The motto of a local hardware store speaks to its place in its community and the area around it.

“Heart of a Working Town,” it says on a store window by an entrance of Express Hardware in Elsa. The store is located about a block away from the intersection on FM 88 and state Highway 107. It has become a crossroads corner for the communities that make up what’s known as the Delta Area, a name derived from a lake in that section of the Rio Grande Valley.

The flow of traffic along Broadway Street – Elsa’s city name for FM 88 – heads north to Monte Alto. For other motorists, Broadway heads south and then east to Edcouch and La Villa after taking a left on 107. These are communities filled with “very prideful people,” said Rafael Aguilera, who with his wife, Mirtha, own Express Hardware. The store occupies historic space in Elsa. One of the community’s first banks in the early 1900s once did business where Aguilera today sells nuts and bolts, screws and paints to everyone from DYI customers to subcontractors. 

“Customers are very loyal to their city,” he said of his store’s standing in the Delta Area. “People tell us, ‘I want you guys to succeed here. We need a hardware store in our community.’”

Customer Collaboration

Aguilera recounts a story of a customer asking for help after her husband became ill and was unable to complete a bathroom project.

The couple are steady Express Hardware customers. After explaining her predicament, Aguilera said he began the kind of collaboration his store is known for when it comes to serving customers. 

“The customer didn’t know what to do,” he said. “She got here and said, ‘I know you’re going to help me.'”

Going through the project step by step, Aguilera guided his customer through the process of completing the DIY project at her home. It was representative of the customers Express Hardware serves, he said, describing them as “citizens who are prideful in maintaining their homes.”

The Delta Area has a foundation of residents who have lived in the area all their lives. Newer residents like Aguilera are reinvigorating the area, leaving more populous Valley communities for life on larger lots. The store owner and his wife lived in an Edinburg subdivision for many years. Aguilera found a larger patch of land to build a new home north of Elsa after he retired from years of working for a state agency. He and his wife are enjoying a more rural lifestyle.

“People are proud to have a home on an acre of land,” he said of newer Delta Area residents. “They want to experience that, the feeling of having more space but not being so far from civilization. They want their grocery stores, restaurants, a hardware store to be not that far away.”

That’s a niche Express Hardware is filling for the Delta Area with its essential plumbing supplies, electrical parts, nuts and bolts, door latches, paints and basic lumber supplies. 

“One aisle at a time,” Aguilera said of ongoing efforts to improve a hardware store he acquired from his brother in 2022. “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

‘My Retirement’

In a prior work life, Aguilera worked for the JC Penney store at McAllen’s La Plaza Mall in its 1990s heyday.

The years Aguilera spent working on the sales floor of a large department store gave him a grounding in retail that has come in handy when taking over a small-town hardware store. It was Home Hardware Plus when his brother Ray Aguilera owned it from 2009 to 2022. When Rafael acquired it two years ago, he renamed it Express Hardware and began sorting out important questions.

“What kind of store are we?” he recalls asking in analyzing the store. “What’s my customer base?”

It all led to the “Heart of a Working Town” theme, a store for plumbers and subcontractors as well as everyday residents who take pride in maintaining their homes. With the help of his sister Olivia, who had worked at the store prior to 2022, Aguilera has forged ahead, leaving retirement behind.

“This is my retirement right here,” he said in his office that was once a small bank vault. “I love coming here every day and working with customers and learning from them because sometimes you’re the student and taking advice from them.”