Whole Life Times: Mama’s Hot Tamales

December 2005 | Taste Buds

Mama’s Hot Tamales

Revitalizing the neighborhood, one tamale at a time

by Lucinda Michele Knapp

There are lots of things you can buy in Downtown LA’s MacArthur Park, and only about half of them are legal. However, there is something for sale here that’s rare and priceless: hope. And in MacArthur Park, hope tastes surprisingly like… tamales?

When Mama’s Hot Tamales opened almost five years ago with a mission to improve MacArthur Park by providing training and licensing for local street vendors, success seemed like a long shot. Decades of neglect had transformed the historic and once pastoral promenade into a dangerous trading ground for drugs, illegal green cards and other contraband. Park tamale vendors suffered constant harassment from the police and health department for selling food without permits. But with no business training or education regarding food handling, these workers, generally new immigrants, couldn’t even get a job in a restaurant. Mama’s Hot Tamales hoped to give these good people the opportunity and support to realize their American dream.

Project Supervisor and community activist Sandra Romero has seen Mama’s Hot Tamales succeed enormously. The restaurant is only one project of the Institute for Urban Research and Development, a non-profit that also creates and manages homeless shelters throughout Southern California. The café is bustling, and the vendors who work in its kitchen sell their tamales from within the restaurant as well as from brightly painted carts in the park. Besides its rotating selection of tamales, the restaurant also sells delicious breakfast, lunch and dinner items and offers fair-trade, shade-grown coffee that’s robust, complex and slightly spicy.

Mama’s is truly the “tamales capital of the world”— there’s no better place in Southern California to stock up on this traditional Christmas specialty. A Honduran chicken tamale comes wrapped in a dark banana leaf, with a filling of potatoes, olives, raisins and rice. Especially delicious is a tamale from the coast of Oaxaca; made with the classic native ingredients of black beans and squash, it combines both savory and subtly sweet flavors and seems to melt on the tongue. A Guatemalan pork tamale uses a dough made from blended rice and corn—so soft it seems buttery—and the warm, steaming contents are nestled in a bright red, spicy sauce.

And there are dessert tamales too. Some come made with sweet corn and sour cream; others surprise with the tang of pineapple. One recipe hailing from San Salvador arrives studded with delicate wild strawberries, its masa tinted gently pink.

The project has always been a labor of love. After the storefront first opened as a kitchen and classroom in 1999, diverse organizations provided nearly $100,000 in grants and funding and in 2001, Mama’s Hot Tamales opened its doors on West Seventh Street, facing the park. The first classes were dedicated to creating a business plan and a budget, costing, pricing, marketing, food handling, state certification, taxes and licensing. Mama’s Hands-On training now provides training in small business operations, kitchen management and service-oriented, “front of the house” skills.

Angel Orozco, a student at Mama’s in 2004, is the café manager. “There have been a lot of rewards to working here: a reduction in crime, the park becoming cleaned up. Womens’ contributions to the economy, which usually go unaccounted for, are appreciated. Each tamale represents a family making a small business work. Also, the organization has confidence in me,” he says, voicing the feelings of many beneficiaries of Mama’s efforts. “That is very rewarding in itself.”

“Right now we are working to make the café self-sufficient without the use of grants,” Angel says. Executive Director Joe Colletti confirms that progress is being made. “We’re not out of the woods yet,” he notes, “but right now we’re running at about 90 percent self-sufficiency. Of course, that’s not enough to provide us with a financial buffer—but we’re doing well, and we’re surviving.”

Mama’s is a model for other social entrepreneurs, too. La Cocina Community Kitchen, which opened three years ago in San Francisco’s Mission District, drew heavily on Mama’s Tamales business plan in its mission to develop micro-enterprise programs in its community. And of course there are the many families whose small businesses help to stabilize the community around MacArthur Park. “Each family comes in to make their tamales,” says Sandra. “It’s usually the mother and two or three family members.”

Mama’s bases business on a different paradigm from the average small American company; rather than setting a goal of rising above competitors to make its owners rich, Mama’s Hot Tamales and the MacArthur Park Sidewalk Vending District base their bottom line on the well-being of the community. Mama’s presence in the neighborhood has contributed to the renaissance of the park itself, which is fast regaining its former glory from the days of Old Los Angeles. A stroll in the park on an autumn afternoon with a spicy tamale in one hand and a chilly, cinnamon-laced horchata in the other seems like the ultimate in urban relaxation

It’s fitting that tamales are a traditional food during Christmas: who would guess that such a small surprise, in its modest wrapping of corn husks, could be such an immense gift to the community?

Bring a dozen tamales home for your family during December and enjoy a traditional Centro Americano-style holiday meal. Mama’s Hot Tamales is located at 2212 West Seventh Street in Downtown LA and is open every day from 8:30am to 3:30pm. 213.487.4300.

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