[Times photos: John Pendygraft]
German Mendoza, 19, left, and Jose Mendoza, 21, eat during their lunch break in the grocery aisles of Mexico Lindo Market.

By CHRISTINA HEADRICK

CLEARWATER -- At the Mexico Lindo Market, piles of yucca, tomatillos, jalapenos and mangos greet anyone who steps inside. A store clerk straightens the produce, including fresh cactus for $1.29 a pound.

Santiago Galicia prepares salsa for the lunch rush at the Clearwater grocery store and restaurant.

Nearby, a group of Mexican teenagers sits at a table, drinking Jarrito soft drinks and laughing. Two women chat as they walk the aisles, packed with jars of mole sauce, cartons of the sweet rice-water drink horchata, bags of tamale husks, containers of guanabana yogurt and refrigerators of fresh Mexican cheeses.

On the north side of the shop, the market's young butcher lays out exotic cuts of meat: cow's head, oxtail and beef tripe, among them. And at the market's taqueria, a Mexican-style lunch counter, the cook serves up open-faced tacos on warmed corn tortillas for $1.34, made with beef or more exotic fillings like beef tongue, and topped with an assortment of fresh-made salsas.

The scene is hardly unusual in this city's growing community of mostly Mexican-owned, Hispanic businesses. By city estimates, Clearwater now has 28 such businesses, serving the Spanish-speaking world within the world of Clearwater.

"We can find things from our country here that they don't have in other stores," said Pela Cadena, a 30-year-old Clearwater resident from Acapulco, Mexico, who has shopped at the Mexico Lindo market for the past eight years.

Often, such Hispanic businesses in the city advertise only in Spanish, through Spanish AM-radio stations, the Hispanic Yellow Pages and other local Spanish publications. Some restaurants don't include English on their menus -- since nearly all of their customers speak Spanish.

Businesses range from Envios del Valle, 1126 S Myrtle Ave., where people talk to family members back in Hidalgo, Mexico, through live video feeds, to Feria Musical, 1484 Gulf-to-Bay Blvd., where customers shop for Latin dance music on compact discs.

The majority of local Hispanic shops, however, are groceries such as Mexico Lindo or restaurants such as Little Mexico, 1118 S Myrtle Ave., where meals come with handmade, thick, fresh-cooked corn tortillas unlike those sold in local American stores. For the city's Mexican residents, these enterprises offer a taste of home.

One of Clearwater's oldest Hispanic businesses is the Mexico Lindo Market, 814 Court St. The market's founder, Jesse Carrillo, 36, came to the United States as a teenager from Zacatecas, Mexico. He worked odd jobs in Chicago, then moved here.

With money he had saved and help from his family, Carrillo started his Mexican market in a 900-square-foot store about eight years ago. Now it has expanded to 6,000 square feet, and he has two other stores in the Tampa Bay area.

"We grew, we grew," Carrillo said, speaking in Spanish. "We've been successful, thank God, fortunately. When we opened, the Latin community here began to grow, and at the same time, logically, my business did."

Carrillo's clientele is 90 percent Hispanic, although his staff is bilingual.

"Our Hispanic customers have various motives for shopping here," Carrillo said. "It's primarily the products we have, but the other thing is the language and the polite service in their language. They can't get that everywhere else."

Culturally, stores like his market act as "a point of information" for the city's mostly Mexican Hispanic community, Carrillo said.

Fliers posted recently inside Mexico Lindo announced upcoming soccer games of Tampa's "El Mutiny." They heralded the office opening of a Largo pediatrician who speaks Spanish, and promoted Spanish-language driving classes.

Wrapped boxes at the front check-out counter solicited donations for a Catholic church's Virgen de Guadalupe celebration to honor the patron saint of Mexico.

"They come here to shop and at the same time, they inform themselves," Carrillo said. "They discover an event that's coming, or a job offer."

