PHOENIX — Milagros Cruz was down to her last $75, and sleeping in a car, when she heard her mother’s voice guiding her in a dream: My girl, make tamales.
Arizona did not make it easy. Though the state promotes itself as a low-tax, low-regulation haven for private enterprise, it does not allow the sale of perishable foods made at home. So for years, a thriving economy of working-class, mostly Latina home cooks has operated underground, selling tacos, tres leches cakes and chile-dusted corn illegally from living rooms and outside laundromats and soccer games.
Ms. Cruz, 41, sells her pillowy green-chile and pork tamales near a Phoenix auto-parts store, and worries about getting cited under a state law that punishes home cooks who break the rules with a $500 fine and six months in jail. She said she would gladly operate legally if she could, but the state offered no way for her to do so.
This month, Republicans who control the state’s fractious Legislature came together with Democrats in a moment of unusual bipartisan accord to try to change all that. They passed a bill that would let Arizona’s home cooks register with the state to legally sell perishable foods like salsas and tamales.
But Katie Hobbs, the state’s new Democratic governor, vetoed the measure last week, citing concerns about the potential for food-borne illnesses, as well as rats and insects in home kitchens.
Her veto set off a ferocious culinary and cultural backlash from the Capitol to kitchens across Arizona, offering a political lesson for the new governor: Do not mess with the tamale makers.
“I respect our governor — I voted for our governor — but this veto, I do not agree with,” said Imelda Hartley, who started her culinary career making tamales from home and now runs her Happy Tamales business in a commercial kitchen. “It’s hurting our Latino community,” Ms. Hartley said of the veto.
She said cooking from home was the only realistic choice for immigrants, many of them undocumented, who wanted to get a toehold in running a food business. A cook can book time in a shared commercial kitchen more cheaply than renting an entire restaurant or buying a food truck, but Ms. Hartley said some of those shared spaces had long waiting lists and could be hard to reach without a car.
Republicans, who slammed Ms. Hobbs for preserving restrictions on small businesses, tried unsuccessfully to override her veto on Tuesday, with a rally featuring food vendors outside the Capitol and “Free the Tamales” stickers. But most Democrats decided to stand by the governor on Tuesday, with one Democratic lawmaker deriding the override effort as Republicans “pandering” to Latino voters.
Christian Slater, a spokesman for the governor, said Ms. Hobbs would work with lawmakers to balance the interests of small businesses with public health concerns.
The governor’s Democratic allies have applauded her for vetoing or promising to veto other Republican bills, including efforts to limit transgender rights, restrict discussions of race in schools and weaken abortion rights. But some Democrats have also criticized her for killing what is widely being called the “tamale bill.”
They said her move was a slap in the face of Latino constituents who voted for Ms. Hobbs, and whose support was crucial in a politically fractured state that is about 32 percent Latino. Critics said her veto would hurt the working-class immigrants that Ms. Hobbs had championed during her campaign.
“We should not criminalize poor people for trying to put food on the table,” said State Representative Alma Hernandez, one of five Democrats who voted to override the veto on Tuesday. “That is just absurd.”
Ms. Hernandez said she felt personally connected to the issue. Her mother had worked as a biochemist in Mexico, but after immigrating to the United States, and after Ms. Hernandez’s father was injured on his construction job, she said her mother had to start a new career out of the family’s kitchen.
“She used to be the Cake Lady,” Ms. Hernandez said. “If she didn’t do that, we wouldn’t have had gas to move our car. We wouldn’t have been able to put food on the table. I’m so proud of that, and I’m so glad she did it.”
Under Arizona’s tamale bill (or “tamal bill,” to use the Spanish spelling), home cooks making perishable foods who take a $10 online food-safety class, register with the state and label their foods could join the roughly 15,000 people who are already registered as part of Arizona’s legal “cottage food” industry, selling homemade tortillas, cookies, roasted nuts and other foods that do not need refrigeration. Several tamale vendors said they would gladly register with the state if they could.
Informal food businesses are an economic lifeline for thousands of people across the country, many of them undocumented women: mango vendors in Manhattan, boiled-peanut stands along Georgia highways, bacon-wrapped hot dog stands outside Los Angeles sporting events and many others.
