Finding the Sweet Spot: Backpack Candy Sales Fuel Dream of Bringing People Together Around Food, Music and Dancing
Liz Guzman has hustled her way into two restaurants and the dream of uniting locals around great food, music, drinks and dancing.
Tom Peterson
The Dalles, Ore., Aug. 7, 2026 — Liz Guzman was 8 years old when she figured out that if she wanted something, she'd have to earn the money herself.
She was one of 15 children growing up in Delano, California. There was food in the house and gas in the car, she recalled, but there wasn't money for the things an 8-year-old wanted — school activities, trips with friends, clothes or maybe a Spice Girls binder.
So she did something about it.
Guzman borrowed $20 from her mother Gaby and father Francisco.
She walked to Smart & Final groceries, loaded up on Snickers, Kit Kats, Dum Dums and Mexican chili candies, stuffed them into a backpack and carried a second backpack for her schoolbooks.
Dreams start with little steps.
At recess and lunch, she went to work.
"I would sell out of my backpack," Guzman said during an interview Friday at the CCCNews office in The Dalles.
She repaid her mother's $20, kept the profit and bought more.
Then came the food.
Guzman began making buñuelos — fried pastries she compares to elephant ears — with help from her mother. The family lived across an alley from a Catholic church, and Guzman learned to time her cooking to the end of Mass.
buñuelos
When parishioners came out, the little girl was waiting with baskets of sweets.
The first Sunday she didn't sell out.
The second Sunday, she brought twice as much, and sold it all.
Soon, Sundays after Mass became part of the routine. Then she branched out, loading a shopping cart with ice, Gatorade, soda and water and selling drinks at soccer games and parks without concession stands.
"I just knew that when I wanted money, that's what I would do," she said.
Nearly three decades later, the backpack has become a restaurant.
And now Guzman wants another one.
She owns La Golosa Postres y Mas, a small restaurant at 623 E. Second St. in The Dalles, where the menu has grown well beyond the desserts that launched the 8 year-old's dream.
She recently leased the former Hideaway restaurant at 2299 Dallesport Road, Dallesport, where she plans to open La Golosa Restaurant and Bar.
Liz Gusman has leased the former Hideaway in Dallesport and plans on transforming it into the La Golosa Restaurant and Bar, which will feature latino music, drinks and her own special recipes.
The second location gives her something her downtown restaurant cannot: room.
Room for more customers. Room to dance. Room for bands.
And, if her larger idea works, room for two cultures that don't always spend Saturday night together.
"I have a lot of Anglo community best friends, and they come out and party with my Latino community," Guzman said. "It really melts me."
For Guzman, that mixing of communities has become one measure of success.
"That's what makes me feel successful already," she said.
A long road to her own kitchen
Guzman's route from Delano to restaurant owner was anything but straight.
She moved to The Dalles at 14, initially dropped out of school and later returned to finish her education.
She had two sons that she credits as the foundation of her dream.
Her boys have motivated that Guzman hustle. She spent nearly nine years at the local Toyota dealership, starting as a porter and working her way up to assistant service manager before eventually leaving.
She later worked for the school district as Safe Routes to School director until funding for the position ended, then took a temporary job at Subaru while preparing to open her own business. Along the way, Guzman also worked as an independent JAFRA Cosmetics consultant, selling skincare, fragrances and makeup — another venture that put her in business for herself.
Through much of it, food remained on the edges of her life.
She saw opportunity in the nearby orchards as her partner worked there. She made burritos and tacos for workers. Later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she, like many others, saw opportunity rather than devastation.
She began baking more seriously from home.
Customers started coming.
And coming.
There was enough traffic at the house that neighbors apparently wondered if she was dealing drugs - and oft wrong assumption for well-trafficked houses.
Her partner had an answer.
"She's dealing sugar," Guzman recalled.
The joke wasn't far from the truth. Cakes and desserts were moving out the door, but she was increasingly convinced they needed to move somewhere else.
That meant taking a risk she had spent years avoiding.
"I was afraid," she said. "But I can't live off other people's opinions."
The decision strained her home life, she said, but she kept going.
