Cuautla, Mexico, Community Here Pumps Prosperity Into Hometown

BELLEVUE

It sounds like the mother of all parties.

Every year about Christmastime, a group of Seattle-area restaurant owners and workers go back to their hometown in central Mexico to enjoy the fruits of their labors.

For 10 days in the little town of Cuautla, Mexico, they celebrate.

They eat and drink and hold bull fights in a ring - the third-largest in Mexico - that they built with their earnings.

The festivities include a four-hour Mexican-style concert, combining a rodeo with singing by superstar musicians like Antonio Aguilar and Vicente Fernandez. The concert attracts as many as 5,000 people from around Guadalajara, 100 miles to the northeast, who pay the equivalent of a day's wages to attend.

And they forget the hard work that made some of them multimillionaires, at least in Mexican terms. These people are part of a clique that is half-family, half-business. About 1,200 in number, they own or staff roughly 150 Mexican restaurants in the Pacific Northwest, according to Pepe Ramos, owner of the Burien-based Azteca chain and the most successful member of the clan.

They also form a link between the Seattle-Tacoma area (population: 2.6 million) and Cuautla, Mexico (population: 4,000) - a link that has pumped enough money into Cuautla's economy to transform it from a dirt-poor town into a thriving modern community.

The tie between Seattle and Cuautla goes back to 1957, when Lucy Lopez left Mexico for Puget Sound. After working at a series of Mexican restaurants, including the Mexican pavilion at the 1962 World's Fair, Lopez started her own restaurant, Lucy's Restaurant, at Pike Street and Sixth Avenue in Seattle, in 1974.

Lopez's first restaurant was a huge success. Word quickly spread back to Cuautla, and the influx of immigrants to Seattle began.

Lopez's cousin, Ramon Barajas, came in 1976, and later started two restaurant chains - El Tapatio (with restaurants in Seattle and Renton) and Toreros (six restaurants from SeaTac to Bellevue to Everett).

In 1977, Andres Cardinas came to work as Lopez's chef. He now owns the seven-unit Mazatlan chain.

And a year later, Pepe Ramos, Lopez's distant cousin, joined the growing Cuautla community in Seattle. After learning the trade under Barajas, he opened Azteca.

With three brothers who followed him, Ramos now owns 29 Aztecas. Two weeks ago, Ramos opened Papa Luigi's, an Italian Restaurant on Pacific Highway South, becoming the first of the clan to move into non-Mexican cuisine. Many others, including the owners of Las Margaritas (eight restaurants), Jalisco (five), Puerto Vallarta (five), followed the same pattern: come to Seattle, work for awhile in a restaurant started by a cousin, go out on your own.

"The same thing that happened to me happened to all these guys from Cuaulta," says Ramos. "Everyone who came from there has been successful," he adds.

Lopez, who at 64 has gone into "semi-retirement" by selling seven of her eight restaurants, isn't shy about claiming the title,"Godmother" of Cuautla, the name given her by many of her hometown friends and relatives.

Today, she says, because of the movement she started, Cuautla has telephones, a medical center and a church. Homes are worth more than many in Mexico. "The whole town lives like kings," she said.

Lopez, Ramos, and many of the others from Cuautla are already planning their trip home for this year's Christmas party.

They say it will be one of the biggest ever. Flights on airlines serving Guadalajara, the nearest airport, are already filling up.