This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. This episode was produced in partnership with Experience Kissimmee as part of a special series about Kissimmee’s Latin Culinary Trail. Click here to learn more.

---

Kelly McEvers: Okay, so let’s say it’s a hot day in Central Florida, like usual, and you’re in a city called Kissimmee. There’s a place you can go to cool off, get a drink and a snack, but it is not easy to find.

Dorimar Mercado: It’s in a cul-de-sac, so nobody will go there unless you had to. It is hidden away.

**Kelly: **Down that cul-de-sac next to a daycare center, there’s a yellow sign in front of what looks like a bunch of trees. Follow the path next to the sign, and it will take you back to this little yellow bungalow with rocking chairs on a front porch, surrounded by tropical plants.

**Dorimar: **You’ll know you’re in the right place because of what it sounds like. We have the sound of the coquí frog on the outside of the store.

**Kelly: **That sound is playing over outdoor speakers.

Dorimar: It’s named coqui because that’s the sound it makes. It literally sings “coqui, coqui, coqui,” all night long. And when it’s raining, it sings that all night long.

You either love it or it drives you crazy. But most Puerto Ricans love it. My mother hates it, but most Puerto Ricans love it.

So when people come in, they hear the sound, and that’s also very emotional for us Puerto Ricans to hear that sound. Sometimes they sit on the rocking chairs and they’re like, this is what I used to do at my grandmother’s house, and listen to the coquí, and they just break down crying, which is sweet. It’s very sweet.

**Kelly: **I’m Kelly McCovers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. This episode is brought to you in partnership with Experience Kissimmee.

The sound of the coquí frog is something that comforts people. And it makes sense that this snack shop, Coquí Snacks, is all about comfort foods. For 16 years, owner Dorimar Mercado has been sharing the snacks and sounds of her childhood in Puerto Rico with people who come to her shop.

And those snacks include a frozen treat with a surprising connection to the aviator, Charles Lindbergh. That’s coming up after this.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Limbers, housemade ice pops, come in almost two dozen flavors, including vanilla cream, grape, mango, and cherry. Corey Woosley / Atlas Obscura

**Kelly: **So, when you think about Orlando, Florida, and the area around it, you might think about a certain cartoon mouse. But in the last decade, the area has become a center of Latin American culture and food. Brazilian barbecue, Cuban sandwiches, sushi with Dominican flavors.

And if you go to Kissimmee, about a 20-minute drive from Disney World, you will find this place called Coquí Snacks. You might think you just walked into the backyard of someone’s grandparents’ house in Puerto Rico.

Dorimar: The vibe is very nostalgic. The actual building, I made it look like a little Puerto Rican country house, like a wooden country house. That’s what it looks like.

Kelly: This is Dorimar Mercado, the founder of Coquí Snacks.

**Dorimar: **It’s small and cozy, and it has an area with rocking chairs, and it just gives you that Caribbean vibe.

Kelly: Today, if you go to Coquí, you’ll find people hanging out on the front porch, sitting in the rocking chairs, many of them having the house specialty.

It looks a little bit like a frozen ice pop in a cup. It’s a classic Puerto Rican snack called limbers, which have a surprising backstory. The name limber actually comes from Lindbergh, as in Charles Lindbergh, the aviator. He visited Puerto Rico back in 1928, flying his famous airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis.

According to some versions of the story, Lindbergh arrived on a super hot day. Someone offered him a popsicle. He loved it. The name kind of stuck. But in other versions of the story …

Dorimar: Puerto Ricans felt that he was a very aloof man. He didn’t show emotions that much. So he was very cold to the Puerto Rican people. And so Puerto Ricans started calling these desserts that probably were being called something like a little ice cream or something. And then we started calling them limber because they were as cold as Charles Lindbergh.

Kelly: So, whichever version of the story is true, limbers were what you had as a kid. Like when Dorimar was growing up.

Dorimar: In Puerto Rico, usually limbers were something that housewives made for a little extra cash, and they sold them from their houses, from their freezers. As a child, you would go to the lady that sold limbers, and then the lady would come out, usually in a bad mood.

I never met a limber lady that was in a good mood because the kids were always bothering her somehow. You know, she was doing something or watching her telenovelas, and the kids were, you know, interrupting her. So she was like, “Yes?” you know, like, “Que?”

