HAPPY MEDIUMS
By default when you upload a video to Ceros, the player controls will appear for the user, requiring them to interact with the video in order to play. However, in addition to this default video behavior, you can also set your videos to automatically play on load — which requires no input from the user.
To access the autoplay settings, click on a video and you’ll see your video settings populate in the Design tab.
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This summer, UPROXX is teaming with Modelo to celebrate the creativity and fight of local changemakers, including chefs, musicians, and artists. These heroes illuminate the determination and Fighting Spirit to uplift and bring their communities to life. Join us in learning more throughout the ‘Salud to Summer’ series.
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As the Brand with strong roots in Mexico, Modelo is proud to partner with UnidosUS to provide Hispanic communities with much-needed resources to ensure that finances are never a stumbling block to achieving their dreams. Read on to learn more about this new partnership.
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Drink responsibly. Modelo Especial® and Modelo Negra® Beers.
Imported by Crown Imports, Chicago, IL
PRESENTS
Modelo is teaming up with UnidosUS to support financial empowerment in Hispanic communities.
As the Brand with strong roots in Mexico, Modelo is proud to partner with UnidosUS to provide Hispanic communities with much-needed resources to ensure that finances are never a stumbling block to achieving their dreams. Read on to learn more about this new partnership.
Modelo is teaming up with UnidosUS to support financial empowerment in Hispanic communities.
Drink responsibly. Modelo Especial® and Modelo Negra® Beers.
Imported by Crown Imports, Chicago, IL
This Latin Chef Is Keeping His Food Culture Alive While Innovating On Tradition
READ MORE +
READ MORE +
As the Brand with strong roots in Mexico, Modelo is proud to partner with UnidosUS to provide Hispanic communities with much-needed resources to ensure that finances are never a stumbling block to achieving their dreams. Read on to learn more about this new partnership.
READ MORE +
READ MORE +
La Cocinita is a food truck that brings a piece of Venezuela to New Orleans And Chicago.
This Latin Chef Is Keeping His Food Culture Alive While Innovating On Tradition
HAPPY MEDIUMS
By default when you upload a video to Ceros, the player controls will appear for the user, requiring them to interact with the video in order to play. However, in addition to this default video behavior, you can also set your videos to automatically play on load — which requires no input from the user.
To access the autoplay settings, click on a video and you’ll see your video settings populate in the Design tab.
Create an engaging virtual event for your business or product.
Template - Event Activation
1280px x 2860px
Add multiple interactions to one Hotspot.
This Hotspot has two interactions: on click, go to a page and on hover, show the hover square.
Subheader blurb goes here
This summer, UPROXX is teaming with Modelo to celebrate the creativity and fight of local changemakers, including chefs, musicians, and artists. These heroes illuminate the determination and Fighting Spirit to uplift and bring their communities to life. Join us in learning more throughout the ‘Salud to Summer’ series.
THURZ
INDIE184
PRIVATE Stock
COMING SOON
COMING SOON
COMING SOON
Modelo And UnidosUS Team Up to Support Hispanics’ Financial Empowerment
READ LESS -
READ LESS -
Drink responsibly. Modelo Especial® and Modelo Negra® Beers.
Imported by Crown Imports, Chicago, IL
PRESENTS
Modelo is teaming up with UnidosUS to support financial empowerment in Hispanic communities.
As the Brand with strong roots in Mexico, Modelo is proud to partner with UnidosUS to provide Hispanic communities with much-needed resources to ensure that finances are never a stumbling block to achieving their dreams. Read on to learn more about this new partnership.
Modelo is teaming up with UnidosUS to support financial empowerment in Hispanic communities.
Despite being the largest and fastest-growing minority group in the United States, fewer than half of Hispanic people living in the country own a home, and the median weekly income of Hispanic workers is well below the national average. Additionally, Hispanics have disproportionately faced economic and health-related hardships from the COVID-19 pandemic, putting even more financial stress on an already historically disadvantaged community.
Yet, our country’s Hispanic community remains resilient and perseverant. In support of those who never quit, Modelo, through its Modelo Fighting Chance Project, is partnering with UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization, to further strengthen Hispanic families’ financial security by expanding UnidosUS’ financial empowerment and homeownership programs.