But it is precarious work, and vendors say they worry about being fined or reported to the authorities. In 2019, a woman selling churros in Brooklyn was handcuffed by the police, and last year a Texas county health department confiscated 25 dozen tamales that a couple was selling illegally from the back of their car.
“I always worry about being cited,” said Javier Lara, 48, who works at a countertop maker and on weekends sells green-chile tamales from his kitchen in Phoenix, using a recipe his grandmother taught him. “I make minimum wage — I’ve got to make extra money. Anything I can do to survive in this world.”
Every year, he said he makes a six-hour pilgrimage to Hatch, N.M., to buy 300 pounds of green chiles, and then spends days afterward peeling and seeding them by hand. Every week, as orders pour in from his Facebook page and over the phone, Mr. Lara said, he spreads masa dough onto hundreds of corn husks, adds a bit of meat, cheese or chile, and then folds up each tamale and cooks them in a huge steel pot for two and a half hours.
It is exhausting work, he said, because he suffers from arthritis, but “my hands do wonders with tamales.”
The debate over food safety in Arizona could affect many kinds of foods, but it has focused on tamales because they hold a special, Proustian place in Arizona’s culinary soul. Tamales are a staple of Christmases and birthdays, the inspiration for the farming town of Somerton’s December Tamale Festival and the subject of passionate debate: Lard or no lard? Dough from sweet elote corn kernels, or more neutral masa? Wrapped in banana leaves or corn husks?
For Yanet Guadalupe Azamar Uscanga, selling Veracruz-style tamales out of her tiny kitchen in suburban Phoenix is a ladder to bigger dreams — running her own restaurant, paying off debts and helping to support her 11-year-old granddaughter.
“I’m doing honest work to get ahead,” Ms. Uscanga said. “I try to be good to the whole world.”
She awakens at 4 a.m. to make tamales, opening windows and blasting fans as she stirs a huge pot of masa in her ground-floor kitchen, where a statue of a grinning chef oversees the operation.
She earns more now selling tamales, cheesecake and frozen ice pops than she did from prior jobs cleaning hotel rooms, and she rarely has to leave home to make a delivery. Customers arrive after work to pick up their orders, have a glass of hibiscus tea and talk about children, work and life.
“This is therapy,” Ms. Uscanga said.
Lately, her customers are buzzing about the politics of tamales. Ms. Uscanga said she lived in fear of losing her business, and with it the money she had invested in food, kitchen supplies and an extra refrigerator.
On Sunday afternoon, Beny Vela Vaaz arrived to place an order for her son’s 15th birthday party, and to commiserate.
“It’s so bad,” Ms. Vaaz said of the veto. “We need the food that she makes.”
Nearly a year after that night in the car when Ms. Cruz dreamed about her mother’s advice, her new business, called La Tamalería, is growing fast.
Ms. Cruz and her wife, Alexandra Herrera, make more than 1,000 tamales by hand every week, cooking huge cuts of beef and pork, slicing dozens of ears of corn and knotting the tamales closed with strands of corn husk, the way Ms. Cruz’s mother, who died in 2017, taught her to do.
They began their business in an open-air hallway outside Ms. Cruz’s sister’s apartment, but they have since been able to rent their own apartment and also recently moved into a rented kitchen space. Ms. Cruz wants to expand the business into a tamale empire, while Ms. Herrera hopes to one day start her own business manufacturing construction supplies.
“We’re here making tamales,” Ms. Herrera said. “At the end is your dream.”
But not yet. Late on Sunday afternoon, they had a long list of orders and 350 steaming tamales to sell. Ms. Herrera packed them into coolers and headed out to the parking lot. Ms. Cruz stayed behind to start on the next day’s batch.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/us/arizona-tamales-katie-hobbs-veto.html (Archive)
Hobbs still mum on what she wants changed to sign new home-cooked foods bill
Nearly two weeks after vetoing a widely popular bill to expand the sale of home-cooked foods, Gov. Katie Hobbs still won’t say what she wants changed in order to get her to sign a new version.Hobbs on Monday dodged repeated inquiries about the legislation or her veto despite the fact that it had been approved by broad bipartisan majorities. In fact, she would not answer any questions at all after giving a 2 1/2 minute speech at an annual ceremony to honor fallen officers of the Department of Public Safety before being driven off by her DPS security detail.
