Recently, brothers Alex and Alan Morales opened their second Civil Coffee in downtown Los Angeles. Their new cafe at 8th and Los Angeles Streets serves nice coffee drinks to the local residents and fashion and flower district businesses with warm hospitality. Expanding their company to DTLA brings these brothers, who moved to L.A. from Chihuahua, Mexico when they were very young, back to a neighborhood they shopped at with their family when they were little kids. Only now they are there as business owners.
Alex and Alan feel proud and a little embarrassed when their family in Los Angeles and Chihuahua gush about their success on the family WhatsApp group or Zoom calls. Opening a second location of their popular cafe feels like a significant step in their commitment to grow and expand Civil. This spot at 8th and Los Angeles Streets in the Fashion District near the Flower Market is just steps from Santee “Los Callejones” Alley shopping, an L.A. destination that is significant to their family.
When Alan and Alex were very young, their father Mere, a mechanical engineer, moved to Los Angeles to join his brother in a copier repair business run out of his apartment. After their father got settled in Glendale, he brought the family over from Chihuahua. Alex was 3 1/2 and Alan was one year old. “I remember orange and grey copiers in the living room and my dad would be fixing them,” says Alan. That business Regional Duplication Specialists (RDS) has grown today to occupy a warehouse of copiers that their father and uncle rent, lease, repair, and service. (They don’t have a website. “Everything is run word of mouth. Very OG”)