East Los Angeles flower shop gets a big surprise from SoCal Honda Dealers
Alisol Flowers owner Martha Jimenez had a month's rent paid and gifts donated after two years of pandemic losses and a canceled parade route.
Martha Jimenez, owner of Alisol Flowers at 3858 East Cesar E. Chavez Avenue in East Los Angeles, received a surprise from SoCal Honda Dealers during Hispanic Heritage Month, according to ABC7 Los Angeles. As part of ABC7's Random Acts of Helpfulness program, the dealers paid one month of Jimenez's rent and donated gifts she could use for the community during her Posadas celebration.
Alisol Flowers sits directly on the route of East L.A.'s Mexican Independence Day parade, a location that has long connected the shop to the neighborhood's biggest annual celebration. But like many small businesses in the area, it was hit hard by the pandemic, and the parade had been canceled for a second consecutive year at the time of the surprise.
A shop tied to the neighborhood
Las Posadas, the tradition Jimenez's donated gifts were meant to support, is a religious celebration honoring Jesus's birth that is common in Mexican households leading up to Christmas. The timing of the surprise — during Hispanic Heritage Month and ahead of that celebration — was described in the report as intentional on the part of the SoCal Honda Dealers and ABC7 partnership.
The parade route the shop sits on is not a small local event: it is described as the longest-running Mexican parade outside of Mexico, according to Francisco Moreno, president of Comité Mexicano Civico Patriótico, in later NBC Los Angeles coverage of the event's eventual return. That same coverage confirmed the parade's pandemic hiatus stretched two full years — 2020 and 2021 — before it resumed in September 2022, meaning Alisol Flowers had already weathered one canceled parade season by the time of the September 2021 surprise and still faced a second.
What the surprise meant to the family
"She's a very beautiful person, and I know the community, they see that. Because every time they come toward my mom they're always very thankful for everything that she does. And I think she does it out of her heart, because she knows how the struggle is," said Nubia Jimenez, Martha's daughter, according to ABC7.
What the gesture signals
The report frames the rent payment and gift donation as one installment in an ongoing local business-support series rather than a one-time story about Alisol Flowers alone — Random Acts of Helpfulness is described as a recurring ABC7 segment produced with SoCal Honda Dealers, the Southern California Honda dealer association's community-outreach arm. Later installments of the same recurring segment featured other Southern California residents and community organizers, including a Pomona teenager recognized for neighborhood volunteer work and the president of a group supporting the Hispanic and Latino community in Conejo Valley, according to ABC7's continuing coverage of the series. The exact dollar value of the Alisol Flowers rent payment and the specific gifts donated were not detailed in the available reporting.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by ABC7 Los Angeles. It restores a story originally published on this site in September 2021; figures are as reported at the time.