End of 2017 Pop Quiz: Guess Who Has A Mess Of Tamales In His Refrigerator — Awaiting A Steaming?

Californio Gustavo Arellano takes a tour through Mexicano culture and reveals the place of tamales during the holiday season. Hint: tamales should be steamed (tamales de vapor) in a proper utensil before serving. Serve with the salsa (sauce) of choice. Always remember this saying when eating tamales: Tamales nos cuidan (Tamales take care of us). If this is a (fair & balanced demonstration of gustatory biculturalism, so be it.

[x The New Yorker]
The Comfort Of Tamales At The End Of 2017
By Gustavo Arellano

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In Mexican-American culture, there is a time each holiday season, beginning around Thanksgiving, when all foods except tamales recede. We eat them fresh at home, one after another, until their corn-husk wrappers are piled high on the table. We pack two or three for lunch at the office, futilely hoping that the microwave doesn’t leave them a soggy mess. We bring tamales by the bagful to holidays gatherings, trading them like baseball cards with friends and cousins—I’ll give you some of my Tía Meme’s pineapple tamales if you hook me up with the potato ones from your Guatemalan sister-in-law. And, once we’ve put on the pounds (the Freshman Fifteen has nothing on the Tamale [sic] Ten) and sworn to reform our ways in the new year, we freeze what’s left to extend the holiday cheer.

Many families buy their tamales; in the parking lots of Latino grocery stores across Southern California, the call of “Tamales! Tamales!” from women selling out of their car trunks is as ubiquitous as the clash of shopping carts. But even more Mexicans make their own from scratch in a tamalada, a daylong ritual performed each year by an army of female relatives and friends. In the American Southwest, television stations offer dispatches from tortillerías (the squat Tamales Liliana’s, in East Los Angeles, or the sprawling Tellez Tamales & Barbacoa, in San Antonio, both equipped with industrial-grade machines), where people line up for hours for the best masa, the dough that serves as the base for tortillas and tamales.

Back in their kitchens, the family chefs—traditionally women—wash the cornhusks (or banana leaves, if they are from Southern Mexico) and cook the tamale’s fillings: guisos (stews) of vegetables, beef, chicken, or pork sluiced in a salsa. Then the real work starts. Spread a husk or leaf with masa, put a dollop of your filling of choice on top, then add more masa to encase it—not too much or too little. Steam the tamales in batches, in a giant pot with a penny at the bottom, which will rattle to alert the cooks when the water level is low.

Many tamaladas take place on Christmas Eve, when Mexicans in the United States typically celebrate Navidad. We eat them for dinner, before opening gifts. (The weakest Mexican joke in the American comedy canon goes like this: Why do Mexicans eat tamales during Christmas? So they can have something to unwrap.) My own fondest tamalada memories are from when my sisters and I were younger, before they had their own families to tend to. Our tías on my mother’s side would take turns hosting the yearly tamalada, setting up tables across their living rooms to create workstations. There was a hierarchy: the older aunts tended to the fillings while teaching the older cousins how to knead the masa so it was smooth. The younger aunts taught the younger cousins how to smear the masa so that the finished tamales could be unfolded without chunks getting stuck to the cornhusks. As a boy, I never even tried to crash a tamalada; it was an unspoken rule that they were a space where women caught up on one another’s lives.

At the end of 2017, a year of persistent chaos and anxiety for Mexican-Americans, tamales are a special kind of comfort food, and the tamalada a time for reflection. A friend recently told me that she and her sisters did their tamalada on Black Friday instead of Christmas this year, “because we just wanted a time-out.” Her husband had lost his job in the fall; she had taken to driving a Lyft. “I’m just stress-eating tamales right now,” she told me.

Marilynn Montaño, a Santa Ana-based artist and writer, does a tamalada with her family each year for Thanksgiving. Her mom’s best, she says, are made with beef and red chile. This year, though, interspersed amid the usual chisme (gossip) in the kitchen was discussion of a more pressing topic: escalating rent. Santa Ana was once predominantly poor and Mexican (in 2004, it was deemed the hardest big city to live in by SUNY’s Rockefeller Institute of Government), but it is quickly becoming gentrified, and Montaño has organized art projects and writing workshops to teach residents how to fight back. For her, tamaladas have become an extension of her activism. “In these times, it’s like going back to your family traditions, whatever they are, because people don’t want to see that,” she said. “People want Mexicans to just be silent and not express who they are.”

I bought my first tamal of the season in front of a bank near downtown Santa Ana, the day after Thanksgiving: rajas con queso, my favorite type, with strips of sautéed jalapeños fused with melted cheese. Lines were forming at the outdoor ATM, and other people walked inside to withdraw money for their Black Friday free-for-all. Sitting near the front door was an old man who wore a straw tejana hat and a fleece jacket despite the unseasonably hot weather. A cooler sat at his feet.

The scene struck me as odd. For one thing, a rotating cast of chocolate-hawking teen-agers, Salvation Army workers, and fund-raisers from a nearby church usually haunt this particular bank; fresh-food venders tend to set up on the street. Moreover, street vending is a pursuit for the young and the middle-aged with children who can help; this man looked like my retired uncles, grizzled and bent from decades working outdoors.

A rush of people bought his tamales, a dollar apiece: bright-red pork ones, a chicken version that was too greasy for me. But the rajas con queso was perfect. It started hearty, got spicy, then ended with a creamy flourish—just like my mami makes them. I asked the man why he was selling tamales. He said that his wife makes them, and that he needed to raise money for a surgery in Tijuana. As an undocumented immigrant, he had no health insurance in the United States.

Sales were strong that day—thirty sold already, and it was only around 11 AM “Tamales nos cuidan,” he said—tamales take care of us. Then he sold a dozen to a millennial in a Crossfit tank top. # # #

[Gustavo Arellano is the author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America (2012). Arellano is a free-lance writer in Orange County, CA (south of Los Angeles). He received an AA (film/video and photography) from Orange Coast Community College (CA), a BA (journalism) from Chapman University (CA), and an MA (journalism) from the University of California at Los Angeles.]

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