Closing time: The hotel beverage room is slowly disappearing from the rural landscape

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Phil Hossack / Winnipeg Free Press The Elma Hotel and Beverage Room has been closed and for sale for years. It remains padlocked along Highway 15.

NOTRE DAME DE LOURDES -- Angelo Mondragon remembers growing up hanging around picket lines in California with his mom and dad, who were union organizers.

His dad worked along side Cesar Chavez, the migrant farm worker who founded the Farm Workers Union in the United States, and who became that country's most famous Latino American civil rights leader.

Mondragon, as a child, would accompany his dad to Chavez's house, and was taken along on union rallies. "I didn't understand what these marches were about. I basically grew up in the (union) headquarters in southern California."

How Mondragon wound up in the heart of southern Manitoba owning a hotel beverage room -- and spearheading a drive to save small rural beverage rooms like his from vanishing off the landscape -- is another story. The small hotel bars scattered across the countryside have outlasted many a school, church and grain elevator, and are just as steeped in history, albeit a different kind. But the days for many of the small beverage rooms appears to be coming to an end.

"A friend of mine met a friend of hers," explained Mondragon, who is of Mexican descent, over a beer one afternoon in the Notre Dame Hotel.

His friend met a woman from Notre Dame de Lourdes, about 110 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg, who was visiting California, and they ended up marrying. Mondragon flew in from California for the wedding -- that was 10 years ago -- and met the bride's friend. A long-distance relationship ensued. He and Tina Bourdeaud'hui married seven years ago. They tried living in California but Tina, who is a physiotherapist, missed home. They returned five years ago. "How do you decide where to live? She's the boss," replied Mondragon, who is 37.

In Santa Cruz, his early attempts at a career ranged from police officer trainee to stock broker. In Notre Dame, he embraced that rural ethic of wearing several hats. He worked in a pig barn, drove a combine for a couple summers, sold wind turbines, and, most recently, worked for Manitoba Hydro.

The couple have two children with a third on the way, and live on an acreage outside town. "What we have here we could never have in California," Mondragon said.

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Closing time: The hotel beverage room is slowly disappearing from the rural landscape