“Discriminatory policies from well before the pandemic have placed Latinos at a huge financial disadvantage compared to other groups,” says Lautaro Diaz, UnidosUS Vice President of Housing and Community Development. “That’s why increased support for important initiatives like housing counseling can get families the help they need to pull themselves up and get through these difficult times.”
Modelo’s $250,000 contribution will directly support vital financial literacy programs through the UnidosUS National Homeownership Network, which enables families to build wealth and increase their financial mobility. Since its inception in 1997, UnidosUS’ National Homeownership Network has provided more than 590,000 families with housing counseling, helped more than 30,000 people to buy homes and prevented some 90,000 families from facing home foreclosures.
“Modelo has a tradition of honoring those who embody the fighting spirit and show grit, perseverance, and determination in the face of adversity,” says Greg Gallagher, Vice President of Modelo Brand Marketing. “We are proud to work with UnidosUS and to help support their mission to provide our core Hispanic audience with the necessary resources to build unified, prosperous, and resilient communities.”
To learn more about UnidosUS and Modelo’s partnership, as well as to learn more about the Modelo Fighting Chance Project, click here.
HAPPY MEDIUMS
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COMING SOON
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COMING SOON
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HAPPY MEDIUMS
By default when you upload a video to Ceros, the player controls will appear for the user, requiring them to interact with the video in order to play. However, in addition to this default video behavior, you can also set your videos to automatically play on load — which requires no input from the user.
To access the autoplay settings, click on a video and you’ll see your video settings populate in the Design tab.
Create an engaging virtual event for your business or product.
Template - Event Activation
1280px x 2860px
Add multiple interactions to one Hotspot.
This Hotspot has two interactions: on click, go to a page and on hover, show the hover square.
Subheader blurb goes here
This summer, UPROXX is teaming with Modelo to celebrate the creativity and fight of local changemakers, including chefs, musicians, and artists. These heroes illuminate the determination and Fighting Spirit to uplift and bring their communities to life. Join us in learning more throughout the ‘Salud to Summer’ series.
THURZ
INDIE184
PRIVATE Stock
COMING SOON
COMING SOON
COMING SOON
Modelo And UnidosUS Team Up to Support Hispanics’ Financial Empowerment
READ LESS -
READ LESS -
Drink responsibly. Modelo Especial® and Modelo Negra® Beers.
Imported by Crown Imports, Chicago, IL
PRESENTS
Modelo is teaming up with UnidosUS to support financial empowerment in Hispanic communities.
As the Brand with strong roots in Mexico, Modelo is proud to partner with UnidosUS to provide Hispanic communities with much-needed resources to ensure that finances are never a stumbling block to achieving their dreams. Read on to learn more about this new partnership.
Modelo is teaming up with UnidosUS to support financial empowerment in Hispanic communities.
Discovering your passion can be life changing. For Chef Benoit Angulo, his passion was unlocked while growing up in Venezuela when he learned to make arepas. Arepas are like a cross between a tortilla, a pancake, and sandwich bread and are very common in northern South America. Despite his young age, Benoit quickly became the designated expert for family and friends when it came to making the dish.
“It’s just what I grew up with. Arepas are a big part of Venezuelan culture,” Benoit says. “There is definitely a comfort food aspect to it.”
Benoit can track his love for cooking from those early moments. Although his passion ultimately led him away from his home country to establish a culinary career in the US, his cooking remains rooted in the traditions learned in the kitchens of friends and family, even as he innovates new flavors and combinations.
Over the past 10 years, Benoit and his business partner and wife Rachel Angulo have turned comfort food into a full-blown business, operating two successful food trucks in New Orleans and Chicago by the name of La Cocinita, which translates to “The Little Kitchen” in Spanish. In those rolling kitchens, Benoit has expertly combined his formal culinary skills with the traditional practices he picked up as a curious kid in Caracas, introducing the two cities to the world of arepas, patacones, tacos, and quesadillas Venezuelan-style.
