Melani Martinez spent much of her childhood working in her family business – one of Tucson’s first tamale and tortilla factories, El Rapido.
Her great-grandfather opened it in the 1930s and it evolved as it was passed down through generations of her family, eventually becoming a sort of lunch counter and market hybrid. They sold lunch to-go and tamales and tortillas, made with corn ground by a big molino.
Now, Martinez has written a memoir named after that all-important molino, in which she grapples with her family’s story — and what happened to them after her dad sold El Rapido.
She spoke more about the forthcoming book with The Show.
Full conversation
MELANI MARTINEZ: That was important to me because number one, it was the most important machine all the way through, right? That the, the business probably never would have lasted without that. It was the thing that provided the ingredients for the two main things that, that they made, which is tamales and tortillas. It was a tamale and tortilla factory. So that machine was superior.
It was also the machine that kind of had the most mystery to me. I didn't quite understand how it worked. At first, I just knew it was really loud and really big and it had volcanic stones, volcanic stones inside. So that just kind of led to the mystery of it for me.
And then, you know, just thinking in terms of memoir, it was helpful for me to kind of think about what happened to our family as a process. And that's what the molino is. It's a processing machine, right? It's a machine that grinds things and changes things.
And so that's kind of the way that I was developing somewhat of a metaphor for even my, my dad, you know, someone who was just grinding and grinding and grinding and changing in the process and, and we all kind of changed in the process.
GILGER: Yeah. So talk a little bit about your relationship to the place to, to this family business, to Tucson. I mean, it seems like there was a long time in which you really wanted to get out for sure.
MARTINEZ: Growing up there being you know, a child working in the kitchen when it was really hot in Tucson, you know, during our summer breaks or any of our school breaks, didn't feel like a good thing to me. It felt like a thing that I was, I really did wanna kind of get out of. And not that my dad was trying to pressure us necessarily my brother and I to take over the business.
It wasn't exactly that, although I think he might have liked that, but there was definitely this sense of, we need to, my generation, my brother and I needed to maybe find a way to move up in the world, right. So that we're not relying on the food industry for our livelihood and, and because it was really hard work, anybody who's worked in a kitchen knows how hard that work is. And so we were, we were hoping for better in many ways.
And then, you know, that, that basically made me feel like everything that was happening in El Rapido was not as important as what was happening in the rest of the world or even the rest of the city. And, you know, it took me a long time to realize that that was not necessarily the right assumption to make.
GILGER: Yeah, I want to talk about the first time you wrote about this, right? Like you've written this entire book now, but you started this, like in, in college, taking a creative writing class, right? Writing about your experience working there.
MARTINEZ: That's correct. So I was taking creative nonfiction was my major at the University of Arizona. And in my very last semester of school, right before I graduated, I wrote an essay about El Rapido and I didn't really think it was that important or that, you know, important of an essay or, or it wasn't even you know, incredibly meaningful to me, it was more like an exercise, can I describe this place that's important to my family?
And right after I wrote it, you know, within a few weeks after I wrote that essay, my dad told us that he was closing. And so then suddenly that piece of writing felt like I was documenting something that was about to be gone. And it, it turned into a much bigger, a much more important project at that point. And, and really was the reason why I ended up going to graduate school and getting my degree in creative writing.
It was really a thing that pushed me through all of that and it took a long time to finish the story. So the first time I wrote the essay in that, in that undergrad class was in the year 2000 and here we are, you know, 2024 barely finishing it. So it took a long time.
GILGER: That's amazing. So, tell us about that. When your dad had to close it, why he had to close it. What was this like for the family?
MARTINEZ: It was very devastating, I think for the family. And also a relief, those two things at the same time. In one way, the devastation was, this is all we knew. Like what, what's going to happen to my dad, how's life going to work for him? Because this is the only thing that he really knows how to do. And it's not like he was making very much money to begin with.
And then on the other hand, it was a relief because it was just so much work and we knew he couldn't do it forever. And the reasons why it closed were actually kind of difficult to untangle. It was difficult conversations I had to have with my dad even, you know, in the last few years to really figure out what happened. And, and to be honest, I still don't know everything, whether or not it's true or not true. I, I only have some guesses and a little bit of insight as to what happened.
And so I write about that in the book, but more importantly, I think instead of just the, the singular reasons or the things that kind of pushed it over the edge to close were part of a bigger picture of gentrification that was happening in Tucson, especially downtown Tucson in the ‘90s, many, many places closed in downtown Tucson. And you know, we had these different waves of renewal that kept on kind of pushing smaller businesses out and it's not something that we're still not dealing with today. We're still dealing with that, hat issue of gentrification throughout Tucson.
GILGER: Yeah. So the book I understand has, has two sort of voices, right? Like yours and you write from the point of view of the person in this mural on the outside. It's a, it's a, a mural of a, a Mexican person napping against a saguaro with a sombrero, which has become something of a divisive figure today, that idea. Why did you write some of this book from his perspective?
MARTINEZ: Well, that mural storefront mural is very iconic to, to my dad's place but also to many other Mexican restaurants, Mexican, Mexican-associated businesses. It's a pretty common image and when it was created, it was, it was actually painted by my uncle, who's an artist, my dad's older brother, and I knew when it was being painted that it was really special, that it was important. Our family had that particular image on the receipt book. My great-grandfather had it on the receipt book that he used.
And so it was an iconic image from my dad, something that they connected to family, something that helped them kind of connect to ancestry in Mexico, too, which they didn't have very, very close connections to. So it's just, it's kind of all packed into just this image.
And of course, it's a controversial image. So when it was being painted, there was a neighbor who came and you know, kind of criticized the image, talked to my dad about why he shouldn't use that image. And my dad decided to just use it anyway. He wasn't really as concerned with the how other people perceived it. The thing that was more important to my dad was the symbol, what that symbol meant to him and to our family.
And so it's a controversial image and it brings up a lot of, you know, questions and concerns and, and definitely makes you think about history and it definitely made me think about where it came from.
So I started using that image because it's the image of a person thinking about the voice of that person and thinking about how that, that voice might have something to say to me about my ancestry, about our faith in our family, about food in general. All of these ideas that have to do with like just a spirit that's speaking to me and, and definitely speaking to other people in my family as a valuable important symbol.
