Throughout most of Mexico, people consume tortillas like French people consume baguettes: They buy them fresh every day or at least every other day.
However, that ritual was among the first to go as Mexican immigrants crossed into the U.S. and bought into the North American way of choosing convenience over freshness. Grabbing a pack of tortillas with your milk, eggs, and other weekly staples, all in the same supermarket, became more common here. Instead of stopping at a tortillería just for the tortillas, like they used to.
But Marco Antonio Calles, co-owner of the revolutionary Tortillería Los Primos in Bakersfield, is single-handedly trying to bring some of that daily tortilla-eating foodways back to the U.S.
“Eating fresh tortillas [from a machine] is very common in Mexico, but not here in the U.S., so I opened this different kind of tortillería for everyone here in Bakersfield to remember how much better fresh tortilla still warm from the machine taste like,” he tells L.A. TACO on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, perched inside a trailer in a church parking lot.