The Mestizo Coffee House

If you want to know where most of my free time was spent this summer look no further than the Mestizo Coffee House.

The Coffee House is located on 631 West North Temple Salt Lake City, Utah. It's in a neighborhood called Rose Park. Rose Park is Salt Lake City's "bad" neighborhood. High levels of drug and gang activity, little development, lots of Spanish, the kind of place my that scares some of my friends. But in truth the neighborhood is a victim of cultural and economic marginalization at the hands of the city. There's more love and community activism in Rose Park than in the rest of SLC combined.

The Coffee House is named after the Poem of the same name by Francisco Alarcon. In the poem Alarcon describes his racial identity as a Mestizo, a noun in spanish that describes someone of mixed ancestory. It is usually used to describe someone of mixed spanish, native american, and african racial backgrounds. However Alarcon takes it farther, the noun is based on the verb mestizar and can mean anyone of mixed decent, Alarcon in the poem, speaks of the mixed racial past of anyone of spanish decent, since spaniards are a mix of greek, pheonician, roman, celtic, german, north african, and iberian peoples. The poem however in particular does speak to a Mexican Mestizo Identity.

The Coffee Shop embodies this poem by promoting a mesoamerican theme and atmosphere to its store. It also funds the Mestizo Institute of Art and Culture (MICA) which will be the subject of a later blog. Both the Mestizo Coffee House and MICA provide a venue and local for community activists to gather and trade ideas, as well as a local and numerous programs for educating and training the youth of this otherwise ignored neighborhood.

The Coffee House and MICA provide space for local artists as well, not just in the form of MICA gallerey space but also as a venue for musical and spoken art. MICA is often used as a theater as well to display independent films of local, national and international origin.

The crowd attracted to the Mestizo Coffee House is diverse but all the different components of that crowd tend to share a love for art and a sence of community responsibility and a desire to serve the local community. The profits from the Coffee Hosue fund MICA and the local afterschool and educational programs housed in the Coffee House. From this aspect of the Coffee Houses Mission and Mission Statement comes the phrase associated with the Coffee House "Que tu cafecito quente/Make your Coffee Count"

And by the way, they serve damn good coffee.