Los Angeles becomes ground zero for Christmas season tamale wars

During the recession, what once were small strip malls in Los Angeles have become multi-service garages filled with independent repair shops specializing in tires, mufflers, brakes, and front end alignment – like Victoria’s Secret departments catering to your car.

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Some of those former strip malls are also the places you can get the best bargains on tamales, especially at this time of year, with the tamale having become perhaps the best Mexican contribution to Christmas traditions in America.

Get your car repaired and tamales too

While waiting to get new Michelins on my car the other day, I couldn’t help but notice that the muffler vendor at one of these car service malls was taking his lunch break over a plate of appetizing tamales that made me wonder if there was a tamales shop nearby I didn’t know about.

“My wife and her mom make them to sell — it’s pretty big what business they do during the holidays,” the muffler guy said, offering me a pork tamale better than anything you can find in the professional tamalerias in L.A. that are packed with orders this time of year.

When I mentioned having eaten a great tamal from his neighbor to the tire guy–who finally got around to putting the Michelins on my car–he momentarily stopped working on my wheels and went to his office, returning moments later with a plate filled with tamales that he offered me.

“If you liked his family’s tamales,” he said, “you’ll love my wife’s. Plus I’ll beat whatever deal my neighbor is offering.”

Tamale heaven in Los Angeles

I have to admit. He was right. His wife’s tamales were amazing, although sometimes I wonder if our opinion about tamales isn’t always rose-colored, similar to our opinion of pot: Does anyone ever really complain about the last tamale they’ve eaten?

So in a town now dotted with medical marijuana dispensaries, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Los Angeles is now also overrun with tamale vendors, licensed or not, who apparently have become enough of an underground economic market that tamalerias are worried.

When I told a tamaleria owner in the suburban San Gabriel Valley of this new tamale source I’d found, he demanded to know the location of the strip mall because he and other licensed vendors are reporting their underground competition to county authorities.

I made him happy by giving him an address. Too bad for him it belonged to Nieman Marcus in Beverly Hills.

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Tamale wars for Christmas?

Tamale Wars are with us. Just wait until there’s a Tamale Bell franchise.

And Los Angeles is not an isolated instance. I checked with reliable longtime sources in Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Detroit, San Diego, Chicago and New York. It’s the same there. In Miami, I’m told, you’ll find Cuban homemade tamale vendors going door to door at doctors’ offices, hair salons and other places, trying to make extra cash.

Tamales, it seems, are everywhere in Hispanic USA and beyond — and it’s a cottage industry that’s around not just during the holidays. Street vendors in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles sell tamalesyear-round, even taken vegetarian and vegan orders.

The guy who sold me new tires said his wife’s tamales helped pay their son’s tuition at pricey Loyola High School, which has educated Los Angeles politicians and studio executives and is known as a networking gateway for colleges like Stanford, UC Berkeley and the Ivy Leagues.

SEE ALSO: A Spanish Christmas tradition that’s a little hard to stomach

He sold me the tamales at half the cost of the tamalerias.

Too bad he wasn’t as generous on the Michelins.

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