During a marathon hallacas-making party in mid-December, folding tables were set up in a Cape Elizabeth garage with the components, where Lucia Villalobos’ extended family assembled dozens of the banana-leaf wrapped packages. Hallacas are the Venezuelan version of tamales. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald

Ask Latinos about Christmastime tamales – and their cousins, including Venezuelan hallacas and Puerto Rican pasteles – and prepare to hear three words over and over: labor of love. Fast, easy and weeknight friendly, tamales are not.

The recipe for plantain-leaf wrapped hallacas, for instance, from “Gran Cocina Latina,” the 901-page Maricel Presilla tome, runs six large, text-heavy pages. The recipe, which, incredibly, Presilla describes as “somewhat pared down,” includes two sub-recipes, more than 50 ingredients and the daunting headers, DAY 1 and DAY 2.  

But the labor that goes into making tamales – some combination of epic shopping and chopping; slicing and dicing; peeling and pureeing; boiling; simmering; kneading; tinting; pulling meat from bones; soaking, cleaning and filling leaves; wrapping, decorating, tying and (finally!) steaming or boiling the tamales – underlines the love.

“Tamale is like a little present that you grab in a corn husk,” said Spanish teacher, Bangor resident and Mexican native Eunice Kullick. “They include a lot of love.”

Because the process is so laborious, tamale-making is usually reserved for holidays and celebrations, most notably during the Christmas season. In Latin America, and among some families in Maine, too, tamales are eaten at parties in the days leading up to Christmas, on Christmas Eve, Christmas morning and Three Kings Day.

The hard work is also why, traditionally, the whole family gets involved. Relatives gather each year for marathon tamale-making parties. Everybody, from the smallest child to the oldest auntie, gets a task as the tamales are put together, assembly-line fashion, over gossip, joking, singing, snacking, conversation, pinata poking, drinking and dancing.

In Cape Elizabeth on a Saturday afternoon in mid-December, Lucia Villalobos’ extended Venezuelan family – some 70 people total, aged 4 to 82 – began gathering at a family member’s home at 1:30 p.m. to make hallacas. The party wasn’t over until the wee hours, 4 a.m. to be precise, by which time 418 hallacas had been neatly assembled and divvied up so that everybody would have an ample supply for the holidays.

The evening before, a smaller group of the same family pitched in for several hours to prepare oversized pots of the filling: a tender, softly spiced, delicious melding of hen, pork, beef, chickpeas, raisins, leeks, garlic, peppers and capers. “Hallacas is a lot of work, but it is a lot of fun,” said Villalobos, who came to Cape Elizabeth from Venezuela with her husband and son 10 years ago.

Maria Freitas, 8, helps her mother Mariangel Gonzalez Freitas press the masa during the family’s annual Christmas hallaca-making party in Cape Elizabeth in mid-December. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald

When Kullick was a child, her grandmother and a cluster of aunts would get together each year to make the tamales, cooking them over an open fire. There’s a saying in Mexico that if you leave the kitchen while the tamales are underway they won’t turn out well, she said. “It’s not, ‘I’m going to stop by for a couple of minutes and then I’m leaving.’ No! No! No! Because if they enter the kitchen, they don’t leave until it’s cooked!”

It was, Kullick remembered, “the party before the party.”

ETCHED IN MEMORY 

Scholars say tamales and their Latin American culinary cousins originated with Indigenous peoples – the word “tamal” comes from the Aztec language and referred to corn dough cooked in corn husks. The leaf-wrapped bundles were first cooked in the dying embers of fires, but today are steamed or boiled. The type of leaves used to wrap the fillings today vary (banana, plantain, corn husk, Mexican cigar plant), as does the soft masa (corn) mixture and the fillings, from family to family, region to region, and country to country.

Lucia Villalobos, left, and her mother-in-law Yvonne de Caldera, center, chat while making hallacas at an annual family party in Cape Elizabeth. Making hallacas together is “part of the Christmas spirit in Venezuela,” Villalobos says. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald

At El Corazon restaurant in Portland and South Portland, you can order three varieties to take home and reheat for your own holiday celebrations: beef and pork with red chile, Hatch green chili with cheese, and chicken mole. Joseph Urtuzuastegui, who owns El Corazon with his wife Laura, said he’s also eaten tamales filled with elk, turkey, crickets and venison.

