A young village woman was paid to make tortillas and deliver them to our living quarters on the school grounds. Corn tortillas were part of every meal in rural Southwest Nuevo Leon. Poor soil and low rainfall made corn the core food staple in the semi-arid region. Weekly, the tortillas arrived wrapped in a cloth inside a wicker basket.
Lacking electricity, refrigeration was not available. Still, the tortillas would keep for several days due to the year-round cool nights. At the end of the tortilla’s shelf life, the daily menu consisted of a steady diet of migas (corn tortilla crumbs or chips); migas con huevos (eggs); migas con papas (potatoes); migas con chorizo (sausage); migas con charro beans and rice (variation of tortilla soup) and refried bean tostadas with a sprinkle of queso fresco (goat cheese). The tortillas never went to waste.
A corn mill was situated by the entrance of the village’s school grounds. Villagers would go there to grind the corn kernels into masa for making tortillas. Few families had a tortilla press. Most villagers, like my paternal aunts in La Bolsa, made tortillas completely by hand. The corn kernels were cooked in a cazuela (earthenware), grounded on a metate into masa. Once turned into masa, it was manually molded into a tortilla and placed on a comal (a flat surface made of clay) to bake.
As a preschooler, I learned to eat spicy food in my paternal aunt’s jacal (a living space constructed on the bare ground with adobe or rock walls and straw roof) kitchen. When visiting my aunts, they would always offer us a chile pepper and salt taco made on a fresh corn tortilla. I watched as the chile pepper salsa was made using a molcajete- a bowl-shaped object for grinding ingredients together made of volcanic stone or clay mortar. Initially, the spicy pepper seeds burned my mouth, but hunger has a way of forcing taste palates to adapt quickly.
My aunts also made corn gorditas, a thick tortilla which was cut in the middle to create a pocket where pinto beans, goat cheese or nopales (Opuntia cacti) were placed. Salvadorians call gorditas “pupusas.” The school teacher who was held in high esteem in the village, my mother, would impress upon us to graciously accept offers of sustenance from my aunts and neighbors because sometimes when you refuse people’s food it is perceived as indication about how one feels about the people who cook and consume the food.
Eating corn tortilla tacos prepared me to eat tamales, tortilla soup and other corn-based dishes. My experience may sound like an episode of the PBS series “Mexico: One Plate at a Time” in which American chef and Mexican cuisine enthusiast Rick Bayless seeks out new dishes. It was not. What my aunts fed my siblings and me were not delicacies. It was the only thing they had to offer, provided with great sacrifice to the modest resources possessed for their daily survival. My aunts generosity when things got difficult for my mom between pay periods unwittingly provided an example of what it is to be a giving selfless human being early in my life.
My maternal grandmother who was white in complexion would send us off to buy corn tortillas when we visited Monterrey while rebuking us for sounding like what city dwellers derogatorily describe as “nacos,” poor rural people, when we spoke. She was a small town person in the big city who also ate corn tortillas. The only difference was that she bought them from the tortilla factory located in the lower working-class neighborhood where she resided. Hearing her provincial roots in the inflection of her reprimands and orders, I was perplexed by her pomposity.
In the US, flour tortillas became a common part of our household’s everyday meals. But physically, I have never been able to get use to the texture of flour. And spiritually, eating flour tortillas feels like an extravagant act which is unnatural to my humble indigenous native-American origins.
Reflecting on the prevalence of corn tortillas in my childhood, I came to understand how corn tortillas sustained families in rural and urban areas of Mexico. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my experience underlined the impact corn based sustenance has had on the subsistence of poor people for centuries.