Kelly: Lucky for her, Dorimar had a better source for limber.

**Dorimar: **In my grandmother’s backyard, she had coconut palm trees. So I would ask for a coconut limber, and she would just go to her backyard and throw rocks at the coconuts. The coconuts would fall, and she would make me limbers of coconuts. And so things like that, and that’s how limbers became a thing in Puerto Rico.

**Kelly: **Then around 2008, Dorimar was living in the U.S. and working as a business journalist, but she started to worry about the future of newspapers and thought about trying something different. She ended up buying a kit online to make mini donuts and started selling them at fairs and events around Kissimmee. And it worked. By 2009, she was ready to open a shop. Kissimmee seemed like the perfect spot.

Dorimar: Kissimmee specifically, we have a large Puerto Rican community here.

**Kelly: **Some say this started in the early ’70s when Disney World opened. The park needed workers, and at the time there was an economic downturn in Puerto Rico. Then, after Hurricane Maria in 2017, a lot of Puerto Ricans relocated to Central Florida. And now more than half the city’s population of 85,000 identifies as Puerto Rican. This was on Dorimar’s mind when she was thinking about how to expand her menu in the new location.

**Dorimar: **I was looking for things that I couldn’t find here as a Puerto Rican. And I thought of the limbers.

Kelly: At first, she started with traditional flavors coconut, pineapple, sour sap, mantecado, or vanilla cream. But over the years …

**Dorimar: **We start getting more creative. At some point, I had them made out of different candy bars, like Snickers bars, Twix bars. And now, for example, Bad Bunny, the singer with his old residency in Puerto Rico and his new album, he has a song that’s called Cafe Con Ron. So we made a limber of Cafe Con Ron, a coffee and rum limber, and people love it.

Kelly: In the beginning, Coquí Snacks was all about sweets, but Dorimar says after customers started asking her for more savory options, she hit up her mom for recipes and learned some new ones on YouTube. So, today you can find fried fritters with all kinds of different fillings.

**Dorimar: **The crowd favorite for the frituras has always been the alcapurria de massa, which is the one made out of the green plantains with ground beef. People love the one that we make. That’s our number one bestseller, is that, and the empanadilla de pizza. The pizza empanada was a classic that all Puerto Rican kids grew up in.

When I was going to school in Puerto Rico in the ’80s, they would have like a little kiosk with sweets and fried foods for the children. For a dollar, you could get a Coke icy and a pizza empanada.

**Kelly: **Dorimar also has some of her own inventions. Like she took a traditional sandwich called a tripleta made with three different kinds of meats and stuffed it into an empanada.

**Dorimar: **Yeah, we tried to make new combinations. I would have new staff members come and say, hey, in my neighborhood, they used to make them out of this. And I say, well, okay, let’s try that and let’s see how we can change it and make it our own.

Kelly: When Dorimar opened Coquí Snacks back in 2009, her oldest daughter was four, and she was pregnant with her youngest.

Dorimar: It was important to me as a mom to these two girls that were born here in the States to also get a little bit of their culture, you know, of where I come from. I’ve noticed that with a lot of parents also, that they love to bring their children and teach them, you know, this is what I used to eat when I was a child, you know, and now I had kids that used to come in with their parents, and because we’ve been over for 16 years, now they’re bringing their own babies, you know.

So, other than making me feel old, it makes me feel proud also. I love, you know, that when you go to different places, you know, Italians keep some of their foods and, or the Irish, you know, that we’re all Americans, but we bring that deliciousness from all our countries. It’s all these traditions, all these little things that um we used to enjoy over there, and bringing it over here and teaching it to a new generation.

**Kelly: **Coquí snacks is open daily. Check out their hours online, and you can order on their website if you’re in the Kissimmee area. The shop is in a cul-de-sac. Look for the yellow sign. You know you’re getting close when you hear the sound, “coquí.”

And if you’re looking for more places to eat while you’re in town, check out the Kissimmee Latin Culinary Trail. There are 40 restaurants in there with a huge variety of Latin American cuisines, including Puerto Rican, Mexican, Colombian, Venezuelan, and Argentinian, to name a few. We will post a link to an interactive map in the episode description.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.