Part I: “We always try to take care of each other.”
In the year 2000, a century was born. The international space station hosted its first crew. The Supreme Court awarded George W. Bush the presidency. And a young mother made the journey from San Sebastián Atlahapa, Mexico, to New York City, leaving her two-year-old son behind. It would take another 15 years to fully reunite them.
Twenty-two years later, Evelia Coyotzi has flirted with fame. Her cart and restaurant, collectively known as Evelia’s Tamales, in Corona, Queens, have been written up in Eater, The New Yorker and The New York Times. The restaurant opened its doors in March, onto a new life peopled by old friends and cart customers. “I felt very happy to see them sitting down,” Coyotzi said, with a smile so self-effacing it seemed like a prayer.
From Coyotzi’s appearance on the late Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown” to endorsements from her congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her homespun Mexican cuisine has fed into the American dream.
The logic goes: In the Land of Opportunity, wealth comes from money. Money comes from work. Work builds wealth.
But the illogic of this singular American story belies the facts. According to a report from McKinsey, the median salary for foreign-born Latinx-Americans is about $20,000 less than their White counterparts. Latinx businesses are less likely to secure all the funding they apply for, when compared to White-owned businesses. The list of disparities goes endlessly on. It is not, therefore, unfounded to conclude that Whiteness, not work, prefigures the American dream.
Today, though, Coyotzi’s restaurant employs 18 people, placing her in the slim minority of Latinx-owned businesses that have more than one employee. “We always try to take care of each other,” she told Ocasio-Cortez, in a Righteous Eats video review.
“Anything good that’s happened, has always been against all odds, for the most part,” said Ocasio-Cortez, describing the immigrant experience while eating a tamale. That Coyotzi is anomalous is not supposition.
But in 2001, Coyotzi’s first year in the states, she was a McDonald’s employee, laboring under the Golden Arches and in the shadow of the towers, as all of lower Manhattan then did. Until 9/11.
Losing her job, Coyotzi was one of the immediate thousands whose lives were sundered by the attack on the Twin Towers. To survive, she leaned on what she knew: home cooking, which she packaged and pushed in a street cart into the shadow of the seven train during morning rush hours.
“I didn’t think this would be my destiny, selling tamales,” she said. Her routine was fastidious and punishing. For the cart’s first four years, Coyotzi and her husband, Delfino Garcia, toiled alone. Prep work began at 7 p.m., nearly ten hours before the cart’s 4:30 a.m. arrival at the corner of Junction Blvd and Roosevelt Ave, in Queens, New York, where it still operates today. A line invariably gathered, the shuffling of feet mingling with the rusted clinking of trains above, steam pirouetting off of unwrapped tamales.
For 20 years, her loyal and large fan base sang hosannas – and the police harassed her, for she was one of the innumerable, unlicensed cart operators that crop up like cornflowers on the city’s sidewalks. She has protested on behalf of street vendors, who turn to black market transactions that price the coveted licenses at up to $20,000. She has been arrested and fined.
Her customers came for the tamales, a combination of masa filled varyingly with molten cheese, meat, vegetables, beans and salsa. Or succulent tortas wrapped in tin foil. They drank hot, blanket-thick atole, a creamy shake of masa sweetened with sugar and spices and milk.
In January 2020, she rented a storefront, but the pandemic papered over its windows before she could hang the papel picado, a Mexican folk art of cut paper, carved with the restaurant’s logo: tamales peeping out of a pot. For 26 months, she scrimped and scrambled, while maintaining cart operations. She took out a $50,000 loan. “All my savings went to pay for the rent.”
Part II: “My parents have already worked too much.”
In the year 2000, 79 miles to the east of Mexico City, descending from the Aztec Templo Mayor, over scrubland and through prim fields of industrial agriculture, a two-year-old boy said goodbye to his mother and then, six months later, his father, too. He will not remember this.
He will grow up in their hometown, San Sebastián Atlahapa, in the state of Tlaxcala, playing in his maternal grandmother’s food plots, the story of his life unfolding across two countries. He will not hug his mother until he is six years old.
They will speak, “over the phone, video, all that stuff,” he said. They won’t be estranged. And when the boy graduates kindergarten, she will be there. In at least this one sense, it is the first time they meet.
For the next eleven years, John Garcia will live without his parents, but in 2015, aged 17, he will immigrate to Queens, New York, and into their apartment.
He has his father’s beard and his mother’s work ethic. Now, at age 24, he is the manager of Evelia’s Tamales, and wants to expand what his parents have built.
“My parents have already worked too much,” he said. And while, as he describes, his parents are content with maintaining what they have, the cart and the restaurant, he thinks, “maybe another cart in Manhattan or Brooklyn. Selling frozen tamales to supermarkets.”
Part III: “You keep going.”
The maladies of modern haute cuisine — high prices, pretension, artifice as authenticity — are particularly acute in a time of inflation. Rococo restaurants like Le Bernardin, Shuko and Eleven Madison Park have raised their prices by hundreds of dollars.
At Evelia’s Tamales, however, the menu might be a rebuke, framed above the counter in bold, block, bilingual print. It reads like a grimoire, the prices an index of incantations summoning an older, more equitable New York: a buck-fifty, $2.00, $3.00.
Like the tamales it sells, the restaurant is filled with a comforting fragrance of warm, toasted masa. A playful ballet of primary colors – red, orange, green and violet – adorns the walls and tables, some of which are quilted, a nod to the family’s ancestral home, where textiles are a thriving industry.
When Garcia arrived in the United States, “they just called us the tamales food cart,” he said, so he devised a name that honored his mother: Evelia’s Tamales, a title that now encompasses the cart and the restaurant. He selected the restaurant’s colors, orange and red, because they “want to be different from the other carts with the typical green and white and red,” he said, referring to the colors of the Mexican flag.
The restaurant’s clientele cuts across class and generation. Day laborers can be seen at 5 a.m., when it opens; young families, locals, and those who have heard, by whisper or article, about the food pass through until 10 p.m., when it closes. They eat everything, from the guajolotas, two tamales encased in a roll, to tacos oozing with earthy adobo or piquant salsa verde. Fresh tamales are still the most popular items, though. Plucked from piping hot pots, they unfurl from their corn husks, wet with steam and salsa, which is “the trick,” Evelia says, to avoid a dry and friable masa. The food can be washed down with horchata, fresh tamarind juice, or Jarritos.
“I can’t wait to return to this wonderful restaurant and support the hardworking people who make it all possible,” said Daniel Flores, a Baruch College student who had lunch at the restaurant with his class in November.
Zoom out and a familiar story takes shape: immigrants, adversity, a nuclear family, a mom-and-pop shop, all the makings of an American myth. But arrests, fines, seven-day work weeks with little sleep, life without her son, prove Coyotzi defied expectations. Hers is not a story of the American dream, but about dreaming in spite of the American story. As Coyotzi said, “It was a tough twenty years. We went through a lot of things. But you keep going.”
John Garcia, the man who waited 17 years to be his parents’ child, is now a parent himself. His son will not be left waiting.