When Elvith Santoyo-McNaught was a teenager in Galesburg, she did what most teenagers in most towns do: she made plans to leave.

Somewhere bigger. Somewhere with more opportunity. The conversations with classmates ran along familiar rails — what they'd do after graduation, where they'd go, how different everything would be once they left town behind. Elvith had her own version of that dream.

Life, as she puts it, had a better plan.

Today she is the Executive Director of Habitat for Humanity of Knox County, a commercial and residential landlord through Santoyo-McNaught Rentals, co-owner of Urban Milling Company, and the mother of three: Otis, 11; Jonas, 8; and Flora, three months old. She has lived several lives.

Her family immigrated from Mexico in 1993 and settled in Galesburg in 2000. Elvith would become the first in her family to graduate from college — and, in the same breath, first generation American.

The summer after graduating from Galesburg High School in 2006, her father opened Acapulco Mexican Restaurant. Elvith, at 18, stepped into the manager's role — not entirely by choice. In a tight-knit Mexican family, the business was a shared obligation. But while she worked through immigration status challenges that temporarily delayed her college plans, she discovered something: she was good at this. Hiring, training, managing staff — she took to it with an ease that surprised even her.

When her status was resolved, she returned to school as a George Washington Gale Scholar, earning an associate degree from Carl Sandburg College before transferring to Knox, where she earned a bachelor's in economics with a minor in business psychology. She was simultaneously running Acapulco full time, having purchased it from her father during her senior year when her parents decided to retire. She graduated in 2013. She had bought the restaurant in 2012. Under her ownership, Acapulco became one of Galesburg's most successful restaurants.

She was also one of the first female restaurant owners in Galesburg. Possibly the first. "I always tell people I knew Judy before she was famous," she said, referencing the woman who would build a TikTok empire from a Galesburg pancake restaurant. "She used to come to me for advice. Now I go to her.

In 2016, she purchased the former Carriage House building downtown. Plans evolved from expanding Acapulco into something new: La Cantinita, an upscale tequila bar with no competition within a hundred miles. She closed Acapulco in September 2019, opened La Cantinita in September 2020 — the pandemic having delayed construction — and built it into a destination drawing customers from Peoria, the Quad Cities, and beyond. She sold the business in May 2023, keeping the building. The buyer changed the concept to a sports bar and closed in August 2024. Elvith does not belabor the point.

She met her husband at the local YMCA in 2013. He is, she notes, a Blue Bullet — from Knoxville, not Galesburg. "He catches a hard time for that more often than not. But we love our neighbors." He serves as superintendent of the traffic department for the city of Galesburg and is her partner in Santoya-McNaught Rentals and Urban Milling Company. Her parents, who had retired to Texas, moved back when she and her husband were expecting their first child. They never left again.

After selling La Cantinita, Elvith joined the Habitat for Humanity of Knox County board, rose to vice president, led fundraising efforts, and stepped into the Executive Director role in April 2025 when a vacancy opened unexpectedly. The fit was immediate. Habitat's mission — affordable housing through education and partnership, a hand up rather than a handout — felt personal. Her own family had arrived with nothing guaranteed and built something real, one year at a time, in a community that showed up for them. Now she helps others do the same.

When she talks about what makes Galesburg worth staying in, she doesn't reach for abstraction. Her village, she says, never gives up on you. People show up in the good and the bad, rejoice with you when something works, and hold you steady when it doesn't. In a town where tribal barriers dissolve into shared history, there is a particular kind of love she hasn't found replicated anywhere else.

If she could sit down with her high school self — the girl who couldn't wait to leave — she knows exactly what she'd say.

"Just lean on your neighbors," she said. "And take it day by day."

She's living proof that the advice works.