By Jonathan Turner, Hola America News
For nearly half a century, the Casas family has helped keep a longtime Mexican grocery tradition alive in downtown Silvis, building a business around authentic products, personal service and generations of loyal customers.
Today, Maria Casas and her son Aaron continue that tradition at San Luis Food Market/Taqueria, 818 1st Ave., a store whose roots stretch back to 1966.
That year, Nellie Puga opened the original San Luis market at 1008 1st Ave., naming it after the Mexican city where her family came from. In the late 1970s, Puga learned that a building two blocks away — formerly home to Katz Drug Store — was for sale and purchased it.
At a time when Mexican products were much harder to find in the Quad Cities, San Luis stood out for its wide selection. Customers could find everything from piñatas, pottery and cookware to fresh nopales, tamales and flour tortillas.
In 1979, Puga retired and sold the business to Pedro and Maria Casas. The couple opened their San Luis market in 1980, beginning a new chapter for a business that would become part of their family’s life for decades.
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Pedro already knew the store well. He had been delivering Mexican products to San Luis from Chicago before purchasing it.
Pedro already knew the store well. He had been delivering Mexican products to San Luis from Chicago before purchasing it.
Pedro died in 2022 at age 69, but Maria and Aaron have continued the family business with the same emphasis on variety and personal customer service.
“I love to take care of my customers and converse with them,” Maria, 75, said. “I know the customers, and I’ve gotten close to a lot of families.”
For Maria, the store has always been about more than selling groceries. It was also a partnership with her husband.
“We would work in conjunction with each other,” she said. “We’d work with each other to make it work.”
Even after Pedro’s death, Maria has no plans to step away.
She plans to keep working “until God wants me to retire,” she said.
Her faith has helped sustain her through difficult times, including a battle with cancer years ago. Maria said she did not have much time to be afraid because she did not know how serious her condition was until doctors diagnosed her.
“They sent me to the hospital, and by that time I wasn’t really afraid because I was already finding Jesus,” she said. “Ever since God entered my life, there’s no impossible.”
Building the business again
Aaron, 50, has increasingly taken responsibility for the business while making sure his mother remains at the heart of it.
“I’ve been trying to grow it again little by little,” he said.
He has made improvements to the store, including repainting the interior, but he still gives Maria considerable freedom to make decisions.
“Even though I took over, I let my mom run the store,” Aaron said. “I let her decide what she wants.”
At the same time, Maria increasingly asks for her son’s opinion.
“She’ll come and ask me, ‘What do you think?’” Aaron said, noting that women of his mother’s generation often relied on their husbands when making major business decisions.
Aaron’s full-time job is driving for concrete supplier Hahn Ready Mix, but San Luis is never far from his mind.
“I gotta find solutions to everything. So even when I’m working, I’m taking care of the store,” he said. “I’ll be working, I’ll be driving, and I’ll be like, I need this done, or that. People call me.”
That work ethic runs deep in the Casas family.
Pedro came to the United States from Mexico with his family in 1964, when he was 11. He later worked at a tortilla factory in Chicago, eventually becoming one of its managers. Aaron was born in 1976.
San Luis was one of Pedro’s customers, and when the opportunity came to purchase the Silvis store, he took a chance.
“He asked his boss to loan him some money,” Aaron said, recalling that his father borrowed about $36,000 to help purchase the market.
“We grew from there, and he started growing and growing,” Aaron said. “He would still do the routes to Chicago for his boss. Every week he would go to Chicago.”
Surviving difficult times
The early years were not easy.
The farm crisis and economic downturn of the 1980s hit the region hard, but the Casas family held on.
“We went through it, we held through it, started growing our customers, and it just skyrocketed,” Aaron said.
As the Quad Cities’ Hispanic population grew, so did San Luis.
The market expanded during the 1990s into the area where its meat counter is now. The family also operated a small restaurant inside the business for years, until Aaron closed it during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Aaron graduated from United Township High School in 1994. As an only child, he felt a responsibility to stay close to home and help his parents.
“My mindset was, I have no brothers, no sisters, I gotta help my parents,” he said. “My dad would have understood if I wanted to go somewhere and stuff like that, but I just never did.”
Still, Aaron pursued some ventures of his own.
In 1998, he opened Pancho Villa’s, a Mexican restaurant near the Moline-Rock Island border in the location where Old Mexico now operates. He closed the restaurant shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.
Even while running the restaurant, Aaron continued helping with his father’s deliveries to Chicago. After closing Pancho Villa’s, he decided to pursue another family tradition: driving.
“I just had a wild idea to go learn how to drive semis,” he said.
He began delivering Mexican products throughout Iowa and as far away as Ohio and Kentucky.
“Driving’s in my blood, basically,” Aaron said. “My dad, his family in Mexico, they’re all drivers. That was the thing they always done, commercial driving. And my mom’s side, they’ve always been entrepreneurial.”
That entrepreneurial tradition continues throughout Maria’s family. Her brother owns Los Charros Restaurant in East Moline.
Aaron and his wife, Gabriela, who have three children, also operated a small Mexican grocery store in downtown East Moline for four years.
A business built on relationships
Aaron faced his own serious health challenge in 2012, when he was diagnosed with histoplasmosis, a respiratory infection. He underwent treatment for about a year and a half before recovering.
“Everybody was worried because I couldn’t move,” he said. “I felt so impotent to be home by myself. I started crying like, what the hell, man? This is not me. Because I used to always be strong, moving.”
The experience reinforced the importance of family, work and community — values Aaron says have also helped San Luis Food Market survive.
“We’ve built relationships with our customers. We don’t see them just as a number,” he said. “We’ve built relationships with them.”
For several years, from about 2006 to 2010, San Luis even produced its own tortillas, making and delivering between 200 and 300 cases each week.
Today, tortillas and meat remain among the store’s biggest sellers.
The family has also endured personal loss. Pedro suffered from kidney disease and underwent dialysis for more than six years before his passing.
“He would sit out here in front every now and then, but he was always so tired that he would just fall asleep,” Aaron recalled.
Yet the business Pedro and Maria built continues.
Generations of families have shopped at San Luis, helping sustain the market for 46 years under the Casas family’s ownership.
Keeping an independent Mexican grocery store operating, however, has become increasingly challenging.
“Unfortunately, we got Walmart, Jewel, Hy-Vee, big box stores, and they all want a piece of the pie,” Aaron said.
When his suppliers raise prices, San Luis often has little choice but to do the same, making it difficult to compete with large retailers.
“And you can’t compete with their prices,” he said. “Luckily we have pretty loyal customers.”
Competition has also increased among Mexican grocery stores in the Quad Cities.
“I’ve always believed that there’s always a piece of the pie for everybody, but it’s just getting smaller and smaller for all of us,” Aaron said.
At the same time, nearly every cost associated with running the business has increased.
“There’s not one thing that hasn’t gone up, especially meat,” he said.
Imported products, including vegetables from Mexico, have also been affected by higher costs and tariffs.
For the Casas family, the answer is to focus on something large retailers cannot always duplicate: personal relationships.
“So service is what we try to have to keep customers here,” Aaron said. “We’re treating them like they’re family.”
After nearly five decades under the Casas family’s ownership — and 60 years since San Luis first opened — that sense of family remains at the center of the market.
San Luis Food Market/Taqueria, 818 1st Ave. in Silvis, is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
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