Tortillería Semilla Finds The Recipe For Worker Rights

Elizabeth Gonzalez and Anabel Hernandez at the Edgewood Park Farmers Market. Julieta Diaz Photos.

As 39-year-old Elizabeth Gonzalez opened the cooler and reached for a pack of tortillas, a rush of steam and the smell of fresh corn dough filled the air. Already, she had been up for hours, turning an Indigenous Mexican foodway into a recipe for fair employment and workers' rights.

Gonzalez is a co-founder of Tortilleria Semilla, a cooperative that began three years ago in the comfort of her Fair Haven home. Owned by Gonzalez, 43-year-old Anabel Hernandez, and 27-year-old Javier Villatoro, the cooperative focuses on making tortillas from scratch using nixtamalized heirloom corn, with a mission of creating dignified employment opportunities for immigrants.

Their story begins with Colectivo Semilla or the Semilla Collective, a collective that supports immigrant and working families and organizes both political and cultural events for the community. During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Semilla helped those in need in the New Haven community, with a mutual aid campaign that provided both food and financial assistance.

The idea of an immigrant-run tortilleria grew out of that work. Often, Gonzalez said, immigrants are looked down on, despite the fact that they have risked their lives to immigrate and work extremely hard. Part of her vision with the tortillería was to fight worker exploitation with a new, worker-run model.

The tortillas, which usually disappear well before the end of the market.

“Siempre trabajamos en lo más bajo, y obtenemos el pago más mínimo,” she said. “We always work at the lowest, and we get the minimum payment.”

All of the tortilleria’s members are in the fight for immigrant rights. Originally from Tamaulipas, Mexico, Hernandez has been living in Meriden for the past 20 years. She is a single mother to her four children, Daniela, Anna, Jessus, and Kamila.

What motivated her to undertake this cooperative was the necessity to create fair employment for immigrant people, she said. At her previous job, she said, she didn’t receive payment for overtime, was fired from her job unfairly, and had no support system.

As the tortilleria has grown into a weekly operation, so too has that vision. The tortillas, made from a mix of natural white, yellow, and blue corn, are made from the ground up in a process that takes up to two days. Before cooking, Tortilleria Semilla members get 60- pound sacks of corn in New York that are grown and sent straight from Illinois. 

On Wednesdays, they put on the nixtamal, “which only uses corn, water, and lime,” said Hernandez. They boil the corn with the mix of the nixtamal in their large pots, usually putting around two large pots full of corn on the stove.

The second day, Thursday, all the corn is ground and kneaded. Some of the dough is packed to be sold, some is made into tortillas right away, and some is left for the weekend.

Even though members use the nixtamalization process from Mexico, they change it to work here in Connecticut. The corn here is a lot harder, which means they have to let it cook more.

The weather also changes the process, Hernandez said. When it's hot, they have to leave the corn a little hard, and leave it to finish cooking in the water they boiled it with. When it's cold, they let it boil a little more, since it cools faster.

“We have everything measured,” Hernandez said.

Gonzalez.

Once the nixtamalized dough and tortillas are ready and packed, members add a tag with information about the ingredients, nutrition, and the collective. The group currently sells at CitySeed Farmers Markets, including on Wednesday at the Dixwell Community “Q” House, Saturday in Wooster Square, and Sunday at Edgewood Park,

Before their usual Sunday at the Edgewood Park market, Gonzalez, Hernandez, and Villatoro were up and running at sunrise. On weekends, the three work out of Havenly’s 25 Temple St. kitchen in downtown New Haven, there by 5 a.m. 

Gonzalez grew up watching how ladies from her town made tortillas, and picked it up by feel. On Sunday she was in charge of making blue corn tortillas by hand, sweating as the heat hit her face every time she flipped a tortilla. What keeps her motivated, she said, is that she’s able to teach her roots to her children, who can teach it to their children, who can teach it to their children, so that their culture doesn't get lost.

Meanwhile, Hernandez and Villatoro prepared both veggie and chicken tamales. Hernandez learned to make tamales in Tamaulipas with her grandmother. She's now brought the flavor to New Haven.

Villatoro, who hails from Oaxaca, Mexico, has learned everything from Hernandez and Gonzalez, from making tortillas to tamales to raising their voice for worker rights. At 17, they decided to immigrate to New Haven because their mother was already here. In Oaxaca, they also faced violence because they are Indigenous, they have said in previous interviews with the Arts Paper. 

Since then, the Collective Semilla and Tortilleria have become a sort of second home. Outside of cooking, they are also building New Haven’s son jarocho community with a new music group, Son Chaneques Rebeldes.

As the three prepared to wrap up—Gonzalez usually heads  to the market, and Hernandez delivers some tortillas—Gonzalez took over both hot comales and Hernandez hustled on the tortilla press.

Their goal is to one day be able to sow their own corn, and be able to provide fair jobs for people. “And so, our same people would work it,” said Hernandez.

This article comes from the 2024 Cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative. Julieta Diaz is a rising sophomore at Metropolitan Business Academy.