Shining Shoes Is His Step to a Better Life

Shoe shining ain’t no science. Almost anybody can do it, says Candelario Tapia as he brushes a pair of black loafers, the kind with the flaps and tassels that lawyers and executives wear.

The shoeshine man is bent over the fancy slip-ons. His wrinkled shirt, stained with multicolored smudges, is unbuttoned at the top and hangs open as he works. His body is more middle-aged than muscular, but his forearms flex with sinewy definition, showing the daily conditioning of his occupation.

Tapia’s trained arms massage the leather in every direction. Up and down. Side to side. Back and forth. Fast at first, then slowly. He wraps his buffing cloth behind the loafer and pulls it tight from front to back until the polished hide squeaks and squeals.

“What does it mean when the shoes make that sound?” I ask.

“Estan ready,” he says without looking up, making the obvious seem funnier by mixing languages.

Sure, anybody can polish a pair of shoes. But nobody makes them sparkle like Candy, as his customers call him.

“You’ve seen his shine,” says Mike Hennessey, a real estate developer who used to work for the City of Santa Ana. “He burns it in there, and that will last forever.”

Hennessey liked Candy’s work so much he also referred his brother, Patrick, an attorney I met last week at the outdoor stand that faces a parking lot at 3rd and Sycamore, between Main and Broadway in downtown Santa Ana.

Candy’s humble, two-chair business doesn’t have a name and seems hidden out of the way. But actually, it’s strategically located at a multicultural urban nexus.

A block from the Fiesta Marketplace, the busy Latino shopping district. Surrounded by the Artists Village, an attempt at gentrification. A stone’s throw from the Civic Center and the new federal courthouse. And immediately adjacent to Trattoria Ciao, a popular downtown restaurant.

Candy shines everything from wingtips to huaraches. His customers reflect the city as social hodgepodge. They are lawyers on the way to court, police and highway patrolmen on their way to their stations, immigrant workers on the way to a Saturday night dance.

“That’s the fun about going there,” says Hennessey, who still stops for a shine when he can. “It’s a gathering place for people who would never talk to each other anywhere else.”

That’s what Candy likes about it, too. He gets to meet people from all walks of life (“de todas las clases sociales”). And they all tell him stories while he works.

“You have fun and you make money,” Candy says.

He’s been working eight years at this location, since he bought the metal-framed stand on credit. The business has been there about 25 years, he says; he took it over from the previous owner, an African American man.

It’s a dying trade. And that’s an advantage in disguise, Candy says. He knows he’s got little competition.

At times, though, he wishes he had a little help. He’s asked a few fellow immigrants to work the stand with him, but they all turn him down. The work seems too lowly to them now.

In Mexico, shoe shiners can still be found on street corners, plying their trade with passersby for a peso or two. But it’s considered a low-class job, Candy says. When people cross the border, they expect to move up. They certainly don’t come all this way to continue shining shoes.

“Shining shoes in the United States? Forget it! That doesn’t make it,” they tell him. (“Chale! De bolero y en Estados Unidos? No va.”)

Candy grew up in a large rural family in a ranch outside Aguascalientes in northern Mexico. His home town is so small it doesn’t even have a name, like his shoeshine stand.

He first came north in the early 1970s, working the avocado groves around Escondido. He liked the fresh air and freedom of the countryside where workers would climb the trees and sing to their hearts’ content, letting out those exuberant mariachi cries whenever they felt like it. Sometimes they sang so loudly the foreman had to shush them to keep from drawing the attention of La Migra.

Candy returned to Mexico after a couple of years, married and had three children, all now in their 20s. But he came back to California in the late 1980s to take advantage of the government’s offer of amnesty for certain undocumented workers. Candy got his legal residence, but his family stayed in Aguascalientes.

Frankly, he says, he didn’t want his wife and kids to come here because he wouldn’t be able to support them on this side of the border.

“It’s a struggle here,” he says. “If you don’t have an occupation and you don’t speak the language, what are you going to do? How can you make money?”

Back then, Candy found work as a busboy at the old Magic Pan in South Coast Plaza. By coincidence, that job led him to his career in shoe care.

A customer at the restaurant, Marilyn Hamilton, was manager of the shoeshine stand inside Nordstrom at the mall. She offered Candy a job as an assistant, assuring him he needed no experience.

Hamilton had taken the shoeshine job herself without knowing shellac from Shinola. She says she got by at first by faking it and by taking advice from helpful customers.

Candy took the job, but soon quit because he felt his English wasn’t good enough to converse with customers.

“He’s a very sweet, warmhearted, gentle man,” says Hamilton, who still runs the department store’s shoeshine operation. “And he’s very cheerful. I never saw him in a down moment.”

After quitting Nordstrom, Candy had the idea of becoming a mobile shoe shiner, pushing a cart around Santa Ana streets. But he said the city wouldn’t allow it. Eight years ago, he got the opportunity to buy his current stand on credit.

He pays $150 per month to rent his tiny patch of ground against a wall at the edge of the parking lot. He opens by 8 a.m. but arrives before 7 to sweep the courtyard of a nearby artists complex.

Candy can’t live by shoeshines alone. Four days a week, he also works as a busboy at a restaurant in Newport Beach. He closes his stand at 2 p.m. and starts his second job at 4.

His spartan lifestyle keeps costs low. He rents a room for $250 a month in a Santa Ana home shared with two men. And he’s stopped drinking, he says; alcoholism has destroyed lives in his own family.

With his extra income, Candy can afford to send $500 per month home to his wife and children in Mexico. He doesn’t appear to spend much on himself. Even if he wanted to squander his cash, he doesn’t have much free time to do it.

When he’s not working, he’s attending school two nights per week. He starts one class at 3 p.m. to prepare for his high school equivalency test, then another at 6 to improve his English pronunciation.

“If you’re not in school, you’re at the bars,” he warns.

Wednesday afternoon is his only time off. That’s when he does his wash and runs errands. But on the Wednesday I visited, Candy still took a customer after closing time. He was a demanding young Mexican who wanted to keep the light stitching on his heavy new hiking boots from turning dark with the polish. (No way, explained Candy, who wears a surgical glove to prevent staining his own flesh. He’s not a magician.)

His Mexican customers usually come in on weekends, with their western boots and their leather sandals. People can be pretty fussy even about humble footwear.

“What I would charge is more than they paid for the huarache,” jokes Candy, who gets four bucks for street shoes and five for boots, plus tips.

Candy says he gets satisfaction from doing a good shine, pointing to my brilliantly polished black Bally wingtips. The local artists even tell him there’s an art to what he does.

OK, Candy smiles, bemused. So now it’s the art of the shoeshine.

“But everything is an art,” he says. “If it’s done right.”

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.