Citlaly Medina could hear the panic in her grandmother’s voice as soon as she answered the phone.
Quique’s Discount Store was on fire. The business had been in the family for nearly three decades. Medina said her grandmother, Guadalupe Morales, told her to hurry.
Medina rushed to the store on East Hyde Park Boulevard in Inglewood. While en route, Medina’s father sent her a TikTok of the fire, warning her that it was bad.
Medina, 29, remembers arriving at a hectic scene on Oct. 8. Fire trucks filled the block as more than 100 crew members worked on the fire, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Medina said the smoke made it hard to breathe as she frantically searched for her grandparents.
She found her grandfather first, standing across the street from the front of the store, tears filling his eyes as he watched the store burn, offering only a solemn “that’s it.”
A few moments later, she found her grandmother crying in a chair several yards away from the fire, wearing a mask and surrounded by the Inglewood neighbors she had grown close to over the years.
“It was heartbreaking,” Medina said. “My first thought was that I knew that this [store] was their purpose to get up every morning and that broke my heart because what happens after that?”
In the end, the fire destroyed six spaces, including Quique’s Discount Store, and one person was hospitalized due to smoke inhalation, according to fire officials.
The loss of the store arrives amid troubling times for many Latino-owned businesses in LA. Rising operating costs coupled with the fallout from the federal government’s mass deportation effort have pushed many Latino-owned businesses to the brink. A UCLA–UC Berkeley study says more than 15,000 people have been deported in the LA area since last year.
Morales was already struggling to keep the store going before the fire, according to her granddaughters. Foot traffic had remained slow since the peak of the immigration raids last year and the store’s landlord had recently raised the rent.
“She was in fear when everything started happening because of the lack of oversight of what agents are doing,” Medina said. “She had very little sales [but] afraid or not, she had to keep going.”
With her primary source of income now gone, Morales can’t help but worry how she’ll get by.
“I’m not angry or desperate, but I’m very sad,” Morales told The LA Local in Spanish. “I’m wondering how am I going to manage in the coming months, how I’ll pay my mortgage, buy food, and cover all the other expenses I have to take care of.”
Morales’ family has set up a GoFundMe to help offset losses from the fire.
But it’s not just the financial loss that’s worrying the family. Loved ones said the store provided Morales and her husband, both 77, with a sense of purpose and social connection. Without it, their loved ones worry for their wellbeing.
“[The store] made her feel useful now that she’s almost in her 80s,” said Angeles Medina, 28, Citlaly Medina’s sister. “For us, we’re worried that now she doesn’t have something to wake up for everyday and we don’t want her to get sick or depressed.”
Originally from Guanajuato, Mexico, Morales worked hard to go from working at LA swap meets to becoming a business owner. She had worked out of the strip mall on East Hyde Park Boulevard since 1998 — when both Quique’s and their family’s gift store next door opened. Morales was the owner of the gift store at first before taking over Quique’s from her daughter in 2017. The stores weren’t just economic lifelines for Morales but also a holder of years worth of memories.
It was at that small strip mall that Morales accomplished her lifelong dream of becoming a business owner — where she watched countless kids from the neighborhood grow up, and made some of her strongest social connections. Morales is from South Central, and without a reason to visit Inglewood every day, she fears those ties could also be lost underneath the rubble.
“We’ve had a lot of people call and just talk about how safe they felt to go to her,” Citlaly Medina said. “Sometimes it wasn’t to buy, it was just to talk… she [created] a safe space for the community.”
In the week after the fire, Medina has found her grandmother crying as she questions what will now fill the space in her life the fire has created. A source of comfort has been the relationships she built in Inglewood. Neighbors have been sharing her phone number throughout the community, so that they can check on her.
“The community is going to miss me and I’m going to miss them,” Morales said.
