Antonia Aurelia still remembers her early attempts at making tamales. They were close to being her last attempts.
“It was not a thing I was interested in at first, because it’s difficult and time-consuming,” said Aurelia, a Flint native.
Tamales have their cultural roots in Mesoamerica. The process to make them correctly and authentically is detailed, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. It includes soaking and preparing corn husks, cooking and seasoning flavorful fillings, and mixing masa dough to the right consistency. Each tamale must be carefully assembled, folded, and then steamed for over an hour before it’s ready to eat. Every step requires patience and precision.
Aurelia first began making them as part of her family tradition. Her grandma made them, and her mom worked at AC Delco and sold tamales there. She also sent them with Aurelia’s dad, who worked at GM Truck and Bus, to be sold there.
“As I got older, I needed extra money here and there, and so I would make them,” Aurelia said. “But every time I would make them I’d be like, ‘I’m never doing this again.’”
As time has gone on, though, she’s perfected her craft, which has been passed down through her family. Ancestrally, her family is from Chihuahua, Mexico, which borders Texas and New Mexico. As she has grown in her own process of making tamales, she’s realized a key ingredient is simply an ability to develop passion for the process.
“They require love,” Aurelia said. “They require technique. It is all just things that have been passed down.”
The years Aurelia has spent developing her skillset in making tamales has resulted in much more than just a way to make a little additional income. It’s become a growing and thriving business. She says she made approximately 33,000 tamales last year that were sold at a variety of events, festivals, markets, and other places she’s set up as a vendor or provided tamales for. Now, this month, she’ll open her first brick and mortar location for The Tamale Spot inside the Flint Farmers’ Market. It will be located in stall 40 on this map, where MI Great Lakes Fish Co., which recently announced plans to move out of the market, was located.
Getting to the point she is now was not a linear process, however.
Reinventing Herself
Around 2022, Aurelia had gone through a divorce and lost a job. As she picked up the pieces, she had a simple goal in mind: to get to a point where she had greater financial stability.
“I didn’t really see a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of my financial future or present at the time,” she said. “I’m a single mom, and I was working just to get by all the time.”
She knew from selling tamales here and there while working a full-time job that she’d built a small, but growing and very loyal customer base that liked her product and told others about her. She realized if she spent more time building that business, it could be a successful one.
At first, that entailed doing other jobs to help sustain herself as she built the tamale business into something bigger.
“I ended up doing tamales and then also Door Dashing and substitute teaching,” Aurelia said.
Her belief that more time spent making and selling tamales would result in an increase in business turned out to be correct. First, she was able to stop doing Door Dash because the revenue from The Tamale Spot had increased enough to replace it. And then, by the end of 2023, she’d been able to stop substitute teaching as well because the volume of her business had taken off so much.
“It just sort of snowballed where people say something to somebody else who say something to somebody else and it just kind of keeps going,” she said. “So I kind of got more regular orders and I started doing downtown events and stuff like that.”
The increase in orders has also helped Aurelia get faster and more confident in her process – now she even shares it with others. Part of her business includes teaching tamale making classes in the Flint Farmers’ Market demo kitchen. In addition to just learning about the process in her classes, students also gain an appreciation for the culture and craft needed to do it successfully.
“If I sit here and tell you, here is the exact recipe, the exact measurements, these exact things that you do, you’re still not necessarily gonna be able to do it, because the technique comes with time,” Aurelia said. “It’s not something I can gift you, or that my mom could gift me. She could give me the knowledge of what she was doing, but being able to really appreciate the process and get good at it, only time can do that.”
People of all different skill levels have taken her classes. In addition to sharing the technical steps involved, she also hopes people come away with a deeper understanding and appreciation for the difficulty to get tamales just right.
“Some people will take the classes thinking that they’re going to learn how to make tamales and then they’re gonna just go home and make them themselves,” she said. “And that’s really cool if you do, but that’s not usually how it happens. You take the class and then you just gain an appreciation for the fact that this is a lot of work and you’re probably still gonna order tamales from me because you don’t wanna do all that, you know? Tamales aren’t something you can decide at four o’clock that you would like to have and just make them for dinner. It’s a whole process.”
The length of that process makes it hard to get authentic tamales even in many restaurants. Aurelia said the craft often requires having an employee devoted solely to tamale making, which can be expensive, so many people use frozen tamales. Her classes help people realize the difference between a frozen and a fresh tamale.
“I love when somebody comes up to me and says, ‘This is my first time I’ve ever had a tamale,’ or when somebody says, ‘Tamales are not really my thing but I like these,’” Aurelia said. “A lot of times the tamales that most people have had have been mass manufactured, frozen, delivered, reheated, and then given to you on a plate smothered in whatever they smother them in to make it taste better. I love to be able to introduce people to an actual authentic tamale that was made just now that is for you, that is still warm, that has not been reheated.”
At Home in the Market
The stand Aurelia is opening might be new, but her presence in the Flint Farmers’ Market is not. Like a growing number of Flint food entrepreneurs, she has worked alongside Tony Vu, founder of the Flint Social Club nonprofit organization, which provides support to people trying to start their own food-related businesses in the area.
“Tony Vu helped me a lot, because he would throw events and invite me to them (as a vendor),” she said. “I also sold out of the Flint Social Club stall when that was in the market.”
Aurelia is excited to have space alongside friends and others who she’s worked with in the market, including Nate Campbell and his newly opened 810 Tings restaurant and friends she has at Say Cheese 810, among others.
“I am supportive of everybody and I appreciate their support too,” Aurelia said. “They’ve been helpful when it comes to my licensing questions, with any extra equipment that they’re not using that I can use, or just anything like that, even just encouragement. I make sure to reciprocate that to them and support them as well. I don’t feel like I’m on an island by myself. I feel like people are really rooting me on. And we don’t look at each other as competition at all. We can all stand on our own and what we do and what we offer, and we can be proud of that, but we can be proud of each other too.”
Aurelia is still putting the finishing touches on her concept, and is aiming to be open by the end of November. When she’s up and running, she’ll have some staple items including pork and chicken tamales and either a black bean and onion or jalapeño and cheese. She also plans to have homemade tortilla chips and a variety of salsas and guacamole. Eventually, she wants to add some breakfast items and seasonal items – like a blackberry and cream cheese tamale when blackberries are in season. Mainly, her food will just continue to show customers how many variations of tamales there are.
“People don’t consider tamales a breakfast food, but tamales are like an all the time food,” she said.
She plans to continue serving all the other catering orders, events, markets, and spaces customers have found her over the years. In addition to her Facebook page, customers can also find information on her website and Instagram page.
Mainly, her goal is to just continue to serve a customer base that she loves and that she credits with helping her growth.
“I’m so grateful all the time for people who are continued supporters,” Aurelia said. “I’m not a good salesperson. So the product has to sell itself and it does luckily, but I have customers who are so great that they deserve commissions because they go out there and just spread my name everywhere. They are so great and so supportive that they say it for me. I’m grateful for the opportunity to show people what a real, authentic tamale is and for people to learn and have an appreciation for them.”
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