YOUR SPACE: Her tamales bring people together

“Six for $8. Chicken and pork. Mild or spicy.”

If Silvia Gonzales had a nickel for every time she says that, she’d be rolling in dough that wasn’t made of masa.

There are many tamale vendors around town. Some stand by the road with handmade signs and picnic coolers. Some have big honking tamale trucks. Silvia is behind-the-scenes, zipping around by car to sell at offices, farmers markets and yard sales rounds.

For Silvia, who has a mobile-food unit license, it’s more than corn shucks lined with masa and stuffed with “chicken and pork, mild or spicy, six for $8,” something she says so fluently you wouldn’t know her English is limited.

“I’m proud of the Mexican product we sell to the American people,” she says with her husband, Daniel, as translator. “The pride is people saying, ‘Your tamales are good.’ And I believe they are because they have been buying them all this time.”

It’s a job the petite grandmother created to support herself when she came to America in 1995. It was, she says, the only work she could get.

In Mexico, Silvia, 49, worked for canvassing sales company Fuller Brush. She applied the service-oriented tactics of brushes to tamales, at first going door-to-door. Now, three workers assist with deliveries to about 100 offices. She has a friendly rivalry with her sisters, who sell tamales in separate ventures.

Silvia named her business Brenda’s Mexican Tamales after her first grandchild.

The name stuck, perhaps too well. She gets called Brenda all the time.

“They call ME Brenda,” says Daniel, who mans the farmers markets tent while Silvia makes deliveries.

They use a commercial kitchen daily to make about 400 dozen tamales a week.

Budget cutbacks have affected demand to offices, which in the past included the one that inspects her.

“She would come and people would buy them. I bought a few myself. They were good,” says El Paso County Department of Health and Environment supervisor Jim Goodwin. Consumers should be wary of sellers using basic picnic coolers and not having proof of a license, he says.

Silvia and Daniel, 74, a retired warehouse manager, were married to others when she came to his door years ago selling tamales. “I fell in love with her tamales,” he says, “before I fell in love with her.”

They hooked up after their divorces. “We started a friendship and it evolved into something else. Then she broke down and asked me to marry her three years ago,” he says. “Here we are.”

“We” includes his 4-year-old daughter, Iris Danielle, who they are raising.

“When we bring her with us, she attracts customers,” he says. “She’ll stand there and smile at the customers.”

To reach the tamale lady, call (719) 200-9226.

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