Raspa Revolution
IT WAS 7:30 ON A FRIDAY NIGHT, AND THE LINE already stretched to the next block. A teenage carhop rushed back and forth between a row of waiting cars and a converted house, its walls airbrushed with a mashup of celebrities from Drake to Kim Kardashian to Selena. When she arrived to take orders, the customers, all in their teens or early 20s, rolled down their windows. They held up pictures on their phones as she scribbled in meticulous shorthand on her notepad. The goal: making the snow cone they would receive an hour or so later an exact replica of the image on the screen.
“Our motto is, ‘If we wouldn’t post it on Instagram, we won’t send it out,’” said Ashley Vasquez, co-owner of the Iced Cube raspa stand in Elsa, a community of about 6,000 people 20 miles northeast of McAllen. She watched from a pink picnic table, one eye on the line of cars, the other on her daughter playing T-ball in the yard. Every 15 minutes or so, she picked up her phone to post something new on social media. “You see the difference almost right away,” she explained, referring to the power of a single post to draw customers. “It’s crazy.”
Last summer, less than a month after Iced Cube opened, one of Vasquez’s posts went viral, igniting a summerlong frenzy with lines of up to 75 cars and four-hour wait times. The crowd eventually grew