At the other side of downtown, Margarito Perez also has been growing his businesses, thanks to the support of the city's Mexican community. Perez hails from the Mexican state of Hidalgo, like the majority of Clearwater's Mexican community. The city's total Hispanic population is estimated by city officials to be about 14,000.

Three years ago, Perez, 38, acquired El Chicanito restaurant, 1478 Gulf-to-Bay Blvd., with help from family members from Ixmiquilpan, a city in Hidalgo. Then in the past year, he added a bakery and a tortilleria, where sweet Mexican breads and fresh tortillas are made daily.

Non-Spanish speakers will find El Chicanito's menu, written daily in Spanish on a white marker board, impossible to understand. One day recently, it included dishes like mole de olla, a stew, and cesina, a thin grilled steak marinated in lime. On weekends, the restaurant offers a menudo special, or beef tripe dish. Always, fresh drinks made by blending water with fruits like cantaloupe or pineapple are served.

Isabel Dothe, Perez's wife, occasionally translates for those who come in and look lost. More English speakers have been stumbling upon the restaurant recently, Perez said, since he put up a new sign outside. Perez is considering whether he should post pictures of his dishes inside, so English speakers can see them. But only about 2 percent to 4 percent of his clientele do not speak Spanish.

"Many Americanos don't know that there's a bakery, a tortilleria and a restaurant here," Perez said, speaking in Spanish. "Our food is very different than the Mexican food that's known as Tex-Mex. That food has a lot of cheese, a lot of ground beef. Mexican food has a different flavor."

Perez thinks there's definitely a greater market to be tapped among all city residents for his latest enterprise, La Tortilleria La Campesina. But even with only a few American customers, he's already selling 1,000 to 1,500 pounds daily of hot, fresh corn tortillas from the new business. They cost $1 per pound.

New Hispanic-owned businesses open in Clearwater all the time.

Five months ago, Onecimo Pioquinto started the Viva Mexico restaurant on 1264 Cleveland St., after working for 10 years at Clearwater restaurants like the Key West Grill as a dishwasher and cook. Once Pioquinto, a 46-year-old resident from Ixmiquilpan, saved enough money to start his business, he decided "it was time to work for himself."

His restaurant, an old diner, serves comida casera, or home cooking, with dishes like chilaquiles, a tortilla casserole. Pioquinto is working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, to make his business a success, with help from his family.

He's advertising in Spanish, but he put his menu in both English and Spanish. "More people means more business" Pioquinto said. "We're open."

But a few Hispanic-owned businesses cater especially to English-speaking residents, like Caramba's Restaurante Mexicano, 1842 Drew St.

Owner Hanyn Arana came to the United States 30 years ago. He managed one of Columbia's restaurants and a Tio Pepe, before starting his own restaurant about seven years ago.

Caramba's menu has English descriptions, but the food is not Americanized, Arana said.

"I didn't want to serve the same old enchilada with a strong margarita and flashy decor and call it Mexican," he said. The menu includes original recipes for fish, pork, chicken and beef dishes, done with various fresh salsas, adobo spice and other touches.

Arana, who comes from a more affluent family background than some of the other Mexican business owners in town, remembers a few instances in which Mexicans from more rural areas visited his restaurant and seemed to feel a bit awkward.

Some typical Mexican dishes came off his menu years ago. "We changed the menu a couple of weeks after opening," Arana said. "We didn't push the menudo."

Meanwhile, other local business owners in the city are reaching the other way across a cultural divide, trying to cater to the city's Hispanic community.

The Publix grocery at Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard and Belcher Road has devoted an aisle to Spanish food products. At the Roadrunner Food Store on Court Street, two aisles display products like detergents with Spanish directions, the fruity Jarrito soft drink, canned Goya products, Spanish mayonnaise, dried beans and instant masa, a corn meal used in tortillas.

"We have a big demand for Spanish drinks and products," said store clerk Tracy Campbell. "We even have Spanish cookies and candies for the kids. I speak a little Spanish, too. We do very well."

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