Renee Carrillo remembers her first job in a coffee shop.
“I wasn’t much older than some of the employees who work for me now,” said the owner of Grinds, Vines and Automobilia Cafe in downtown Morgan Hill. “I learned about responsibility early on and this shaped who I became as an adult.”
Carrillo, one of six children growing up in single parent home, said she has faced many challenges in her life, including living in the United States illegally when she was brought across the border from her native Mexico as a young child to make a new home in east Los Angeles.
She said she only learned of her undocumented status when it came time to apply for college and this meant Carrillo had to go to work. However, she never gave up on her college dreams and graduated in 1991 from East L.A. College with an associate’s degree in business management.
“Despite the challenges, I was always a dreamer and always set goals,” Carrillo said.
Early work experiences became stepping stones in a long journey that brought Carrillo to the Bay Area. A single mother to daughter Samantha, 21 and an aspiring veterinarian, Carrillo said she regularly worked three jobs, not only to make ends meet but to supply the family with extras as well.
“The first (job) was to pay the bills, the second was to save and third was to reward myself,” Carrillo said. “I had always been an employee for someone. But I always wanted to accomplish my American dream of owning a business.”
After years of hard work, the opportunity for her American dream presented itself.
On Valentine’s Day 2012, Carrillo stopped by the flower shop inside Carte Luna in downtown Morgan Hill to buy her daughter a gift. The visit took an unexpected turn when the proprietor asked if she would be interested in purchasing the business. Carrillo signed the lease the next day and renamed the business “Forget Me Not.”
In 2012, Hot Java came up for sale and she purchased it too, and Morgan Hill’s Grinds, Vines and Automobilia Cafe at 17400 Monterey St., Ste. 1B was born.
The space that now showcases local events, photos and vintage car parts donated by customers was an “empty shell” when she bought it, Carrillo said. “It had a refrigerator, tables and chairs and that was pretty much it.”
Carrillo designed the business from the ground up, using the coffee shop as a venue to promote local talent and highlight her passion for race cars. Carrillo said she knew instantly where she wanted to take the business, starting with stabilizing its previously unpredictable hours for customers. Little by little she added additional services and menu items based on customer feedback.
While she tried to run both businesses for a while, Carrillo decided to close the flower shop in 2012. This allowed her to focus her attention on Grinds, Vines and Automobilia Cafe.
“It’s challenging,” Carrillo said of business ownership. “It’s not what you think. There’s this misconception that it’s easy. It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had. I asked myself: ‘How can I be as successful working for myself as I have been working for other people?’”
Now that she owns a business, Carrillo has her eyes set on a new goal: reopening the Granada Theater, located just a few doors down from the coffee shop.
The historic theater—closed and boarded up for more than a decade—is scheduled to re-open for its first movie showing in May, according to Carrillo, the chair and president of the Morgan Hill Granada Preservation Society.
The society is working to bring the building to code, Carrillo said, but decided to leave the original architecture and identity of the vintage theater intact. Carrillo said the organization has received a $150,000 budget, donated from various organizations and businesses, to reopen the theater. This includes an agreement from Gidell & Kocal Construction to donate a $40,000 renovation to create usable bathrooms compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act. The society has also incorporated into an official 501c3 nonprofit organization, Carrillo added.
John Liegl, past president of efforts to restore the Granada, said Carrillo is committed to turning the theater into a new community space. In fact, “she is the motivating factor,” he added.
Liegl admires Carrillo on a personal level as well.
“She’s an amazing human being,” he said. “Everyone who knows her loves her.”
Carrillo said her dream in restoring the Granada to its former glory is to create a space to show independent and foreign films, as well as a venue to host film festivals, live music, concerts and stand-up comedy. This includes the Poppy Jasper Film Festival, an international short film festival hosted annually in Morgan Hill dedicated to giving filmmakers of short films a venue to showcase their work, participate in workshops, network and share artistic expression.
Additionally, Carrillo said she hopes to create the Granada Youth Empowerment Program when the theater reopens. This effort would hire local teenagers with an interest in film to staff the venue, and include special workshops on life skills.
According to Carrillo, the community is rallying around renovation of the Granada Theater just as it did to support her coffee shop, which recently celebrated its second anniversary. She said she hopes to serve the community through her shop, a stone’s throw from the Granada, for years to come.
