Five dollars and a dream: The legacy of Carlos and Juanita Renteria
In 1956, Carlos Renteria arrived in Sacramento, an immigrant with a visa and $5 in his wallet. He didn’t speak English. He was alone. He had left his wife, Juanita, and their two sons behind in Vista Hermosa, Jalisco, Mexico; they were waiting until he could earn enough money for them to join him.
Renteria waited at the Greyhound bus station until, eventually, someone offered him work. He was given an address for a job in a town called St. Helena. After he bought a bus ticket and lunch, he had 20 cents left.
“I did not have any money or know where I was going,” Renteria recalled in Spanish.
Renteria’s first job in St. Helena was picking grapes, something he had never done before. Once he earned enough money, he paid $50 for a car and learned how to drive.
After his work in vineyards, according to his daughter Linda Renteria, he next worked at Lambert Egg Farm in St. Helena for two years. There, his job was collecting eggs and putting them in boxes; but soon he learned to feed the chickens too. He did well, until he told his boss he wanted to go to Mexico to bring back his family, and his boss said if he left, he would not have a job to return to.
“I said thank you very much and I left,” Renteria said. When he returned to Napa County, he found a job feeding pheasants on a farm owned by the Usibelli family. The property was converted into a vineyard, and he continued to work for the Usibelli family for the next 53 years until he retired.
Then, in 1975, Renteria came across an opportunity that would change life for himself and his family.
Renteria, who lived in Rutherford, enjoyed going to the movies, which is how he discovered the Lincoln Avenue theater where Copperfield’s is now located.
He learned that the owner of the movie theater was planning to sell the business, but not the building, which he was renting.
Renteria offered a payment plan of five years. He gave the man $500 dollars, with an agreement to pay him the balance in installments, for a total cost of $30,000.
He painted the theater and learned how to operate the machinery. Running La Vista Theatre became a family business, with his wife and children selling tickets or snacks. When the movie theater burned down in 1976, the property owner still wanted the money he was owed, about $24,000. The men settled on a final payment of $20,000, and Renteria became a business owner.
The situation was complicated, however, by the fact that the building was owned by another man who wanted to sell the property for $75,000. Since Renteria did not have the money, the owner said the building would be sold in an auction.
Months later, learned that the building was his; he had “won” the auction and would only pay $19,500.
He said the owner told him, “I know you don’t have any money, but I want to help you.”
In 1978, Renteria rebuilt the building, which became a restaurant and bar called La Vista.
“But people were stealing money, and I decided to close it,” he said.
In 2000, Renteria found the right tenants for the building: Copperfield Books. When he was approached with the idea, he thought a bookstore would be reliable.
He was right. “They are very responsible,” he said. “They pay the rent on time and often earlier.”
Store manager Julia O. Rummel-Smith said of the partnership, “It has been a wonderful relationship, very welcoming through all the changes in town and also the retail business, the shutdown and the town’s recovery from losing that tourism.”
Seventy years after arriving in Napa County, Renteria, 91, was honored during an event at Copperfield’s Books earlier this year when the staff installed a plaque in appreciation of the man who has now been their landlord for a quarter century.
“To be able to have a permanent honor for him in the store is really important to us,” Rummel-Smith said. The bookstore staff was grateful for the way Renteria had helped them navigate the challenges the business had encountered, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The struggles he had encountered as an immigrant, so many years earlier, perhaps, had given him a special empathy for others.
The Renteria family, the Copperfield’s staff said, is a vital part of the community.
RM Horrell, chief operating officer for Copperfield’s, said Carlos and Juanita made it possible for a small business to thrive during economically challenging times.
He’s so kind and so generous,” Horrell said about the partnership with Renteria.
“When we came up on the 25-year anniversary of being in this building and we started renegotiating the next lease, we realized that these were the type of people who we want to always be in partnership with in everything we can do.”
In addition to being a business owner, Renteria was able to cultivate his love of riding caballos bailadores, dancing horses, which are part of the Mexican rodeo tradition, called charrería. In addition to being a familiar Calistoga businessman, Renteria is also widely known in town for his decades of riding his horses down Lincoln Avenue in the local Fourth of July parade.
“Wherever I went, I was always given first place,” he said, adding that he has more than 100 trophies displayed in a room in his Rutherford home. Although he stopped riding 12 years ago, today he still owns one horse.
After a lifetime of hard work, Renteria is enjoying his retirement. He spends time at his home in Rutherford sitting in his garden. “My wife, I miss a lot,” he said. “Because she helped me a lot.
“The secret I’m going to tell you is to work and save what you have and set a good example for your children,” Renteria said.
He has no plans to sell the building that helped him realize his dream of making a better life for his family.
Carlos and Juanita Renteria raised four children: Adalberto, who is a medical director; Saul, who was a welder and volunteer firefighter and who passed away in 2016; Linda who works in the wine industry; and their youngest son, Carlos, who lives in Los Angeles. Juanita passed away in 2017.
“The building was an important thing,” Linda Renteria said. “It was both my mother’s and father’s. But they always had two to three jobs and this building. It’s a success story. You come here; you’re immigrants and, like a lot of people, you start off really small and you work hard and there’s that work ethic, and before you know it, you have something.”
For those who would like to share memories or stories of the Renteria’s, Copperfield’s has placed a guestbook in the store, located at 1330 Lincoln Ave., that they plan to present to the Renteria family.
