Melani Martinez has a story she loves to tell.
And as with any great story, hers is about food and family. Hers is also about local history and lore. There are people — past and present — and ghosts in her story. It’s about continuity and gentrification.
It’s her story to tell and to share.
Martinez, known to many as Mele, has been recounting the story of El Rapido Tortilla Factory for several years. She’s published snippets of her story. She has related parts of it before live audiences. And she’s continuing to write about her family’s story. It is in manuscript form and someday, she hopes and expects, her story will be a book.
But right now it’s a jumble, in a good, creative way. Martinez has a lot of material to work with, and now she is figuring out how to put her words and thoughts on paper, or rather into the computer.
“I’m in this messy time,” she said with a smile. A lecturer at the University of Arizona teaching first-year writing and food-writing courses, Martinez, an award-winning author, understands that the hardest part of writing is just before the ideas gel together.
We met at her “office,” at Exo Roast Co. on North Sixth Avenue, in the quiet back room, where she and her husband, Jason Martinez, were busy on their laptops. She and her husband are professional flamenco artists and dancers, and for about six years they had organized the Tucson Flamenco Festival.
But on this morning, tamales, tortillas and memories were the topics of conversation with Mele.
Her story begins in 1933 when her great-grandfather Aurelio Perez opened a small tortilla and tamal store in the Presidio neighborhood, on the corner of North Meyer Avenue and West Washington Street. He called it El Rapido, apparently a name that acknowledged his speed in making tortillas and tamales, as well as other Mexican foods. It was a fast-food restaurant even before the concept took hold.
The business originally fronted Meyer but eventually moved next door to what was a garage facing Washington, Martinez said. Subsequently, Martinez’s great aunt Soledad Perez Tarazon and her father, Tony Peyron, operated the family business.
“My grandmother and all her seven sisters worked in the store at some point. Even after they were married. After children. After the war and after women’s liberation. After their husbands died,” Martinez wrote in an essay, “El Molino,” for BorderLore, an online journal for the Southwest Folklife Alliance, affiliated with the UA.
“El Molino” is the name of Martinez’s memoir and a reminder of the hulking electric corn grinder in the kitchen that churned out the masa for tamales and tortillas.
“My father made more tamales and tortillas than you could imagine with that molino. He’d hunch over its mouth, his eyelids sagging over his eyelashes, pushing nixtamal or corn down its neck,” she wrote in her 2018 essay.
In the late 1980s, the time came for Martinez and her brother Richard “Ricky” Peyron to work at El Rapido. They represented the family’s fourth generation to work there. But for young Mele, she wanted nothing to do with the family business.
“Ricky and I spent summers and weekends and school vacation days in that kitchen, wading in grease, dreaming of movie theaters or even school days,” she wrote. Maybe worst of all, she said, “I literally dripped in red chile for years.”
But that red chile, based on a family recipe, was what made El Rapido popular for many years. “My dad’s red chile was the best,” Martinez boasted.
Gentrification and rising costs finally affected El Rapido’s health. Martinez’s father closed the business in December, 2000. Today a small coffee shop, Fanny’s Cocina, is in the place of El Rapido and the “sleepy Mexican” mural on the wall facing Washington Street has faded, but the original window sign facing Meyer, El Rapido Molino de Nixtamal, looks freshly painted.
Martinez will share her family’s story and food on Saturday, May 25, at 6 p.m. at the old family business at 220 N. Meyer Ave. Seating is limited and tickets can be found at https://bit.ly/30v8TpG.
