José Hernández pointed to a bag of dried yellow flowers from behind the counter of his Lake Street store in south Minneapolis. “This is good for diabetes,” he said in Spanish.
Tronadora is one of the popular herbs that helped save Hernández’s suitcase store. When the market for suitcases bottomed out with the outbreak of COVID-19, he took inspiration from his rural Mexican upbringing and switched to selling medicinal plants.
Now his shop – called La Petaca, Spanish for suitcase – has developed a customer base. People come looking for all kinds of plants, and as demand has grown, so has the range of Hernández’s inventory. The store fills a need among members of the Latino community looking for alternatives to traditional pharmaceuticals.
“The person comes here and asks you for a product and tells you what it’s for, so you take the product and now you sell it to other people,” he said.
Hernández, 48, came to Minnesota undocumented from the Mexican state of Tabasco in 2003. He immigrated in search of a better life and to support his family in Mexico, he said, but Minnesota has since become home to his. He worked a variety of jobs until he earned his legal residency permit in 2018.
A year after getting his green card, Hernández started thinking about starting his own business. He was tired of working for others.
“In 2019, I lost my job, so I started to see what it takes to start a business,” he said. “I would just focus on selling travel bags.”
Advisers were skeptical and the organizations he asked for help told him it was not the right time to start a business. “Everybody would tell me, ‘Don’t do that,'” he said.
But Hernández pushed through and opened his store at Plaza Mexico, 417 E. Lake St., in March 2020, just as the pandemic was spreading. He was soon forced to close the store, which was then called J & B Alta Tendencia.
When it finally reopened, Hernández found that COVID had stifled travel so much that no one was buying suitcases. He had come from a small community where herbal medicines were used by his grandparents, mother and neighbors to treat ailments such as headaches, sore throats and fevers. So he decided to take advantage of that knowledge and sell herbs instead.
The store was in danger of closing again just weeks later, due to civil unrest that erupted after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in May 2020. Protesters demonstrated for several nights on Lake Street, home to the department’s third precinct headquarters. police, and some businesses were looted and burned.
Hernández’s store, located about two miles west of the Third Zone, was not hit, but merchandise was thrown out as neighboring vendors’ stalls were looted or damaged. Hernández, who doesn’t like to discuss what happened, said what’s important is that he was still able to work.
Most of his customers come from outside the Twin Cities and keep the business afloat, he said. Some travel from North and South Dakota to gather medicinal herbs.
Hernández said there are good times and bad, as with any business. The store, like many in Plaza Mexico, is not fully stocked right now because vendors tend to offer fewer items during the beginning of the year to save money. Business is entering some of its slow months.
“There are days when nothing is sold and others where we sell a month’s worth,” he said. But he added that it doesn’t bother him, smiling and pointing up: “He decides everything.”
The aromas of earth and flowers permeate the small, crowded space. The walls are lined with packages of dried herbs, vitamins and over-the-counter medicines from various Latin American countries. Up on the walls on the grass sit a few suitcases, a reminder of how the business was born.
Hernández’s limited English skills have limited his customer base, along with non-Latino shoppers who are unfamiliar with medicinal plants and skeptical of their use as alternative medicine. But he said he’s grateful to Minnesotans for giving him the opportunity to live his dream.
“Americans don’t understand our habits — they can’t understand how tea can lower blood sugar levels,” Hernández said. “We don’t know everything. But it can help, this medicine is a help.”
This story comes to you from Sahan newspaper, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color. Sign up for one free newsletter to get Sahan’s stories in your inbox.