"It was my dream," she said. "It was my dream, and I'm trying to fulfill it."
Eventually, she found the former Frutas Y Locas location on East Second Street.
The place needed work. Equipment needed replacement. Fire suppression and safety equipment required attention. She negotiated to purchase the existing business assets, brought in her own recipes and began rebuilding the place around what she wanted La Golosa to become.
That included something important: delicious mexican food.
The name La Golosa Postres y Mas — roughly, desserts and more — grew from Guzman's home baking business. But the "and more" has become increasingly important.
Some customers, she said, still see "Postres" and assume it is only a dessert shop.
They are missing much of the menu.
Guzman serves handmade tortillas and Mexican dishes including menudo, pozole, tamales and birria. Among the restaurant's strongest sellers, she said, are birria, tortas and asada fries. And don't forget that Cubano torta.
The tamales were initially supposed to be seasonal.
Customers had other ideas.
She made them in November, December, January and February, she said, but people kept walking through the door asking for them.
Blending food, people and music
Guzman's dream extends beyond the kitchen.
On live-music nights, tables at the East Second Street restaurant are hauled away and the room becomes a dance floor. Bands set up at one end and customers fill the remaining space.
Sometimes there simply isn't enough of it.
"I've had to turn people around, and they're not happy," she said.
Not because of the food.
Because they want to get inside for the music.
Guzman said customers tell her they have been traveling to Hood River, Portland or across the Columbia River to find Latino music and nightlife.
She wondered why they should have to.
Bringing bands to The Dalles isn't cheap. There are musicians to pay, alcohol licensing costs and security. She hires a security guard for live events because she wants the gatherings to be safe.
But the crowds convinced her there was an appetite for it.
The problem was the walls.
"The space is what has pushed me to want a bigger location," she said.
Then an opportunity she had pursued before unexpectedly came back around.
Guzman had previously tried to lease the Hideaway location in Dallesport, but it went to someone else.
More than a year later, an email arrived asking whether she was still interested.
"I thought it was a joke for a minute," she said. "It's full circle."
She took it.
The plan is to keep La Golosa Postres y Mas operating in The Dalles while developing the Dallesport property into La Golosa Restaurant and Bar, moving the larger live-music events there while expanding the restaurant side of the business.
Guzman said the Dallesport location remains a work in progress and is at least a month from opening.
But her cultural experiment is already happening.
Guzman is also working with other businesses on music events, including a Saturday collaboration with Colter and Lacey at 15-Mile Winery next door, where customers from both businesses can mingle during an evening of live music.
That crossover is intentional.
"My people want his people involved," Guzman said.
Then she distilled much of what she has been trying to build into a single thought
"I want the communities to niche because we're all one."
Granada Theatre owners and dynamos Chuck Gomez and Debra Liddell.
To that end, Guzman said she is working with Chuck Gomez and Debra Liddell on bringing latino music to the Granada in weeks to come.
Ultimately, she aspires to bring it all together.
Mexican families. Anglo families. Handmade tortillas. Drinks. A live band. A dance floor.
Nobody needs to leave town to find it.
"We want to keep it here," she said. "We want people to come and support us and know that it's local."
For Guzman, there is a line connecting all of it — from the restaurant and bar she is building in Dallesport back through the restaurant on Second Street, the cakes she sold from home, the burritos she made for orchard workers and eventually all the way back to Delano.
Back to a Catholic church on the other side of an alley.
Back to a basket of buñuelos.
Back to an 8-year-old girl with $20 of her mother's money and two backpacks — one carrying her schoolbooks and the other carrying the beginnings of a business.
She sold candy because she wanted more.
Decades later, she named her business much the same way.
La Golosa Postres y Mas.
Desserts — and more.
"I knew I wanted more," Guzman said. "I just didn't know what."
Now she does.
How you might know Liz
Guzman remains active with Latinos Unidos, lending a hand to Spanish-speaking members of the community by accompanying people to court, helping them navigate language barriers and immigration-related concerns, and even helping connect families with groceries when needed. "I just do what I can," Guzman said.
