A former inmate is brewing change in the community after turning his life around. 

Richard Cabral co-owns Tepito Coffee and Tea House in Pasadena. The shop is located in Vroman’s Bookstore on Colorado Boulevard. 

Cabral’s look alone tells his story, but he’s writing his future his own way. 

“My family has been involved in gangs since the 1970s, and I, too, would be involved in gangs,” Cabral said. “At age 13, I started my incarceration.”

In and out of prisons at age 25, Cabral’s sentence could have solidified his family’s legacy. 

“I was arrested for attempted murder for shooting another gang member in East Los Angeles and facing 35 years to life,” Cabral said. “I got five years in prison and ended up at the organization Homeboy Industries.”

Homeboy Industries is where Cabral said he met his true father figure and founder of Homeboy Industries, Greg Boyle. Boyle shared the importance of Homeboy Industries in one word: “humildad,” or “humility.”

“There it is. You have to start with humility before anything,” Cabral said to Boyle. “I love you, pops.”

Before co-owning Tepito Coffee and Tea House, Cabral worked as a baker at Homeboy Industries, where a Hollywood casting agent spotted him about 10 years ago.

“That’s where my first TV show, "Southland," came — that was my first acting gig,” Cabral said. “That would change the trajectory of my life.”

Cabral’s IMDB profile boasts dozens of his credits, one of the more recent being his work on Peacock’s “Twisted Metal.” However, Cabral doesn’t think his story is unique, and believes “there are millions of my stories in America.”

Cabral was born and raised in East LA in what he calls a broken community and home. He said Homeboy Industries taught him to accept the things he could not change. 

“There’s these circumstances where as a child you have no choice but to know life is gonna be hard, right?” Cabral said. “And understanding that sometimes it wasn’t my fault — it wasn’t my fault my mom was an alcoholic, it wasn’t my fault that my dad left me, right?”

Cabral found power in accepting what he called “hard truths” and is now the master of his own story. 

“It doesn’t matter where my life started, it matters where my life ends, and I get to determine how I dictate this story now,” Cabral said.

Cabral’s mission with Tepito Coffee is personal. He said his whole philosophy changed when he had his first pour-over, and that he had “been drinking coffee wrong all this time.”

“I felt that if anybody should be making coffee in our community, at this high-end, gentrified level, it should be the ones from this community. It’s very simple,” Cabral said. “I'm proud of where my people come from. I know the beauty of my people. I felt that that was missing right here.”

While Cabral still has his American dream in Hollywood, his taste buds remain authentically Angeleno. 

“I couldn’t have done this without the people and specifically the people of Los Angeles,” Cabral said.