The rush started at 2 p.m. as high school students and families walked in. Ten people crammed into a small “panaderia,” a bakery, in East Boston. Some waited in line to pay, others picked out their pastries from four large display cases.
Elvia Guzman, owner of Lolly’s Bakery, quickly rang up customers, giving them a warm smile and making small talk.
While Guzman is happy about the success of her store, she is bracing for change in the neighborhood she has been living in for 20 years.
“East Boston had been kind of forgotten, and then [the city] came and repaired the train stations and started doing a lot of construction,” she said, “People are buying properties very fast.”
Guzman thinks that this change, along with graduating college students starting families, is pushing her community to move out.
Guzman is all too familiar with the transition of culture in her neighborhood. Lolly’s Bakery is situated in a predominantly Latino neighborhood, but it was not always this way, she claimed.
When Guzman bought the bakery in 1997, the neighborhood and the bakery itself was Italian.
She continued selling Italian pastries for four years in order to cater to the community she lived in and partly because she was new at baking.
“It was hard,” she said, “I kind of felt the [judgment], like, ‘What’s a Spanish person doing here selling pastries?’ That’s what I felt from the customers.”
The bakery did not make much profit when Guzman first took over because of the cultural difference, she said.
“At the beginning we didn’t know if we were going to close, because there were those days where we were barely making ends meet.”
As there was a cultural transition from Italians to Latinos, the bakery started to transition as well. Lolly’s Bakery grew more popular once Guzman started changing the recipes and making pastries that were common to Mexico and other Central American countries. Guzman says she feels like she has to add new equipment every year to keep up with the high demand.
Guzman also likes to express her Latin culture through her pastries.
“We like to keep those pastries that are typical for holidays. We offer them to our customers so they can keep those traditions and teach them to their children.”
Guzman says she hopes to meet the demand of different types of pastries as the neighborhood becomes more diverse.
“I want to incorporate the pastries that these new neighbors want and enjoy,” she said. “Although we do see them come in and try our pastries, but, you know, they have a different type of product.”
Jackie Contreras 