The Hernandez Grocery Store

Reprinted from The Dallas County Chronicle
Volume 19, Issue 2, Spring 2020

Amazing. That is all that can be said about a family-owned grocery store that has been in existence for 102 years. The odds of any business lasting more than a handful of years are exceedingly difficult—more than 80% of all new businesses close by their fifth birthday. To be a “mom and pop” neighborhood grocery that has had to withstand the Great Depression, the arrival of grocery store chains and Walmart, population shifts, the construction of a toll road that literally destroyed the neighborhood it served, speculative real estate pressures, and the challenges of being a minority-owned business, the story of the Hernandez Grocery is truly amazing.

Established by Pedro Hernandez in 1918 when he was just twenty-one, the grocery was originally located on McKinney Avenue and served the Little Mexico community where much of Dallas’ Hispanic population lived. At the time, it was one of the first and one of the few grocers to provide food items that people from Mexico were accustomed to using in their cooking.

As might be expected, the grocery, not unlike most businesses, experienced difficult times during the 1930s. Socorro Navarro Hernandez, Mr. Hernandez’s wife, recalled in 2007 that the store survived on barter. Customers, she said, would often “bring some cheese or chicken to pay. It was hard, and one year, we almost had to close.”

But they didn’t, and in the mid-1940s, the store moved a few blocks to Alamo Street. It was there for the next sixty years that the store operated even though the construction of the North Dallas Tollway during 1966-1968 irreparably changed Little Mexico. Still, the grocery continued, selling meats, meals, and other food.

It was only until 2009 when real estate in the area had become so expensive that the store finally left for a new location on Garland Road. However, just because it is no longer in Little Mexico doesn’t mean that the store isn’t continuing to serve its traditional customers.

Today’s Dallas now has 560,000 Latinos—90 times the number that lived in Dallas in 1940—and while the store’s current location is ten miles away from Little Mexico, the population of its new neighborhood is 52% Hispanic.

It is not often that a family-owned grocery store can become one of the oldest, continuously operated businesses in a city like Dallas. But what else would you expect from a store that has been so amazing?

The photos of Pedro Hernandez and Socorro Navarro Hernandez were graciously provided courtesy of their grandson, Macario Hernandez, PhD.