The dough has to be just right. In the back of the tortilleria, an employee pours water into the machine that kneads and churns the corn flour.
She tilts the machine and scoops the pale mixture out, shaping it into four spheres. Any cracks in the dough, and the tortilla will be too dry.
The dough balls are covered with wet cloths to keep them humid while they wait to be loaded into the rumbling tortilla machine. The machine presses the dough balls flat and cuts circles into the sheets. The dough becomes puffy and freckled as it’s slid through the heated conveyor belts.
Another employee weighs a one-pound stack of the still-warm tortillas and expertly wraps them in paper. Colored in green and red, the packaging reads “Tortilleria Azteca.”
Usually, the shop will sell about 270 pounds of tortillas a week. But when it’s nice outside and people are celebrating birthdays and having picnics, they’ll go through more — one time, 22 sacks of corn flour in one day.
The door opens at the front of the shop, a patron walks through. “Buenas tardes.”
“Buenas,” Luis Mancel Morales, 46, responds from his seat by the door.
Morales, the shop’s owner, immigrated to Seymour, Indiana, from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, in 1998. One of his cousins was working for a dairy farm in Seymour and needed help. He was only 19.
Morales’s dad told him to go to the United States, save money and come back. But he ended up staying, getting married, having twins. His then-wife helped him get residency and a green card.
Eventually, with only $500 in savings, he decided to start a flea market business. But there was one problem: people like to see new things every time they come in, he said.
He wondered to his wife, what was something the shop could sell that people would keep coming back for?
Tortillas, she said. Seymour’s Hispanic population looks for tortillas.
“Corn tortillas, is like, for the American, the bread,” Morales said.
So he bought a tortilla machine in September 2022 from Florida and a food truck, which he offers for events or businesses. His business was recieved well until last August, when he made a Facebook post advertising fresh tortillas at the store.
A Facebook page reposted his advertisement. “Time to start the boycotts,” it read. “LET THE IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY SUPPORT THE IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY ~ THEY WONT RUN ADS IN ENGLISH BECAUSE THEY DONT WANT TO BE PART OF AMERICA”.
Morales is a citizen. He can vote, he owns a business, he has a family. Mexico, he said, used to be his home.
“Now I consider the United States home,” he said, because he’s been here for most of his life.
The Facebook page, he said, had been posting different businesses, saying the owners were illegal. While many of the posts made are now listed as unavailable, it regularly posts mugshots of different people, many of them Hispanic, and a petition requesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Seymour.
Seymour’s population has grown over the past few decades, Seymour Mayor Matt Nicholson said.
The city saw growth starting in the late 1980s, Nicholson said, and as people immigrated to Indiana and found good-paying jobs with low costs of living, they told their relatives about it. Now, Seymour’s immigrant population is about 15%, with many of them Guatemalan.
Morales responded to the post on Facebook, saying he wouldn’t let anyone damage what God has given them and what he has worked and sacrificed for, and that he was proud of his Mexican heritage and Aztec blood.
“I will say that I always want to defend myself, my family, my business, and God,” Morales said. “That’s the two, things, I always want to fight for it. And this guy crossed the line.”
Morales spoke with a lawyer and sent the page’s owner a letter telling him to take down the post or he would sue. Morales wasn’t looking for money, he said.
“Somebody had to give him an example of what we were going through when somebody, just because, decides to do stupid things like that,” Morales said.
He said the person running the page will even take pictures of people’s houses if the thinks they are illegal, which has caused his neighbor to have to move out. Many other Hispanic restaurants in the area, Morales said, were attacked on the page.
As a citizen, Morales said, he wanted to help other people who don’t have as much of a voice.
After Morales told him to take the post down, the person running the Facebook page responded, saying they wouldn’t apologize for the original post — though they did take it down. “I applaud Mr Morales(or whatever) his name is on taking the step to become a citizen,” they wrote. They said Morales had bult a business that “incentivize,encourages and supports an illegal immigration infrastructure into and around Seymour IN”.
Though the post targeting his business was short-lived and only up for about two weeks, Morales feels the page shouldn’t go after families.
“Just because he think he’s American patriot, and we are coming from different countries, he doesn’t have no rights to do that,” Morales said.
Morales said he has worked hard to create a life for himself and his family here. From just a few hundred dollars, he created a business that now offers people food that reminds them of where they came from — not just tortillas, but in the little grocery section of his store, he sells Goya cookies, Jarritos, tostada shells, Mexican candy.
Things that let Seymour’s immigrant population get a bit of home from thousands of miles away.
Natalia Nelson covers immigration issues in southern Indiana. Her work is supported by a rural reporting grant from the Hearst Foundation.
