking care of us, giving us food and clothes,” Lucia Alcantara said in Spanish.

The dream that one day she will be able to afford to pay for her children’s college education and buy a home eases the dread and sadness, she said.

Jaime Gomez, the New Vista Shelter’s manager, said the Alcantaras are a model family. “They’re a close-knit, hard-working bunch,” he said. “If every family had the same drive and motivation, every family would be a success.”

Business-wise, the Alcantaras are dedicated, Vartanian said. “What thrills Carlos the most is serving people a whole lot of good food with a big smile for a little price. It’s breaking his back, but he is going to make it.”

Added Carlos Alcantara, “The point is to keep (the restaurant) open against all the odds until we make it or break it.”