For a time, Kullick’s daughter was vegetarian, so Kullick veered from her usual asado de puerco (pork) tamales to fill them with things like chickpeas and vegetables or poblanos, cheese and corn. “I had to be very creative,” she said.

In Puerto Rico, pasteles are made from taro root, green bananas, plantains, yucca and sweet potatoes. North Turner resident Ezequiel Martinez grew up eating them in Lowell, Massachusetts, and in Puerto Rico, made by his mom, his grandmother and local church ladies. Their size and shape resemble Hot Pockets, he said, and “Oh my God, they taste amaaazing!”

The hallacas are boiled in water for about 45 minutes. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press He

Others mention beans, hard-boiled eggs, olives and prunes among the long list of ingredients, and in Mexico, you can find pink-tinted sweet tamales, too, flavored with pineapple juice and coconut.

Christmas breakfast in Mexico is typically tamales, left over from Christmas Eve dinner, and often served with an egg over easy, cooked here by Eunice Kullick. Photo courtesy of Eunice Kullick

Urtuzuastegui likes to eat them for breakfast, with eggs over easy. “That’s one of the best breakfasts you can have,” he says. And Martinez likes them with ketchup. “A lot of people say that’s ruining it, but I can smother that thing in ketchup and it’s amazing!” he said.

But delicious as they are, the taste is rarely what Latinos in Maine mention first when you ask them about tamales. Take, for instance, Francisca Smith, who lives in Bangor, and teaches Spanish to high schoolers and adults.

“Tamale is really a connection with love and a connection with family and it’s a connection to my mom,” she said in a characteristic comment. “When I feel down, that’s what I do: I eat a tamale.” Each time she visits Mexico, she comes home with several dozen Sonoran tamales de carne, from the region where she grew up. Periodically, she takes one out of the freezer, “and then I just call (mom), or I send a message, ‘I’m thinking of you. I’m eating a tamal.’

“It’s a connection,” Smith repeated. “It’s not just a tamale.”

Joseph Urtuzuastegui, who owns El Corazon with his wife, in the restaurant’s dining room. He began making tamales after he left home in his 20s, and, “Quite honestly, I’ve been making them for over 40 years.” Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald

Urtuzuastegui grew up in Yuma, Arizona, where his mother would make 50 dozen tamales each holiday season that as a kid he’d deliver to friends, family and customers by bicycle. Merely the mention of tamales brings up memories of Christmases past. “There were a total of eight of us in our family, six kids and my parents. And honestly we’re down to three,” he said. “It brings back good memories and sad memories but mostly good memories.”

He laughed before adding, “My dad walking around the house and singing Christmas carols in a real funny voice and irritating my mom on purpose.”

Kullick recollected the nine days of traditional neighborhood Christmas parties, or “posados,” in Mexico during which Joseph and Mary’s struggle to find shelter is reenacted in front of people’s homes. Part of the celebration is praying the rosary at the nativity scene. “When that is over, whoever was praying, they earn a ticket to eat tamales,” Kullick said with a laugh. “That’s what my grandmother said: ‘If you’re not gonna pray, you’re not gonna eat tamales!'” 

Alessa Iafrate talks to SoLange Ramirez while Ramirez presses the masa down to make a circle before send it off to the filling table in the hallacas assembly line in Cape Elizabeth. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press He

GET THE PARTY STARTED

When Villalobos and her husband Tito moved to Cape Elizabeth from Venezuela with their then 10-year-old son, it was just the three of them. Now the family here has grown, and with it, the hallacas party. The organization is intense. It used to be Villalobos’ father-in-law, a mathematician, who did the advance work of tallying the considerable shopping list, as well as each family’s hallacas order. But her father-in-law died earlier this year, and now it’s Villalobos, her husband and her sister-in-law who make up the advance team.

There’s no doubt, they’ve got it under control. Villalobos has printed out a typed chart that lists each ingredient, how much is required (7.5 kilograms onions, 6.57 kilograms Spanish paprika, 1,125 grams sweet chili peppers…), and exactly how the ingredients will be split among the pots. Her husband has done the shopping, at Market Basket, Hannaford and La Bodega Latina. They’ve calculated the price per hallaca this year at $3.50. Villalobos’ family has reserved 40 hallacas – they plan to serve some to the staff of their company, Lucia & Tito Cleaning Services, for a Christmas lunch – which means they’ll contribute $140 toward the cost of the day’s production.

