After 25 years of selling tamales in Chicago, an undocumented immigrant mother returns to Mexico without her family

So she learned to make them, she recalled as she made tamales for the last time in Chicago.

“My husband would tell me I was crazy; that (the business) wouldn’t work out,” Perez said, wrapping the dough in hundreds of corn husks. Still, he made her a wooden cart to sell the tamales.

She’d get up at 2:30 every morning to make the tamales, champurrado and arroz con leche from the small, old kitchen in their apartment. Then she’d be out by 5 a.m. to sell. The pork and green salsa tamales were the customers’ favorites, but she also made green pepper, cheese and red salsa tamales.

Some nights, she didn’t collapse into bed until 11 p.m.

“It was all worth it,” Perez said.

Around 2013, business was so good that Perez moved from making tamales in her apartment to renting a space with a commercial kitchen. She also hired employees to operate six carts across the city.

“It was a profitable business. It gave me everything I have and more to help my family in Chicago and in Mexico,” Perez said. “I loved my job.”

But there were obstacles. Though business took off, she struggled to keep operating because selling tamales on the streets of Chicago was not permitted. Police actively fined and arrested vendors until the City Council pushed for a move to relax the rules in 2015.

Perez became a member of the Asociacion de Vendedores Ambulantes, or the Street Vendors Association, a group of vendors that organized in 2010 to urge the city to pass the now active ordinance that allows vendors to get a license more easily and reduced the cost of the fines.

After she and her children were arrested on multiple occasions for selling tamales, Perez testified before the City Council and spearheaded protests advocating for the ordinance.

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