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Mamá and I (Gainesville, FL; 1995).

Her Last Tortillas

I did not use a knife at the table until I was about seventeen or eighteen years of age and began eating out with friends. Chicago, where I was born and raised, is renowned for its diverse and delectable dining opportunities. But at home, the custom had always been to eat with a fork (or spoon if absolutely necessary, as with soup) and with a tortilla. The tortilla served as bread but also as a utensil. It is an old Mexican custom that is still practiced by people from humble origins. You tear off a couple of pieces as you would with flat bread when eating hummus, let’s say. With one piece in hand you push a little food onto the piece held in the other and, scooping it up, eat the whole bite. The palate becomes so used to tasting tortilla along with food that it becomes virtually impossible to sit down to a meal without it.

Until I was nine and she passed away, we lived with my paternal grandmother in her flat. My parents met in Chicago. Abuelita, who may well have been my great-grandmother, I suspect now, so advanced was she in age, introduced my parents. My mother had just migrated to Chicago with two small children. A year later Mamá and Dad were married, and a year after that I was born.

Abuelita arose every day to the task of making flour tortillas. She was from the beautiful state of Guanajuato, where people ate corn tortillas. However, after moving up to “El Norte,” my little grandmother took on the preference for the kind made with white flour. My mother, American born, was raised in Mexico City. She always preferred the corn tortilla. But my father, used to Abuelita’s homemade flour tortillas, insisted on the flour ones.

Corn tortillas are very good and what I prefer at home today, if only because they are healthier. But the choice sometimes takes willpower. There is hardly an aroma more enticing than waking to the smell of coffee brewing and flour tortillas roasting on a grill. They are good reheated—but freshly made, with melted butter and rolled up, they are to die for.

Mamá went off to work before dawn, taking buses to the factory. My earliest breakfast memories are associated with Abuelita at her red Formica table making tortillas. As a child, my assistance took the form of play. I was given my own ball of dough with which I tried to mimic my grandmother’s motions. I made little tortillas, which also went on the hot grill.

Abuelita passed when I was not quite ten. Since Mamá had a job outside the home, on Saturdays, her day off, she prepared the several dozen tortillas which were to last the family throughout the week. This went on until shortly before my mother’s death. Unlike with my doting great-grandmother, Mamá had no time for play and was short on patience. She had a lot to do on Saturdays. Before she got a “wringer” washing machine, there was a very long walk to the laundromat, ironing, cleaning linoleum floors, and many other tasks that fell to her. As I grew into a young teen, some of these chores were passed on to me.

Tortilla making was only one reponsibility to be accomplished before we moved on to the next thing. My older siblings were always out on weekends, and both left home not long after high school. Tradition would have held the role of Mamá’s helper for the first-born daughter but, since she was gone, I became the daughter who learned to clean, iron, and, yes, make tortillas.

In the long run, this training served me well. Whatever image one has of a feminist at home, I’ve always taken pride in the upkeep of my house and kitchen.

When my mother’s health declined and I was entering my forties, I took on the difficult task of relocating with my son, moving in to her two-flat building, and caring for her for the next two years. Mamá did not want anyone to come in and clean. She did not always feel comfortable with people seeing how feeble she had become with illness. Mamá had a better relationship with her oldest daughter who came to visit regularly and who shared the responsibility with me to take her to doctor’s appointments. As a writer, though, it didn’t seem I had a “real” job to go to every day. I was expected to take charge of the household.

Shortly before her death, Mamá had little appetite and said she had lost her taste buds. I’d noticed that she’d begun to reminisce a lot about years gone by, foods she prepared in years past, meals that were not necessarily nutritious, especially to a diabetic. Chitlins, pigs’ feet, and wiener tacos were now comfort food to my mother. One afternoon, just back from the hospital, she made a request, which she expressed to her eldest daughter. My sister came in to tell me what Mamá needed. “She wants you to cook for her,” she said, dryly. Maybe she was confused about my mother’s choice. I wasn’t known in the family for my cooking. Mamá’s first-born daughter had much more practice. Perhaps, Mamá hoped the lessons I had learned under her thumb and at my great-grandmother’s knee would produce a meal that would taste like this side of heaven.

I nodded.

My son had had occasion to taste his grandma’s homemade flour tortillas and also yearned for them. In my mother’s kitchen, I took out the flour, cutting board, and rolling pin—the same one Abuelita once used. The baking powder, Clabber Girl, with the picture of a girl with a bow that I had seen all my life in our pantries. A pinch of salt. A cup of tepid water.

My mother had a lovely singing voice. In my best tone, I began to hum as I prepared the dough. Mamá in her room resting. Mi’jo waiting for the first waft of tortillas on the comal. Soon, he too would be put to roll out the masa. Soon, she, like my abuelita, would only live in memory. The tradition of la tortilla linking us, past to present, living on and on.