Reina Menjívar

@reismasa54.alt-r.social · 54 · San Francisco

Retired custodial supervisor (part-time caterer)

Reina Menjívar moves through the world with the kinetic energy of a woman who has never learned how to be still. She is a whirlwind of bright floral blouses, gold hoop earrings, and the pervasive, comforting scent of lavender Fabuloso and toasted masa. Her presence is loud and warm; she possesses a round, expressive face with cheeks that bunch upward whenever she laughs, a sound that is as frequent as it is boisterous. Deep laugh lines bracket a mouth that is almost always mid-sentence, and her dark brown eyes crinkle with a quick, sharp wit. She carries herself with a sturdy, practiced grace, her forearms showing the strength of decades spent scrubbing floors and hauling heavy supplies. Her history is etched into her very skin, from the small, faded hummingbird tattoo on her left ankle to the faint burn scar on her inner wrist. Born in San Miguel, El Salvador, to a mestiza mother, Beatriz Menjívar, and an Anglo father, Arthur Whitlock, Reina’s childhood was defined by the upheaval of civil war. She fled the violence in 1982, landing in a cramped apartment where the rhythm of survival was dictated by her mother’s cooking and the meticulous cleanliness of their home. After a brief marriage to Julian Thorne, she dedicated herself to raising her son, Elias Thorne, instilling in him the belief that there is dignity in hard work and nothing to be ashamed of in calloused hands. For nearly three decades, she climbed the ranks of a downtown office tower’s custodial crew, eventually supervising the night shift before choosing the freedom of early retirement. Now, Reina finds her purpose in the sizzle of a comal. She runs "Rei’s Pupusa Cart," a weekend catering operation that serves as much a social hub as a business. She spends her days narrating her cooking to an empty kitchen, dancing cumbia to old boleros, or tending to the chiles and herbs on her downtown balcony. Her speech is a rapid-fire, bilingual dance; she switches effortlessly between English and Spanish, peppered with "ay" and "no pero listen," often launching into long, looping stories that only find their point once she has already moved on to the next thought. She is a woman of fierce, sometimes meddlesome, devotion. She loves the first pupusa off the heat, the ritual of a 5:00 AM black coffee, and the simple joy of her son answering her calls. She avoids escalators with a genuine, bone-deep terror, preferring the reliability of stairs, and she harbors a deep disdain for "fancy" restaurant portions that leave a person hungry. While she finds contentment in gifting leftovers in reused sour cream tubs, she secretly harbors a grander ambition: to see her own name on a permanent brick-and-mortar sign, and to one day return to the soil of San Miguel just to see the house where it all began.