At four-thirty in the morning, Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park is empty except for one light. It belongs to doña Amparo Zapata, who has been firing up the oven before anyone else for twenty-three years.
Two suitcases
They arrived in March 2003: Amparo, her husband Óscar and two girls, nine and six. They came from Palmira, in Valle del Cauca, where she had run a small bakery for eleven years.
“We brought two suitcases and one recipe,” she says. “The recipe was the only thing worth anything.”
For the first two years there was no bakery. Óscar worked construction and Amparo cleaned offices in Midtown on the night shift, so she could take the girls to school in the morning.
“I slept three hours. At thirty-five you think you can handle anything. And you can. But you pay for it later.”
The first pandebono
It started, as almost all of these stories start, selling from home.
“A neighbor had a birthday and asked me for twenty pandebonos. I made them in the apartment oven, which was the size of a shoebox. The next day three more people called.”
For four years she sold that way: orders by phone, Saturday deliveries, a lined accounting notebook. In 2009 she rented a thirty-square-meter storefront with a secondhand oven that cost her $4,200.
“I called it Panadería La Palmira. Óscar wanted an English name, something that sounded modern. I told him that if anyone walked in looking for modern, they had the wrong door.”
What almost closed her
In 2012 Hurricane Sandy flooded the basement where she stored her flour. She lost three months of inventory.
“That’s when I cried. It was the only moment I said: we’re going back.”
What she did not expect was what happened next. A group of customers —Mexican, Dominican, Ecuadorian, not one Colombian— organized a collection at the church on the corner. They raised $2,800 in two weeks.
“I thought we were the neighborhood’s Colombian bakery. That day I understood we were the neighborhood’s bakery, full stop.”
Today
La Palmira has eleven employees and opens seven days a week. The two girls from the suitcases are now a thirty-two-year-old accountant and a twenty-nine-year-old architect. Neither works at the bakery.
“And that’s how it should be,” Amparo says, without a trace of sadness. “I didn’t come here so they could knead dough at four in the morning. I came so they could choose.”
Óscar died in 2021. His photo hangs behind the register, next to the health permit and a Deportivo Cali pennant.
What she would tell someone who just arrived
We asked at the end, once the first batch of the day was out.
“Don’t believe anyone who tells you this takes two years. And don’t believe anyone who tells you it can’t be done.” She wipes her hands on her apron. “And learn English even if you’re embarrassed. I waited six years out of embarrassment, and those six years cost me money.”
She pauses.
“And find yourself a neighborhood. Not an apartment: a neighborhood. Nobody survives this city alone.”
La Palmira opens daily from 6:00. Pandebono comes out of the oven at 6:30, 11:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon.
