88 FORTUNE FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021
Medina prayed his staff wouldn’t all get sick at once and
require him to shut down. The restaurant has actually done
very well during the pandemic—he credits takeout alcohol
sales for the fact that La Carreta had its best-ever Cinco de
Mayo in 2020. And Medina says he was lucky to have gotten
the virus himself during the quiet Thanksgiving week, at a
time when his business could handle his 10-day absence.
Most of his employees had mild cases like his, and all
eventually recovered, but nearly everyone on his team has
lost someone to COVID: Medina’s 52-year-old uncle in
Ohio; his parents’ 30-year-old physician in Mexico; his
chef ’s father; the grandfather of two servers; loyal custom-
ers. “Death has been all around us,” he says.
Medina was born in Roanoke, Va., and he spent his early
childhood traveling around the country with his parents,
immigrants from Mexico, as they built a growing business
of Tex-Mex restaurants. They arrived in Iowa when he was
5 years old and later moved to Marshalltown, which he
loved for its diversity, the good education he got, and the
kindness of people generally. “It was a good place to grow
up. You know, ‘Iowa nice,’ you really do see that,” he says.
When the pandemic began, Medina noticed many
high-demand items—sanitizer, rice and beans, toilet pa-
per—were available from his bulk suppliers. He made large
orders and started reselling things locally; at one point, he
was providing local nursing homes with gloves. Through-
out the pandemic, he’s donated staples for local food-drive
efforts and organized fundraisers for families who have lost
members to COVID.
But Medina is probably best known for a slogan—“No
love, no tacos”—that he promoted on a billboard in front of
his restaurant, and on merchandise this fall. After the kill-
ings of George Floyd and other unarmed Black citizens by
police last summer, Medina felt a responsibility to use his
platform as a local business owner to be vocal about his val-
ues. He experimented on social media and got good feed-
back, so he placed a yard sign in front of La Carreta. It had,
what seemed to him, nuggets of unimpeachable common
sense: “Black lives matter”; “Human rights are women’s
rights”; “Science is real.” But the sign prompted an angry,
handwritten note on a receipt one day; the customer called
the sign un-Christian. Medina posted a photo of the receipt
on his personal Facebook page with his own note: “No love,
no tacos.” He also set up a website and online clothing store
under that banner, advocating for fairness and equality and
that Election Day be made a federal holiday to ensure all
can vote. Profits from the site went to a local scholarship
fund Medina had previously established.
As things do, his message went viral, especially after he
was featured by CNN in October in the run-up to the elec-
tion. Orders for “No love, no tacos” hats and shirts poured
in from around the world, and as people posted photos of
themselves voting in November, many hashtagged them,
#NoLoveNoTacos. The effort funded 14 scholarships toauthority, Greer issued a mayoral proclamation requiring
face coverings, with the caveat it couldn’t be enforced. It
didn’t really catch on.
In October, Greer walked into a local bar to pick up a
takeout order. The place was crowded, and while the staff
were wearing masks, he was the only customer wearing
one. The other patrons began making derogatory com-
ments about him and questioning his manhood. “These
people, they must have flunked science,” Greer tells me.
“They just don’t get it.”
Service workers in Marshalltown were among
those who paid the price for the divide over mask-wearing.
Alfonso Medina, the 31-year-old proprietor of La Carreta
Mexican Grill, a popular Tex-Mex restaurant in the city,
came down with COVID during the last week of Novem-
ber. He lost his sense of taste and smell, a symptom that,
by that point in the year, he estimates 80% to 90% of his
17-person staff had already experienced. Since March, his
team had tried to distance in the restaurant and take pre-
cautions. They had worn masks, but few customers did.
“It was very frustrating that customers didn’t have to
wear them because it was almost causing this, to a point,”
Medina told me in early January. “We could all be wear-
ing masks, but we knew it’s just a matter of time before
someone gets sick.”
While a couple of big-box stores in Marshalltown—
Menards and Walmart—started requiring face coverings
early in the pandemic, without a state mandate and as a
minority-owned business, Medina thought it would be dif-
ficult to enforce a mask policy at La Carreta. His employees,
particularly those in high school who worked part-time,
weren’t comfortable confronting customers. He wished his
patrons would just be responsible. “If you’re coming here
to eat because this is your favorite restaurant, why wouldn’t
you just wear one?” (Since the governor issued the state-
wide mandate, he says, almost everyone wears them.)
1.34
MILLION CUBIC YARDSAmount of storm debris hauled away by debris
management companies in Iowa since the derecho,
equal to about 24,000 dump trucks, or 133,000 tons