One peak season at Gibson was sufficient. In the Spring of 2002, Scott Flack and Steve Mattingly helped us find our next home – we had a better sense of what we were looking for than we had the prior year.  This time we knew that we needed a standard dock. We needed clear height suitable for racks. We needed a space that could support a forklift.

We toured some locations here and there around Austin, but nothing clicked until we pulled up to 1305 E. 6th Street. “Guerrero Produce” according to the tiles across the face of the building. On the other side of the iron bars and sliding glass doors we walked into a true big room. This one had something like 25 or 30 foot clear height and two or three proper dock doors. On the left was two stories of offices – dingy on the bottom and businessy up top. Like a fine haircut.

It had been some time since any produce had been distributed from this building. Outside the dock doors there was about as much space unenclosed but under roof as there was in the four walls of the building. All of this area was dock-high with the parking lot set down below and the full area was enclosed by a barbed wire fence.

The roofed area outside the four walls needed a lot of cleanup – pigeon poop blanketed the grounds. but seated in one of the concrete seams, cutting through the white sheet, a single pepper was growing – some spicy life in the midst of the detritus. Pepe the pepper. (Wash before consuming.)

Jef saw Pepe. Jef photographed Pepe. Jef declared that we had found our new warehouse: Guerrero.