Apr
15
Poverty can make a mother do the unthinkable.
So bad was the employment situation in Puebla, Mexico, that in 1996 at age 19 Guadalupe Galicia left behind her two sons, Marcos, 3, and Diego, 2, with family to come to New York with her husband to find a new American life.
“In the beginning I took care of the homes of mothers with new babies,” Guadalupe says. “I lived in Bushwick and saved money so that I could bring my boys to New York.”
Her husband did odd jobs. And after a year she brought her boys to Brooklyn and was pregnant with a little girl she’d name Julie.
“My father started to drink,” Diego says. “My mother worked and he drank and soon he just left us. He was a horrible parent. Last I heard he was maybe in California. But my mother kept the family together with hard work.”
As tough as it was being a single mother of three in New York, it beat the squalor of Puebla.
“In 1999, my older sister Micaela, who also lived in Bushwick, had the idea to start a business,” Guadalupe says. “We would make tamales like the ones back in Mexico and sell them door to door in Brooklyn.”
The sisters started with a couple of big steel pots and a shopping cart, making the tamales with plantain leaves that were more flavorful than the corn leaves most New Yorkers used. They stuffed the leaves with roasted chilies and chicken, the sweet ones sprinkled with raisins, and the hot ones doused with red chilies.
“Served soft, not hard,” Guadalupe says. “Then we sold the tamales door-to-door in Bushwick. Making sometimes $50 a day.”
Guadalupe soon set up her shopping cart as a street vendor on the corner of Knickerbocker and DeKalb Aves., streets appropriately named for early Dutch settlers and a German immigrant who became a great patriot of the American Revolution.
On this gritty Brooklyn streetcorner, Guadalupe Galicia built her entrepreneurial American Dream. Word spread. Lines formed. A loyal customer base grew. Cars and truckers pulled up. She served her tamales in the freezing cold, spring rain and stifling summers, charging a buck apiece.
Her sister moved to Queens, setting up her own tamale business.
“So we helped my mother,” Diego says. “All the kids helped her shop, prepare and clean. She cooked. We helped sell the tamales on the corner. After a few years my mother found a boyfriend. They had two baby girls together. But he also left after a couple of years. My mom was alone again. With five kids. But she held everything together by selling her amazing tamales.”
All of Guadalupe’s children attended local public schools and worked for Guadalupe’s Tamales, which has become such a Bushwick staple that next week the Business Center for New Americans and the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs will present Guadalupe Galicia with the The Boot Strap Entrepreneur Award.
“Guadalupe is very inspiring,” says Yanki Tsherling, executive director of BCNA. “She is a single mother of five, and started her own business with very little financial means, but with great courage, initiative, talent and tenacity, Guadalupe supports her family with her tamales. She is very deserving of The Boot Strap Entrepreneur Award.”
“My brother Marco graduated Bushwick High and works as a waiter now,” says Diego. “I will graduate Bushwick High this June. But I am also taking credits at Brooklyn Technical College, where I will go full time next year. I will be the first of my mother’s kids in college.”
“I am very proud of that,” says Guadalupe. “All my girls will go to college, too. That was also part of my dream.”
Her next dream is to open a family restaurant. “That’s the whole family’s dream,” says Diego. “My mom saves. My brother saves. We’ll all save. I also have a second dream of becoming an astronaut. I know that’s a big dream. From tamales to the moon and beyond.”
Diego laughs, and then says, “But if I work as hard as my mother, anything is possible in America.”
Ole!
dhamill@nydailynews.com
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