And so far, the governor and her newly hired press aide have refused to address bipartisan complaints about what some saw as a racist tinge in her veto message: She wrote that allowing what has become known as the “tamale bill” to become law would open the door to items being cooked in home kitchens with “rodent or insect infestation.”
In her April 18 veto of HB 2509, the governor said that allowing certain cooked foods to be prepared by individuals and sold to the public would “significantly increase the risk of food-borne illness” by allowing what are called “cottage food vendors” to sell “high-risk foods.”
As Democrats who supported the original bill began talking override, several said they heard from the governor’s office that she would be willing to sign a revised version. And that was enough to convince 12 House Democrats who had voted for the measure to change their votes, uphold the veto — and keep Hobbs from being the first governor since 1981 to have her decision overridden.
But supporters of the measure as originally approved questioned the need for further alternations.
They noted that Arizona has had laws for more than a decade that allow for the sale of some home-prepared items like cookies and cakes as long as they are not made from items that can spoil.
More to the point, HB 2509 was not simply an expansion to allow people to legally sell cooked items like the tamales, tortillas and pupusas, items already widely available, albeit illegally, in parking lots and in front of stores. It actually contained a host of new provisions.
For example, the legislation included a new requirement for those doing home preparation to register with the Department of Health Services and complete a food handler training course from an accredited program and maintain active certification.
Also new, any items offered for sale would have to be labeled with not just the name and registration number of the preparer but also a list of ingredients and the production date. There also would need to be a statement on the label that it was prepared in a home kitchen “not subject to public health inspection.”
Items containing fish or shellfish were strictly forbidden for home preparation.
And there even were restrictions on delivering items like maintaining temperature, allowing items to be transported only once and never for longer than two hours.
On Monday, however, Hobbs still would not provide specifics. About the only thing that press aide Christian Slater has said is that his boss was not asking for unannounced inspections.
That, however, still leaves a host of other possibilities.
Senate Minority Leader Mitzi Epstein, who opposed the original bill and refused to vote to override the governor’s veto, has floated the idea of some sort of limit on these home sales, whether by total volume or on a seasonal basis.
“We need to make sure that the bill is crafted to address these very small home sells,” the Democratic Tempe lawmaker said. “Largely, I’m hearing of people who do it seasonally. maybe around Christmas time or maybe they do it around another holiday or something, so that really is small scale.”
But Rep. Alma Hernandez, D-Tucson, one of the big supporters of the unsuccessful override attempt, made it clear she saw no reason to impose what she sees as artificial limits.
“That lady you bought tamales on, whatever corner you were on in Phoenix, she is not selling the tamales for fun,” Hernandez said. “I guarantee you, she is selling the tamales to make an honest living and be able to provide for her family.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Travis Grantham, R-Gilbert, the sponsor of the original legislation, told Capitol Media Services on Monday he has yet to hear from the governor’s office what changes would make his measure acceptable to Hobbs.
The dispute is not just over what was in the original legislation, what the governor may demand to get her signature on a revised version, and whether those changes will get the necessary votes.
Hobbs angered several lawmakers with her verbiage in the veto message about “rodent or insect infestation.”
“That is offensive,” Hernandez said. “And I would be glad to put up my nana’s kitchen or my mom’s kitchen up against anyone’s kitchen.”
Sen. T.J. Shope, R-Coolidge, whose mother and grandmother are Mexican immigrants, took it a step farther.
“Not only was the veto outrageous, but to continue to push racist tropes of homes riddled with insect infestation or rodent infestation, it will just not be tolerated in the year 2023,” he said.
Neither the governor nor Slater would address that language or the bipartisan reaction.
https://azcapitoltimes.com/news/202...s-changed-to-sign-new-home-cooked-foods-bill/ (Archive)
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