Tortillas: A Cultural History

6 • THE INDUSTRIAL TORTILLA

Chapter 6 • • • THE INDUSTRIAL TORTILLA Before dawn, Anita Hernández Lucas and her mother rose and went their separate ways to different cornmills to begin work by 3:30 in the morning. Hernández’s story began in 1916 when she was born in Mexico City. Her father fought during the Mexican Revolution and her mother followed him as a soldadera from battlefield to battlefield where he died, she told historian María Teresa Fernández-Acevas. In the 1920s her mother moved the family from Mexico City to Guadalajara where they lived on a small military pension supplemented by her mother’s work as a torteadora, a tortilla maker, paid piece rate for the number of tortillas produced. At the cornmill, by six in the morning workers turned out the first batch of large quantities of masa, the nixtamalized corn dough made from wet corn grinders powered by gas engines and electric motors. At six in the evening they were still at work, for the more dough made and sold, the more money earned. Work conditions in the molino de nixtamal (nixtamal cornmill ) could be harsh, and until the late 1920s unregulated. Unskilled, poor and uneducated women accepted what was available, a take-it-or-leave-it job. Undisputed woman’s work was forming dough balls or selling the dough in the shop adjoining the mill. Women competed with men for the job of nixtamalera, a person who worked alongside the men tending hot vats of simmering lime-treated corn kernels. Women hoped to prepare the lime solution, operate simple dough machines, or supervise, the best-paid skilled positions open to both men and women (but dominated by the former). Only men hauled the finished product, heavy loads of corn dough. 90 Chapter 6 After work, Anita and her mother listened to the rousing speeches of women textile workers, schoolteachers, and tortilla workers, fed up with demeaning work conditions, unequal pay, and passive Mexican women. “This was stronger than the household, the home, and parents. We went to the meetings without eating, without sleeping in order to go the labor struggle ; this was a full time job,” said Hernández. The Hernández women joined the budding labor movement, which initially consisted of mixed unions with men and women advocating for better paid positions, then later split into separate men’s and women’s organizations as the technical hierarchy of the industry grew and the men gravitated to the higher-paid, mechanized jobs. From shop worker to labor leader, Anita led six hundred unionized women working as tortilla workers in the cornmills and tortilla factories. In time, she became a labor inspector and a city council member. Her children eventually joined the family tradition as a third generation of labor organizers. Economically disadvantaged women like Anita Hernández Lucas entered the industrialized work force, earned wages, learned to read and write, and organized labor strikes. Were the bloody strikes and boycotts, hostility, and family sacrifices worth it? There was no guarantee of complete woman’s emancipation in the male-dominated tortilla industry, but take notice, Hernández and others pointed out: working-class women had rights. And they savored their important victories. For these women the tortilla, the symbol of national tradition, was also the symbol of social and economic change. Instant Corn Flour For scientists, inventors, dreamers, and entrepreneurs the corn tortilla offered a golden opportunity to gain a bit of fame and make a lot of money . . . if they changed the homegrown art of the pre-Hispanic hearth into a mass-produced, mass-marketed, high-technology commodity. In one year the average Mexican The Industrial Tortilla 91 ate about 220 pounds of tortillas. In the central part of Mexico at least 85 percent of the population ate corn tortillas three times a day. The industrialized corn tortilla was an untapped market to exploit in Mexico. The engineers and tinkerers went to work to solve the problems of sticky, scorched, and misshapen factory tortillas made from corn dough. Moist nixtamalized dough clogged machinery . Early tortilla presses flattened the dough with rough edges. Conveyor belts stalled, flipping tortillas on the floor or burning them. And a system of ovens had to be carefully timed and regulated to produce the perfectly cooked tortilla acceptable to the picky Mexican consumer. Why couldn’t the corn tortilla be more like the wheat flour tortilla? The wheat farmer harvested the wheat...