A digital platform documenting Miami's independent entrepreneurs—the families, the trades, and the neighborhoods that built this city one small business at a time.
Carlos, Roberto, and Miguel Espinoza arrived in Miami with their parents in 1992. The bay they rent now is the same one their uncle used before he retired. This is not a coincidence. This is how the avenue works. A documentary portrait of a family and a block.
Jean-Baptiste Dorvil has worked at four different locations in eighteen years. His core clients have moved with him every time. Trust, in Little Haiti, is not transferable—it is personal.
Her parents had been saving since she was six. At fifteen, she told them to keep the money. At twenty-four, she used it as a deposit on the lease. The shop opened in 2009. It is still open.
It started as inventory control. Now it is mythology. Raul Rodriguez says he will replace the chair when the shop closes and not a day before. A meditation on continuity and the things we refuse to throw away.
Yolanda Castillo did not plan to run the shop. She planned to be a teacher. Then her father got sick, and she answered the phone one morning, and it turned out she knew more than she thought she did.
The franchise opened six months after the last family shop on the block shut down. The neighborhood is still processing what that means. We spent three months on the block trying to understand it.
There is no official closing time at Mendez Auto. The light stays on until the last job is finished. It has been this way for twenty-two years. The family considers it a policy, not a sacrifice.
Northwest 7th Avenue in Miami is one of the densest concentrations of independent auto businesses in South Florida. It is also one of the most unwritten places in the city. Quitalo exists to change that.
The people who work along this corridor are entrepreneurs, immigrants, parents, and neighbors. Their businesses are the connective tissue of the neighborhoods around them. They absorb community life—the gossip, the crises, the rituals—in ways that no franchise ever could.
We document this because it will not document itself.
AUTO REPAIR D&J LLC is a digital media project rooted in Miami's NW 7th Avenue corridor—one of the densest stretches of independent auto shops in South Florida. We document the people behind these businesses: their immigration stories, their family dynamics, their trades, their neighborhoods.
We are writers and photographers. We do not repair vehicles. We record the lives of those who do—and the streets that shaped them.
AUTO REPAIR D&J LLC is a Florida Limited Liability Company based in Miami. Our editorial work is entirely independent, conducted without commercial influence over our subjects or our coverage decisions.
Privacy Policy →Documentary features on Miami's independent entrepreneurs and the neighborhoods they inhabit. Published when the stories are ready.
Documentary features only. We never share your data or sell your attention.