It was 10 a.m. in San Luis, a small town in southern Colorado, and the grocery store had only been open for an hour. But already owner Devon Peña was dealing with a lot. Two workers were out with COVID-19, and the guy he’d hired to operate the forklift in the stockroom was proving unreliable. Then the butcher burst into his office and told him that all the freezers were down. “Oh, crap,” Peña said. “We’re going to lose thousands of dollars’ worth of meat.”
The butcher and another employee began frantically moving food from the freezer into the fridges. Melting blueberries dripped blue goo onto the floor.
For the past few months, Peña had faced a string of similar emergencies. Running a business isn’t easy. “I’m a professor and a farmer,” he exclaimed. “I don’t know how to run a grocery! I’m learning now.”
This is not a typical grocery store, and Peña is not a typical grocery store owner. He’s the founder and director of The Acequia Institute, a not-your-typical environmental and food justice organization that purchased the market earlier this year. Started in the 1980s and incorporated in 2006, the institute has tackled projects ranging from land restoration in the San Luis Valley to scholarship support for local students entering environmental and health fields. Peña himself is a professor of environmental anthropology at the University of Washington who divides his time between San Luis and Seattle. He sees the market as a way to merge the institute’s many goals.
The San Luis grocery store, long known as the “R&R,” had been in the same family for 165 years, ever since Dario Gallegos started it in 1857, making it the longest continuously operated business in Colorado. But when Gallegos’ greatgreat-grandson, Felix Romero, decided to retire in early 2022, nobody in the family wanted to take over. So The Acequia Institute made an offer and rebranded the R&R as the San Luis People’s Market.
Luckily for Peña, Romero still lives upstairs, and he was in the store when the freezer broke down. “It’s nothing major. Don’t panic,” he
