Tamales: From The Cause of Crime to the Cause of Celebration at Candelaria

In Mexico, Candelaria is an important holiday. Above all, it’s the day for tamales, steamed, usually stuffed maize dumplings  (unlike in the United States where tamales are now for Christmas).  This is the story of how in popular opinion tamales rose from a cause of crime to a cause for celebrating a national dish at Candelaria.

First, a bit of background. Candelaria is the midpoint between the winter equinox and the spring solstice. Known as Candlemas in English, for the blessing of candles in the church, in the United States it’s much-diminished, known as Groundhog Day, when Punxsutawney, Pa., has its one minute of fame a year when a woodchuck is paraded on television, its shadow or lack of it said to predict the weather for the rest of the year.

In Mexico, it’s the start of spring planting, the commemoration of Christ’s presentation at the temple, and the culmination of end of the long Christmas period, which begins on December 13th, the Dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe, continues through Advent, Christmas,  and All Kings Day for which a sweetbread known as the Rosca de Reyes is baked with a figurine inside representing the baby Jesus. Today the lucky recipient of the figurine in the Rosca de Reyes has to offer a party on Candelaria.  And that party means tamales.

Tamales as “an abominable folk pastry!

Tamales haven’t always been acceptable, at least in respectable Mexican families. For centuries after the Spanish conquest, the well-to-do ate white bread and shunned tamales.

Tamales, they thought, were at best rustic food, at worst a street food for the urban poor. They were an “abominable folk pastry,” according to the distinguished Mexican criminologist , Julio Guerrero author of The Genesis of Crime in Mexico (1901).  The wild greens, beans, nopales, squash, fried pork skins, chiles, corn tortillas, and tamales of the indigenous caused social backwardness, delinquency and crime.

Rehabilitating Tamales

Following the drawn-out, destructive Revolution that began in 1910 and stretched on in regional bouts of violence for a decade after its official end in 1920, the ruling class struggled to find ways to heal the wounds (still alive today) and re-unite the nation. Intellectuals such as the educator, author and politician José Vasconcelos, filmmakers such as Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, and artists such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo embarked on a campaign to show that  Mexico’s cuisine, including its corn, beans, chile, and tamales, was a force for national unity.

And that’s where tamales enter the story, says Beatriz Ramírez Woolrich, Mexico’s leading expert on tamales. Her mother, the beautiful and forceful Doña Amelia, was happily married to an engineer who wanted her to stay home with the children.  So she did.

But she also went to the classes given by Doña Josefina Velazquez de León, still revered as a pioneer who collected, recorded and published regional recipes. There Doña Josefina encouraged her, like the other middle-class students to go into business.

Beatriz Woolrich Ramirez with banana leaves for her tamales

Doña Amelia’s needed little urging.  She was a Tehuana from the Tehuantepec Isthmus on the southwest coast of the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, and Tehuanas were fine cooks and entrepreneurial business women.   “When man lands on the moon, he’ll find a Tehuana selling food, ” goes a Mexican saying. Her own aunt dealt in sesame seeds, owned a hotel, and ran a cinema.

Doña Amelia’s team turning out tamales. Beatriz Woolrich Ramírez

In the 1950s, Doña Amelia began making cakes for her neighbors’ social events and children’s parties using Doña Josefina’s recipes.

One day when Doña Amelia was buying cake-decorating supplies from  La Veiga on Boulevard Insurgentes, one of the city’s most prestigious bakeries, the Spanish owner asked her why she didn’t just buy his cakes. Doña Amelia shot back that she herself was a skilled cake-maker. Well, would she be interested in making cakes for them? asked the owner.

No, she replied, but what about high-quality tamales, unlike those of dubious safety sold by women squatting on the street outside the bakery. Her family’s were of the same quality as the finest cakes.“Bring a hundred tomorrow,” said La Veiga’s owner.

A hundred tamales was a tall order.  A Oaxacan tamal filled with chicken mole and wrapped in a banana leaf requires 120 different steps.

Doña Amelia delivered the tamales on time. By midafternoon, La Veiga had sold out.

Banana leaf tamales were a novelty in Mexico City where corn husks were the normal wrapping. Soon Doña Amelia was accepting orders for quinceañeras, meriendas (7 p.m. get-togethers) and wedding breakfasts. When supermarkets came to Mexico City in the 1970s, Doña Amelia sold to them too.

Doña Amelia’s tamales, said Oaxacans, were better than the ones they could get in their home state.

Tamales as Business

The family’s apartment overlooking the colonial plaza of Coyoacán, where Cortés had once lived, overflowed with banana leaves and corn husks, corn dough, pots of mole and billowing steam. Doña Amelia and tamal equipment spilled over into the next-door apartment.

Then Doña Amelia and her husband built a new house, just round the corner from Frida Kahlo’s famed Casa Azul, with kitchens on the ground floor and family quarters above. They hired more women  and a driver to make deliveries. Her engineer husband invented a tamalera, organized a safe, sanitary kitchen, and eventually left his job to do the accounts full time. Her children helped out. How could anyone not know how to make tamales? wonders Beatriz.

Tamales Today

Doña Amelia died several years ago, never having broken her promise to stay at home with the children. Beatriz still makes her tamales to special order (my favorite has the surprise of an olive, an almond and a slip of red pepper inside). She organized the early Ferias del Tamal at the Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares and is the inspiration behind an annual day-long seminar at the Anthropological Institute of the National University.

And, the political battles over the social consequences of tamal-eating long forgotten, the Mexican public enjoys tamales on Candelaria declaring the Christmas season finally over.

Asserting that the diet of the poor causes problems of health or delinquency was common at the beginning of the twentieth century in many countries, not just Mexico.  And elevating the dishes of the poor into national dishes was also a common strategy. I’m sure readers can think of examples of both.

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A much up-dated version of my 2011 article on tamales for Zester Daily.   For other English-language discussions, see  Ruth Alegria, something of El Nino Dios; Lesley Tellez, strawberry tamales;  Ben Herrera Beristain, a tamalada.  In Spanish,  Mexico Desconocido on why tamales on this day.

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