Signs of Nostalgia Attract Customers, Compadres

Not far from the county offices and the courthouses that define Santa Ana as the heart of Orange County government, the Uruapan Body Shop opens for business each day. Not far away is Patzcuaro Restaurant and just down the road is the Michoacan Beauty Shop.

The businesses and many more in the predominately Latino city are named after towns in Michoacan, a state in central Mexico. Leaders of a local Michoacan Federation say as many as one in five Mexicans in Santa Ana come from there.

The business names represent both pride and promotion. They speak to the owners’ interest in finding old neighbors and friends, their love for their native land and the simple nostalgia that the names carry. “Mexicans create a strong identification with their birthplace,” said Jorge Bustamante, a sociology professor at Notre Dame and founder of Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana.

“In Santa Ana, you see it more because there are so many people from one place.... It’s more than nostalgia,” said Bustamante. “It’s a calling. It’s to attract people and to explain characteristics that the owner or business may have.”

The city’s license rolls show 11 businesses with Michoacan in the name, two with Morelia -- the state capital -- and two with Uruapan, a Michoacan city that prides itself on avocado production.

But the official numbers don’t tell the whole story. Many businesses in Santa Ana are licensed under the name of their owners but operate under another name -- and many of these also contain references to Michoacan.

For such shop owners, the name of the business carries deep significance.

Video Apatzingan on Harbor Boulevard rents videos and sells CDs of musicians and groups from Michoacan -- bands with names like the Apatzingan Aces. The owner paid $3,000 extra to get all the letters of his native city of 120,000 on his business sign: Apatzingan.

“I didn’t even flinch about the price,” said Agustin Prado, the store owner. “I’m very proud of where I’m from and I wanted people to know it. I also wanted to create a sense of community for Mexican people.”

The ice cream at La Nueva Reyna Michoacan is made with fruits and a caramel made with goat’s milk, both from the state.

“These are the ingredients we remember from there, and to make what we had there, we need to put them in our ice cream,” said co-owner Marta Silva. “It is a wonderful reminder of home.”

Pedro Castillo, a history professor at UC Santa Cruz, said the business names say, “You are not in Michoacan anymore, but we are here.”

Michoacan immigrants are not the only ones to name their businesses after their homelands. There are several restaurants in Santa Ana named Tapatia, the word that describes a person from Guadalajara, Mexico.

But Michoacan and the names of its cities, mountains and even lakes seem to dominate the business landscape. Michoacan immigrants have been streaming to Santa Ana for decades.

The connection between Orange County’s largest city and the Mexican state runs so deep that on major holidays, thousands of people from Santa Ana head back to Michoacan.

The immigrants come mostly from farming communities -- some that have been reduced to ghost towns as people have gone north.

The emigration trend is so well-established that the governor of Michoacan recently visited Santa Ana, and officials from that state have set up cultural exchanges with the city.

“There’s so much of Michoacan here that people in Michoacan often say this is Santa Ana, Michoacan,” said Roberto Laurean, president of the recently formed Orange County Michoacan Federation.

“It’s really no surprise that the businesses would be named after Michoacan,” Laurean said. “People are proud of where they are from and they want to tell people, ‘Hey, I’m from where you are from.’ ”

Ariel Lopez renamed his business Morelia Income Tax four years ago and immediately saw a surge in business.

“I didn’t do it to make money,” said Lopez, who visits the state nearly every month and keeps pictures of historic monuments at his desk. “I began to think that people forget where they are from and I wanted to encourage them to think of their roots.”

Lopez misses Morelia so much that he tries to go as often as he can. After tax season, he has gone for as long as two months to visit family.

“There are great things in the United States, but you can’t erase what is your home,” he said.

A little more than a year ago, Alberto Onosfre, 40, an immigrant from a small town near Zamora, Michoacan, opened his third restaurant. Each is called Taqueria Zamora, and attracts a crowd -- mostly in blue work pants and uniform shirts -- even for breakfast.

The name, Onosfre said, “makes people remember a place in Mexico. It’s like entering a little piece of Mexico. We are saying ‘make yourself at home.’ ”

But in Onosfre’s case, the name was not of his choosing. He bought the first restaurant from a woman who also owns the building.

She rents him the space, and as part of the lease, she required him to keep Zamora in the business name.

Knowing how business works in Santa Ana, it was a caveat he didn’t mind at all.