As anyone who’s ever participated in one will tell you: a tamalada is a lot of work.
The annual Mexican tradition, usually hosted by the family matriarch during the holiday season, typically involves transforming the kitchen into more of an assembly line. There are lots of laughs, sometimes music, and always plenty of gossip, but to ensure the creation of the perfect batch of tamales, everyone is assigned a key role.
There are those who prep the hojas or corn husks; those on masa duty, who spread uniform layers of the dough on each husk; others in charge of filling, doling out servings of chicken or pork; and those who fold and tie the tamales together, so they’re ready to steam. Growing up in Brownsville, playwright and actress Alicia Mena remembers taking on a different role altogether: “I was the entertainer,” she says.
Now based in San Antonio, Mena is the writer, director, and producer behind “Las Nuevas Tamaleras,” a play that’s been performed annually in the city since 1993. It follows three friends—Silvia, Josie, and Patsy—as they attempt to put on their first tamalada. Their efforts are aided by the spirits of Doña Mercedes and Doña Juanita—two more experienced tamaleras with plenty of input on their approach.
The play, which has become its own family tradition in San Antonio, draws from Mena’s childhood, and the memories she has of being in her mother’s kitchen. Each year, her mother would set up shop early afternoon on Christmas Eve, and their home would become a rush of activity. “For years, I would only have two tamales a year: one fresh out of the steamer, and then the next one on Christmas morning, toasted on the comal in the husk, and then with salsa, tomatoes, lettuce, and onion on top.”
Years later, when her mother died, Mena was struck by how many of these family customs and rituals would be lost with her. “It had never occurred to me that I wouldn’t always have access to certain parts of my culture, things like specific recipes or family traditions,” Mena says.
Not long after, while Mena was part of El Teatro Bilingue de Houston, she and a friend were preparing to welcome a theater troupe from California when they decided to make some tamales for their afterparty. Once they got into the kitchen, though, it was a comedy of errors.
“I came back from the stove over to the table where I’d left my friend tending the masa, and I saw her on top of the table,” she says. “I was horrified. But I swear in that moment, it’s like I heard the voice of my mother—who was a very traditional woman—saying a not-very-nice word.”
They burst out laughing, and after recounting the experience to another friend, she told Mena it was a great idea for a play.
“I had been wanting to find a way to express this feeling of lament over not having treasured my family traditions, and other things I had taken for granted,” Mena says. “This is what I do, theater is my platform, and comedy was the best way to express this in my voice. So that’s where it all started.”
She dreamed up each of the characters, pulling from different generational experiences and drawing inspiration from her family and the people she’d grown up with in South Texas. “It was very important for me to keep the voices and phrases that I grew up hearing around the neighborhood, and to recreate that,” she says.
Each woman is a different archetype: the organizer, who wants to keep her kitchen neat and perfect; the one who wants to be helpful, but is more likely to be sitting down drinking a beer; and the younger one, who has their own idea of how this tradition should go. “It’s almost like the three stooges,” Mena laughs. “There’s conflict between them because they all have different ideas of how to approach this, but in the end, this is about making tamales, and keeping something alive. It’s about love.”
One character, Doña Mercedes, who Mena plays in the show, only speaks in Spanish. Often, its her lines that receive the biggest laughs from the audience. During one scene, when the trio is busier gossiping than paying attention to the stove, they ask “What’s that smell?” only for Doña Mercedes to respond, “Es la manteca, pendejas!”
“The most important part to me was that I express a feeling that seems to have been understood by so many people who watch the play: please don’t let go of these things, and appreciate them,” she says. “It feels like that message connected with people, so that’s very gratifying.”
She’s heard from parents who saw the play as children, and are now bringing their own kids to see it. She’s also heard from teachers who bring their students to watch it, too. “They’re going to carry the banner forward, because they’re appreciating our traditions,” she says. “It warms my heart seeing theater students especially be inspired to tell their own stories, and I’m very honored to have contributed to telling our stories authentically.”
By the end of the play, the women toast to their mothers, their tias, their abuelitas—all the women who shaped their lives and put warm tamales on the table each Christmas. “I think that’s what keeps people coming back to the show,” she says. “They have this memory of the tamaladas they had as kids, what their grandma’s recipes tasted like, and you just can’t replace that.”
