Worlds collide, or don't

I was in the neighborhood, so last night I stopped by Copps supermarket on S. Park St. for a little grocery shopping. Park St., for those of you who don't know, runs the length of Madison's South Side, where many of our city's Latinos live.

I was wryly amused to note that this particular Copps now has two sections of Mexican food. One, near the canned tomatoes and green beans, has the Tex-Mex brands familiar to American supermarket shoppers for at least a generation or two: El Paso, La Preferida.

The other section is altogether harder to find. It's on the opposite side of the store, stuck on the blunt end of an aisle somewhere between the Lysol and the bottled water. This section has things that, I imagine, recent arrivals to Madison remember fondly from home, things like Jarritos soda and canned menudo. There also are tr�s chic glass bottles of Coca-Cola, imported from Mexico; I paused over these but, at $1.50 per, decided to forego them this time.