Written By Josh Stuyvesant

Pop Fizz is one of the most colorful paleterías to ever grace Albuquerque’s scene. Lorenzo and Carlos Alvarez started the business in 2013, opening up shop on the threshold of the South Valley. Carlos always wanted to own a business. He’d gone to school for it, but prior to Pop Fizz, he found himself working for a technologies company. Similarly, Lorenzo worked as an estimator with a construction company—he’d gone to school for construction management. I think you’d agree that there’s never a shortage of construction work in our city freckled with orange cones.

Money and security—is there not a better representation of what we’re supposed to look for in work and in life? Carlos and Lorenzo, despite their good, steady jobs, had another calling. They wanted something of their own, something to recall their home of El Paso, which was flavored with the fruits of their childhood. Simply speaking, they wanted popsicles.

Their father, Rafael, joined them in Albuquerque in 2012 from the sister cities El Paso and Juárez, where he’d spent most of his life. In a lot of ways, Rafael was the impetus behind Lorenzo and Car- los opening Pop Fizz. I met Rafael last year; he gave me a hibiscus paleta. He struck me as proud and honorable and honest. As I begin to interview Carlos and Lorenzo, it was clear that Rafael, a fifth-grade teacher at Armijo Elementary School, had ingrained many of these same characteris- tics in them.

They seem to be rather modest about opening a business, playfully regarding it as a move one would be crazy to undertake. Without divulging too much of his own experiences, Carlos whole- sales the idea that, “you have to go in with the expectation that it is extremely hard, harder than most any job you’ll ever have, and for way less pay. But in the end,” and then Lorenzo jokingly finishes the sentence for him, “it might not be worth it.” They share a chuckle before Carlos buck- les down again. “In the end it might be worth it, it might not be, but you can say you tried it, and you knew what you were getting into.” Carlos is the more prudent of the two; Lorenzo the more intrepid. Carlos the Fizz. Lorenzo the Pop.

Lorenzo is the president of the South Valley MainStreet Initiative’s board. “We’re working on revitalizing the South Valley in general: bringing more business and making it a place where you’d want to stick around and spend some money and spend some time. It’s going to be a long process, but it will be worth it.”

You can tell that they are truly humble, and still figuring it out. They are consistently in the day-to- day, with nothing further than a two-year plan, which they themselves admit is generous. And yet, they’re doing it. Pop Fizz, that endearing “Mexican paletería with an American soda shop twist,” has been a champion of the South Valley for the past two years. They’ve dropped anchor in an all too often ignored part of town; they’ve become a part of the integration that exists there, while also introducing new audiences to the neighborhood and their passion for popsicles.

Currently, a few infrastructural restrictions have forced them to leave their storefront on Bridge Boulevard. “We don’t have enough power at that shop to put additional equipment or a new air conditioner because there’s no new transformer, so the electrical load is topped out. It would just shut off if you added anything else. Those are fifteen, twenty thousand dollar transformers. To ask a tenant to put that in, you know, a small business—that’s just not going to work for us.” That’s the irony of it all: How can we expect an impactful business to continue to positively impact its com- munity if in trying to grow, its lights shut off?

That said, these brothers are uncannily adaptive. “Nimble” is how Carlos describes it. They’ve barely missed a beat in dealing with the hindrance of their store. They’ve signed a lease to be the concessions company at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. They’re also operating a commer- cial kitchen on the NHCC campus, where they will be focused on making wholesale and retail products for their carts and trucks.

The Alvarezes don’t dress anything up. “Simple,” one might call it. Probably more refreshing than their paletas is that they make no pretense of the slickness we’ve come to associate with business- people. Their only slick qualities rest in their reactive maneuverability, their ability to make ends meet while maintaining their integrity to each other, to their product, and to their neighborhood.

And like their neighborhood, in which infrastructural concerns demand the most immediate attention, and the struggle for a positive identity nips at the heels, long-term plans for Carlos and Lorenzo aren’t regarded as entirely graspable. When I ask them what’s on the horizon for Pop Fizz, they simply, naturally, and enthusiastically respond, “Summer. Popsicle weather.”