San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
TAMALADA
Market Square.
“It’s not so much the tamal, but it’s really the process,” said Ellen Riojas Clark, co-founder of the event and a Professor Emerita of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies at University of Texas at San Antonio.
As you knead the masa, “you’re putting in years and years of history and culture,” she said. Just as important as the ingredients are the family and friends gathered, along with “the stories, the jokes and the
chisme.”
Over time, “traditions can fall by the wayside,” Cortez said, with people opting out of tamaladas because they’re too much work or because family’s matriarchs have passed away, and the younger generations haven’t taken up the mantle.
But those traditions were alive at the annual event, which started in 2008 and moved to Market Square last year.
Cortez, Riojas Clark, and co-founder Carmen Tafolla spoke on the opening panel of the Tamal Institute at Centro de Artes, a new addition to the event with a lineup of discussions about about tamales, history, gastronomy and culture.
In the tamal workshop tent, recipes and traditions were passed on to many, including festival-goers who’d never been to tamaladas of their own.
Bernadette Frausto showed Pauline and Jason Poon how to spread masa on the corn husk.
“Smooth yours out a little,” Frausto said to Jason, before showing them how much pork and chicken to add. Holding another husk in her well-practiced hands, she demonstrated how to wrap it up, sending them off with instructions on how to cook their tamales.
“I love eating tamales,” Pauline said, but she’d never made them before. “It reminds me of making dumplings with my family.”
Many stopped to watch Ballet Folklórico Festival perform inside the Farmer’s Market, while more clapped along outside when the Guadalupe Dance Academy took the stage on San Saba Street.
Some, like Kristen and Thomas Smith, took advantage of the festival to do some Christmas shopping at the stores and stalls around the square, and others posed for pictures with Pancho Claus.
At stalls throughout the festival, customers lined up to buy tamales by the plate and by the dozen, choosing from fillings ranging from pork and barbacoa to buffalo chicken and seafood.
When you unwrap a tamal, "you’re tasting a piece of history,” said Tafolla, former poet laureate of San Antonio and Texas, explaining that “the earliest legend on this continent tie us to corn.”
At a tamalada, “you are always in a definite stage of creativity,” Riojas Clark said. “That act of creativity is what forms the essence of a tamalada.”