Hasta Muerte Coffee is a collectively run, worker-owned Latinx coffee shop coming to Fruitvale and 27th in Oakland in early 2017. The founders envision an inclusive space that offers small bites, good coffee, a specialty bookstore, community events, resources and workshops. I interviewed two of the three partners during the last week of their Kickstarter campaign. Matt is co-founder of the Bikery, a bike shop and community center that trains and mentors youth from all over Oakland, and Kari is a first generation Xicanx, visual artist, and self-publisher. Matt was born in Oakland and moved around the Bay Area until returning to the San Antonio/Fruitvale area. Kari is originally from southern California, and like her partners went to U.C. Berkeley and then stayed in the Bay. Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Tell me about the project.
M: There are two main facets to what we’re trying to do, one being just to create a stable and warm work environment where we as the workers share profits of the business.
K: And then having the autonomy to run a space the way we want and that fits the community we’re apart of. We want to extend the way we move through this world and our beliefs in anti-oppression and anti-racism into our work life, instead of going to a job because we have to.
M: There’s a lot of room in the space for creating a multi-use coffee shop, event space, and meeting space. Even though coffee is something we’re excited about, at the end of the day coffee is the hustle, and we’re bringing life and vibrancy to it—that’s why alongside coffee we’ll have other elements.
K: In addition to a community space and zine library we also envision having info shops, skill workshops, decolonial nutrition classes, anti-displacement resources, bike clinics, things like that.
What’s up with the name? Until death?
M: We had this desire to say we’re about more than coffee. We’re in community and solidarity, and we’re in it for life.
There’s often a resurgence of cooperatives in times of economic crisis, do you feel like there is an economic crisis in your local economy that this business is responding to?
M: Here are the things we’ve seen in the last 3 to 5 years in Oakland: an increasing amount of white gentrification, which means to say a gradual shift in racial and cultural hegemony. It’s not just the families we work with that are getting evicted and pushed out, not just the fact that rents have gone up by 50 to 75 percent, but it’s also just about who takes up space and who feels comfortable. A lot of community spaces have been taken away abruptly, physical spaces of gathering are quickly disappearing.
Tell me about your backgrounds and how they brought you to this project?
K: My parents are from Mexico, I have eight siblings and I was the only one born in the states. My most important takeaway from UC Berkeley was being introduced to cooperatives, which changed and shaped how I view food and community. After Cal I did food justice work, facilitating cooking and nutrition classes for low-income communities across the east bay both in English and Spanish. That really shaped my direction towards this, along with self publishing and running a print shop. I like creating community events and facilitating places for folks to gather and connect. Right now, we need to step up our game in building these networks and social fabrics and help people heal.
M: I co-founded the bike shop seven years ago and in that time we’ve done a lot of job training for community youth. I’ve met a lot of people who have had to move away from Oakland with their families, and having a similar path, I think it’s important that if we are building something for ourselves we have to build something for the community as well. Especially in the new Trump regime, people are feeling scared and we want to have a place where people feel safe.
Can you talk about what it means to you to be a Latinx business owner and how you think it has (and will) influence your business decisions?
K: We chose Fruitvale because the long history of black and brown folks here, and we’re inspired by that and inspired to continue that legacy and building solidarity with community and offering support that reinforces what we want to see here and what others want to see.
We’re here very intentionally.
Choosing to be a cooperative is a somewhat risky business decision: what are the challenges you’re anticipating and how are you addressing them?
M: We have a lot of collective experience. We’re going in knowing that it’s going to be challenging and that’s important. We’ve sat with co-founders of Arizmendi and Alchemy, and members of others like Rainbow Grocery. We’ve talked with a lot of collective projects that have made it.
K: We’ve had a lot of experience non-hierarchical space and we’re very focused on making the space sustain itself on coffee. We have also talked to a lot of folks that didn’t make it and who were also super willing to support us.
Are there spaces here or elsewhere that have created the type of environment that you hope this space creates, and if so what are the things you are going to try to emulate?
M: We want it to be like a childhood living room, but bigger and nicer, with a kid corner, bright colors, somewhere my daughter can come and hang out. Growing up in Stockton the coffee shops were just these chill small businesses that were welcoming for young people. It felt representative: there was nice artwork on the wall, there were punk kid band stickers, they felt lived in.
K: I think of my grandma’s kitchen in Guanajuato, with plants in cazuelas and the bright colors and the plates that might not match. A place that lends itself to convivir.*
For more info or to support Hasta Muerte’s Kickstarter (ending December 1st) click here.