CommentsTONY CASTRO’S AMERICA-During the recession, what once were small strip malls in Los Angeles have become multi-service garages filled with repair shops specializing in tires, mufflers, brakes, front end alignment – like Victoria Secret departments for your car.
It is also the place you can get the best bargain on tamales, especially at this time of year, with the tamal perhaps the best Mexican contribution to Christmas.
While waiting to get new Michelins on my car the other day, I couldn’t help but notice that the muffler vendor was taking his lunch break over a plate of tamales that made me wonder if there was a tamales shop nearby I didn’t know about.
“My wife and mom make them to sell during the holidays,” the muffler guy said, offering me a pork tamale better than anything you can find in the professional tamalerias in LA that are packed with orders this time of year.
When I mentioned this to the guy who finally got around to putting the Michelins on my car, he dropped what he was doing and went to his office, returning moments later with a plate filled with more tamales.
“If you liked his family’s tamales,” he said, “you’ll love my wife’s. Plus I’ll beat whatever deal my neighbor is offering.”
I have to admit. He was right, although sometimes I wonder if our opinion about tamales isn’t like that of pot: Does anyone ever really complain about the last tamal you’ve eaten?
So in a town now dotted with medical marijuana dispensaries, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Los Angeles is now also overrun with tamale vendors, licensed or not, who apparently have become enough of an underground economy market that tamalerias are worried.
When I told a tamaleria owner in the suburban San Gabriel Valley, he demanded to know the location of the strip mall because he and other licensed vendors are reporting them to the county authorities.
I made him happy by giving him an address. He had no idea it belonged to Nieman Marcus in Beverly Hills.
Los Angeles is not an isolated instance. I check with reliable longtime sources in Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Detroit, San Diego, Chicago, and New York. In Miami, I’m told, you'll find Cuban homemade tamale vendors going door to door at doctors’ offices, hair salons and other places, trying to make extra cash.
Tamales, it seems, are everywhere in Hispanic USA -- and it’s a cottage industry that’s around not just during the holidays. Street vendors in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles sell tamales year-round, even taken vegetarian and vegan orders.
The guy who sold me new tires said his wife’s tamales helped put their son’s tuition at pricey Loyola High School, which has educated Los Angeles politicians and studio executives and is known as a networking gateway for colleges like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the Ivy Leagues.
He sold me the tamales at half the cost of the tamalerias.
Too bad he wasn’t as generous on the Michelins.
(Tony Castro, the author of seven books, can be reached at [email protected]. This appeared on Tony Castro’s America.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
