Evelyn Bahamundi Segarra, owner of El Rancho de la Rubia on Puerto Rico’s PR-119 highway in San Germán, will celebrate the restaurant’s second anniversary on Saturday, November 14, starting at 6:00 PM with the third aguinaldo promise she has sung there and the first caravan of ox drivers (boyeros) held at the site. Participants will gather at the PR-119 bridge near the gallera (cockfighting venue) and march to the business, accompanied by jíbaro music, with Bahamundi Segarra singing her aguinaldos.
The property holds a roughly 100-year-old crane where sugarcane growers once weighed their harvest before it was taken to the Central Eureka sugar mill, and it was home to the old El Rancho business, where animals, especially horses, were sold. Bahamundi Segarra said she visited the site with her father and grandfather and vowed as a child to buy it one day.
She paid a promise at the Church of Our Lady of Montserrat in Hormigueros in September 2024 and later bought the business despite having lost her job. She said she has sung aguinaldos de promesa since age 8, a devotion she learned from her grandfather. At the restaurant she built an altar with images of the Divino Niño Jesús, the Virgin of Montserrat and the Three Kings, and she expects descendants of the cane workers to attend.
She said her farm may be the only one in Puerto Rico that still has one of these cranes, as most were sold to the Dominican Republic, and she holds workshops on plowing with oxen and displays old artifacts.