The new Portland Mercado will feature enhanced commercial spaces, including a commissary kitchen, more community gathering areas, and an improved food truck plaza with covered seating. The Portland Mercado aims to reopen by the end of 2025.
Courtesy of Hacienda CDC
For almost a decade, the Portland Mercado has been an anchor for local Latinx communities serving as a food hub, marketplace and cultural center, and has been a business incubator for more than a hundred entrepreneurs.
In the early morning of Jan. 3, 2024, a fire tore through the Mercado’s Market Hall, destroying the entire building and shuttering the onsite commissary kitchen.
Now, a year later, there are plans to rebuild with a vision for Mercado 2.0.
Ernesto Fonseca is the CEO of Hacienda Community Development Corporation, which oversees the space. He spoke with OPB’s “All Things Considered” co-host Crystal Ligori to talk about the Mercado’s future.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Crystal Ligori: Let’s go back to the start. Within that very first month after the fire, there was a real outpouring of support for the businesses affected. I know a relief fund was created — can you talk us through what that relief fund helped with, in the first initial few months after the fire?
Ernesto Fonseca: Absolutely. Well, we had to shutter the Portland Mercado right away, and the few businesses that stayed behind, which are the food carts, experienced significant losses in terms of food sales. The people that had businesses inside the food hall and the bigger market, well, they were gone. Absolutely gone. Their employees, they have unemployment to come back to. They themselves lost their livelihood for the time being.
So what we did in addition to freezing rents for the entire year of 2024 to anybody that stayed behind — primarily the food cart owners — is that we started a fundraising campaign. We raised over $250,000, and we distributed every single penny of those dollars to every vendor.
I believe we were pretty successful in actually maintaining and sustaining these businesses. All of the businesses that used to be inside the Portland Mercado continue to have a second venue in other locations, and we are hoping that at least the great majority of them come back to Mercado, once it is fully reopened.
Ligori: For people unfamiliar with the Portland Mercado, can you give us an idea of what it was, and what Hacienda CDC wanted for the space when it first opened?
Fonseca: The Portland Mercado was, is and will continue to be a place where not only small businesses come to thrive, but also a place where the community comes to enjoy themselves.
The Portland Mercado was conceived to support and to give a place of business to primarily women that were making Latino food. They were making tamales, they were making tacos, they were doing a lot of these things in a very informal way–they didn’t have a base to distribute, promote and welcome people to have their food.
We were able to help many of these small businesses to not only have their first brick-and-mortar store, but also to expand into different markets. Now, you can see some of them are already in different places, not only in Southeast [Portland], but also in downtown, and it is exciting to see many of them expanding to different locations. Some of them are already mass producing some of their products and placing them in local [grocery stores] like New Seasons or Market of Choice.
So that was the bigger idea that the Portland Mercado had at the time — for us to support the development of small business owners. With this Portland Mercado 2.0, the goal is to welcome back any of these entrepreneurs in the food industry and new ones, and be ready to be stakeholders on the actual ownership of the Portland Mercado.
Ligori: Let’s talk a little bit about that. How are the plans for the future Mercado going to be different?
Fonseca: Before I get to the actual vision of the Mercado, I’ve got to say that our insurance and legal system is a little convoluted. It took us about five months for us to clear the path for insurance companies to give us access to the entire building. We were not able to go inside some parts of the Portland Mercado, because there was an ongoing investigation. And given that we had multiple insurance companies involved in the case — from the city of Portland’s insurance company to our own, to the different insurance policies that the small business owners had — everyone’s insurance companies were basically trying to find who was the liable party for this whole thing. It’s going to be a very expensive claim overall speaking, including all the losses that people are continuing to have to this date.
A fire tore through the Portland Mercado on January 3, 2024, destroying businesses housed in the Market Hall, including Barrio and Xocotl. The fire disrupted the livelihoods of Latino entrepreneurs and uprooted small businesses. Hacienda CDC has launched a campaign to secure the remaining funds needed to rebuild the Mercado by the end of 2025.
Courtesy of Hacienda CDC
So once we were allowed back in, I believe it was August, we were already designing from what we had before. So the Portland Mercado is going to have a second floor that is going to be a bar with a terrace, and then part of the first floor is going to continue to have at least a bakery, an additional bar and also the commissary kitchen is coming back.
So those are some of the preliminary things, but some of the other bigger changes that you’re going to see is that the plaza is going to be fully refurbished with a hive-looking roof that is going to be covered in the entire plaza, for people to be able to gather even during the rainy days. So there are some big changes that are coming back at the Portland Mercado, and I am hopeful that we can accomplish all of those changes within this year.
Ligori: I love this idea of Portland Mercado 2.0. So when can we expect it to be fully reopened?
Fonseca: Well, we need our permits [from the City of Portland] completed. As we know the holidays got in the middle, so we submitted our permits back in October, November. It’s on a small set of plans–the Mercado is not that big. We are hoping to have some comments from the city by the end of this month. Once they give us those comments, we can get back to them, and then they will have another 30 days for them to return back to us [with] a full permit.
A rendering of a seating area for the future Portland Mercado. Prosper Portland, Oregon Community Foundation, the Harbourton Foundation, and individual donors have raised over $1,000,000 toward rebuilding the Mercado. This winter, Hacienda CDC will officially launch the Portland Mercado Capital Campaign to secure the remaining funds needed for the Mercado's new plaza.
Courtesy of Hacienda CDC
So my hope is that by March or April, we have a set of plans that is fully approved, and if all the stars align, we start construction in May and no later than June. It’s going to take us about six months to get the whole place completed. We are going in with every penny and every labor force that we have to make it happen as soon as possible. I wish we could reopen the market during the summer, but it’s looking like it’s going to be in the winter time.
Obviously the rebuild of the Portland Mercado is going to be extremely expensive. We are collectively and actively fundraising for the Portland Mercado, so we welcome your support into making this dream and this community, this place back to life. What you will see coming forward in the next 12 months, is going to be a revamped Portland Mercado with bigger stakes for the actual entrepreneurs that will be joining us. It is my hope that this entity will continue to be identified as part of the community, and not necessarily as a property that is owned by Hacienda CDC. That legal component is irrelevant when an asset like that really brings that much joy and a place of gathering to the community.