Mariangel Gonzalez, Villalobos’ niece, is hosting the party in her tidy, quintessentially New England cape. In preparation, her garage has been equipped with a heater, a large-screen TV (tuned to Spanish music videos), a karaoke machine, card tables and mobile stoves to heat the sizeable pots in which the hallacas will boil. “Here they call it a lobster pot. We call them tamale pots back home,” Urtuzuastegui said about similar cookware.

By early afternoon, the card tables have been set with stacks of banana leaves meticulously sorted by size, bowls of garnishes, balls of string and tortilla presses; the presses can quickly flatten the masa mixture onto the leaves for more efficient assembly. Also on the tables are packages of bandanas; each participating family will wear matching colors. In past years, they’ve worn matching T-shirts.

Chila Griborio ties up a hallaca, the last step in assembling them before they are cooked. Tying them takes skill: Too loose or too tight and they’ll fall apart while cooking. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald

A small child will be given the job of pressing the masa. “Pressing the masa is like a freshman, rookie year (job),” Villalobos explained. The tasks of wrapping and tying will go to those with more experience. “If you tie it too (tight), you break the leaf and the water will come in,” she said. “If you put it too loose, the hallacas will open. It is a science, almost, to wrap the hallacas.”

In a telephone interview, Martinez had similarly emphasized the importance of properly sealing the pasteles. “If not, (the filling) will just come out like a cracked egg,” he warned.

In the kitchen, Villalobos’ mother-in-law Yvonne de Caldera – “one of the queens of hallacas,” as Villalobos described her – has been cutting olives into neat slices. Others have prepared the masa, put together a fruity alcoholic punch, readied garnishes and set out trays of snacks. People are gradually arriving, and though the mood is already festive, the party won’t really get cranking until late afternoon. Still, the chatter is noisy and happy, the house spiffed up with Christmas trimmings. An eye-catching, double-decker birthday cake, draped in pink and aquamarine fondant, awaits a lucky little girl named Lara, a family member who turns 4 today. It’s a double celebration.

Pausing from slicing olives, de Caldera asks a family member to translate as she explains hallacas at their most basic to a reporter. “It’s a fine case of corn that is surrounded by a banana leaf.” The mechanics out of the way, she gets to the important part: “It keeps inside the best of the flavors and the culinary culture of Venezuela.”

Family members chat during a break to eat pizza during a hallaca making party in Cape Elizabeth. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press He

FAR FROM HOME 

Maine is home to a small but growing Latino community; between 2010 and 2020, the state’s Latino population grew 57%, according to U.S. Census data. But the notion of home has a complex, layered meaning for immigrants, and never more so than at Christmastime.

Many members of Villalobos’s family remain in Venezuela, where the economic and political situation is bleak. It pains her to think about the hardships her family there faces. At Christmastime, they can’t enjoy even the ordinary things as she wishes they could, she said. For example, because the olives and capers that are key to hallacas are imported, they are either unavailable or unaffordable.

At this time of year, Smith worries about Maine’s wider Latino community. Ideally, Christmas equals happiness, she said, but it’s not so simple for some Latinos. Their immigration status may have prevented them from visiting their homelands and families for years, she said. Cooking traditional foods is as close as they can come. “I think that’s most of the reason why we do it,” she said.

It goes the other direction, too. Latinos living in Maine are eager for their neighbors to understand their cultural traditions. Kullick and Smith both belong to the Bangor-area Chispa Centro Hispano de Maine, an organization interested in educating non-Hispanics about Latino culture through lectures, poetry and more.

A culinary education is probably an easy sell. When in 2012, Urtuzuastegui launched the food truck that eventually became El Corazon, he sold seven dozen special-order tamales at Christmastime. Last year, that figure was 200 dozen, “probably 95%” to non-Latinos, he said. And Kullick has learned from her daughter that even Trader Joe’s now stocks tamales. But, the daughter assured her, “they’re not the same.”

Rosa Diaz runs the kitchen at El Corazon in Portland and makes the special order holiday tamales, following the recipes of owner Joseph Urtuzuastegui’s mother. The restaurant takes orders from November until a few days before Christmas and this year expects to sell more than 200 dozen. Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald

Naturally, Latinos in Maine want their own children to understand and take pride in their heritage, as well. Come Christmas, Smith expects her teenage sons to help her make tamales.

“That’s the idea of doing it with them, to pass on my tradition, because they are more American than Mexican, even though they have my blood. They grew up here,” she said. “This is the way that I transfer something of who I am.”