$20 million from the Fred Loya family puts a name, and a story, on new sports project
Long before the Loya name lit up downtown El Paso, it belonged to a boy counting tortillas. In the back of his parents’ small grocery in Santa Ana, California, a store called La Chiquita, young Alfredo Loya was woken early to tally the dozens being sold.
“I really grew up in that damn tortilla factory,” he would say decades later, with the pride of a man who knew exactly where his discipline came from.
“I became very adept at counting from one to twelve.”
That boy became Fred Loya Sr., founder of one of the largest Hispanic-owned companies in the United States.
This month his family turned his story into the name of a public place.
The Fred Loya family has given $20 million to the Downtown Deck Plaza Foundation for the 6.5-acre park planned over Interstate 10 in the heart of El Paso, and the project will now be known as the Fred Loya Family Deck Plaza.
The family announced the gift at Cleveland Square Park, and that night the downtown skyline and the Star on the Mountain glowed green in their honor.
For Fred Loya Jr., the company’s chief executive, the gift is a continuation of what his father taught him.
“My father believed in the American dream, and he believed in progress,” he said.
“It was the foundation for everything he worked so hard for, and he instilled it in me and our entire family. Part of that dream has always been giving back to the community where our story began and where our hearts will always be.”
He was blunt about the urgency.
“A moment like this will not come around again in our lifetime, and we cannot let it pass.” And he said what the park means to the family in a single line: “You can’t stop the growth in El Paso. So let’s become better, not just bigger.”
The family’s road to that moment ran through a cattle ranch in Chihuahua. The elder Loya’s parents came from Mexico separately and met in California, and his father later bought land in the state of his birth.
After college and three years in the Army, stationed in Germany as a payroll clerk, Fred returned to run the family’s 10,000-acre ranch.
There he married Maria, the daughter of an attorney and concert cellist, who had supported her family since she was a teenager. They had a daughter, Flower, and a son, Fred Jr., in the mid-1960s.
When cattle prices collapsed in the early 1970s, a friend persuaded Fred over breakfast to try selling insurance in El Paso.
He was 35. He called Maria to say he wasn’t coming back; he was going to be an insurance agent. “You’re crazy,” she told him.
“We’re going to starve to death.” Instead, she stayed behind to manage the ranch and, by his account, became the first woman on the board of Chihuahua’s cattlemen’s union, while he started over across the border.
His first paycheck was $16.38. A manager suggested he sell under “Fred” rather than “Alfredo,” and, as Loya told it, “Fred Loya was born right then and there.”
He became one of the city’s most successful Farmers Insurance agents. But as auto insurance became mandatory, he kept meeting people the big carriers didn’t want: working families, first-time buyers, and customers who might fall behind in a hard month.
They drove in from the Lower Valley, Clint and Fabens, because, they told him, “We know that you’re going to take care of us.”
Loya decided to build his business around them. “I knew that these were people that I was destined to serve,” he said.
He went independent with a $10,000 bank loan, and the whole family pitched in. The children recorded serial numbers, photographed cars and stood on street corners handing out flyers.
“A family enterprise from day one,” he called it.
What began with three employees in a Northeast El Paso storefront grew to more than 3,000 people across 13 states.
Along the way the family weathered a stretch of near-collapse that the elder Loya called “The Time of the Troubles,” eventually earned its own insurance charter, and passed the company to the next generation in the early 2000s.
In 2010, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce honored Fred Loya Sr. as its Hispanic entrepreneur of the year.
He kept the title of chairman emeritus and, by his own admission, never quite stopped advising. “I still meddle,” he said.
His generosity was rarely abstract.
Beginning in 1990, he volunteered at a local YMCA and rose through the organization until he served on its national board and chaired its international committee, the only Hispanic and the only Texan to hold that post, he said.
The Eastside branch near the family home now bears the name Fred and Maria Loya Family YMCA. The family has also supported schools, youth sports, seniors, and the Catholic Diocese of El Paso’s legacy endowment.
He was inducted into the El Paso Baseball Hall of Fame. When the pandemic threatened small businesses across the city, he sent what many owners came to call “Loya stimulus checks” to help them stay open.
Yet for most El Pasoans, the Loya name means Christmas. The light show started modestly at the family’s home on Paseo de Oro Lane, with lights on the house and almost no one coming to see them.
“We ran it every day in December,” Loya remembered, “and the only people that were there were the people that put it up.”
Year by year it grew into hundreds of thousands of lights synchronized to music, with free hot chocolate, cookies, and lines of cars wrapping around the Montwood neighborhood.
In 2014 it won ABC’s “The Great Christmas Light Fight,” and the family gave the entire $50,000 prize to ten local charities. Loya often spent the evenings watching the crowd himself.
“Thank you El Paso,” he wrote, “for allowing my family and I to present this gift to you.”
That is the thread organizers chose to emphasize.
“So many families in our community have special memories tied to the traditions the Loya family has helped create,” said Tracy Yellen, president of the Downtown Deck Plaza Foundation.
“This gift will carry those traditions forward by creating a new gathering place for all El Pasoans to enjoy.”
Fred Loya Sr. died earlier this year, and the park’s name honors him as founder while also holding the whole family, three generations of whom built the company, in a single public place.
The plaza itself is designed for the kind of gathering the light show made famous: a performance stage and pavilion for concerts and festivals, a children’s playground, a dog park and splash pad, walking and biking paths, open green space, and public art, all stretched across the freeway between Santa Fe and Kansas streets.
The Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Foundation has since committed $10 million for a fieldhouse on the site, and the campaign for the rest continues.
“Public-private partnerships like this one are how we build a stronger El Paso,” said Mayor Renard Johnson.
“The Fred Loya family’s generosity brings us one step closer to a place every El Pasoan can call their own.”
Years ago, when asked how he wanted to be remembered, Fred Loya Sr. listed three things: “loving, with my family, honest with my employees, and giving to my community.”
His family has now made sure that the third will be written across the center of the city he adopted.
The boy who counted tortillas by the dozen built something that will one day hold crowds by the thousands, in the open air over a highway, on a plaza that carries his family’s name.