Edgar Nava, who runs the Correas Market pop-up in Lincoln Heights, has found a way to stay extremely positive despite the letter from his landlord back in August raising the rent on his family’s business to market rate.
“It was a shock at first,” Nava, 29, tells L.A. TACO. “But we’ve all accepted the change and are excited about the new chapter.”
After 19 years, his uncle’s meat market, which recently grew a new following thanks to the mariscos pop-up Nava opened inside the market in 2017, is closing its doors. Nava’s family is from Michoacán. He was born in El Sereno and raised here in the community of Lincoln Heights.
Like so many other first-generation Mexican Americans who grew up in an L.A. food service family, the market was pivotal to Nava’s own decision to work in the industry.
“I was in 4th grade when I first helped my uncle peel some nopales,” he says. “When I grew up, I tried getting an office job but realized that being inside a cubicle was not the life for me. So I came back to make ceviche.”