“A lot of people come and just want the tacos they know and love,” Rachel tells me. “It’s the people that try something new, or try the arepas, that get hooked and want to come back.”
Starting a food truck, with its freedom to experiment and fewer barriers to entry, feels like an obvious play for a young chef trying to make a name for himself in the modern American culinary scene. However, Benoit makes it clear that the roots of their choice of business model run deeper.
“Growing up in Caracas, there are different little alleys and corners in every neighborhood designated as ‘the hunger street’ — ‘calle de hambre.’ Essentially, it’s a place where you go for a quick lunch in-between shifts or a place to go after a night out with your friends and a few drinks,” he says. “I felt like New Orleans was kind of lacking that aspect.”
The idea of bringing ‘hunger street’ a little closer to New Orleans came to Benoit after a late night of drinks on the town with Rachel.
“A big part of ‘calle del hambre’ is what they call ‘areperas,’ which are essentially arepa joints that have every arepa you can imagine, baked, fried, made over coals,” Benoit says. “My spiel when I pitched to Rachel when we were hungry after a few drinks was simply, ‘Do you want to open up a food truck?’ I was just thinking about wanting an arepa before bed, and that’s how it came about.”
But as simple a story as that sounds, Benoit and Rachel were immediately hit with roadblocks when they set out to turn La Cocinita into a reality. During the process of outfitting and modifying their food truck, they learned that there were no available permits for a new food truck in New Orleans and wouldn’t be for years. Couple that with some archaic rules about where and when food trucks could and couldn’t operate and Benoit and Rachel were in for a test of their own fighting spirit. They didn’t let that challenge stop them from realizing their dream, though. Instead, they worked with the local government to reform outdated and limiting laws — giving La Cocinita and other businesses in the community a chance to flourish.
Fast forward 10 years later and La Cocinita is now a staple of the New Orleans and Chicago street food scene, meeting the demands of foodies while expanding on the idea of a classic arepa.
“It’s not a classic Venezuelan Arepera. It’s something that’s influenced by our market. A classic arepa is arepa, shredded cheese, and butter… but being here, we made the decision to stuff our ingredients inside. It’s the same way I learned how to make them back home. Here in Chicago, we have actual Venezuelan moms making your empanadas and arepas, we have a Venezuelan heavy kitchen so that brings a lot of traditional influence, but with a modern twist,” says Benoit.
Like countless other restaurants and food trucks, Benoit and Rachel faced an existential threat to their business in March 2020 when COVID-19 hit. With her background in social work and a passion for helping others just as strong as Benoit’s passion for cooking, Rachel made sure that La Cocinita continued to serve the community. Waiting for the storm to pass just wasn’t an option.
“We had a team that wanted to work and food in the kitchen so it was kind of a no-brainer to start collecting donations for meals that we were discounting and serving to frontline workers,” says Rachel, who had previously worked in ICUs and quickly thought about the risk of burnout for doctors and nurses.
“We figured comfort food would bring a ray of sunshine to their days.”
The pandemic gave Benoit and Rachel a lot of time to think about what the evolution of their “little kitchen” looks like. Unsurprisingly Benoit is still exploring ways to push his culinary style to meet the demands of tomorrow. While the pandemic was hard on business, it helped Benoit and Rachel develop a future-focused game plan.
“We definitely have some ideas that were probably influenced by the pandemic,” Benoit says. “We’ve been talking about plant-based local sourcing type stuff, changing our menu in a way where we are a little more sustainable and more locally driven. One of those big things about the pandemic was revealing supply chain issues. That’s one of the many ideas we have for what La Cocinita will look like, but that’s the one I think about the most — how we’ll change and how we can have a more positive impact.”
Whatever La Cocinita’s future looks like, Rachel and Benoit’s efforts show that it’ll be one forged from passion and a fighting spirit.
HAPPY MEDIUMS
THURZ
COMING SOON
INDIE184
COMING SOON
PRIVATE Stock
COMING SOON
La Cocinita is a food truck that brings a piece of Venezuela to New Orleans And Chicago.
This Latin Chef Is Keeping His Food Culture Alive While Innovating On Tradition