Pictured are Abundio and Concepción “Concha” Sanchez’s children, Refugio, Soledad, Guadalupe, Arnulfo, and Maria, around 1919. They opened a grocery store, The Mexican Mercantile in Fillmore, California about 1921.
Concha Sanchez and her family followed the path of many Mexican immigrants who turned their traditional foodways into a staple of community life. Concha and Abundio Sanchez migrated from Mexico in 1912 at the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. Through the 1920s, they worked in Kansas, in Texas, and in the produce fields of California, eventually opening a grocery store. When that failed in the Great Depression, Concha supported her family by creating a tortilleria, making and selling tortillas in her Ventura County neighborhood. Instead of making them by hand, as Mexican women had done for centuries, she used the new electric and gas-fired equipment bought by her son to produce tortillas and tamales for sale.
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