This quote in KERA’s profile of Dallas Tortilla & Tamale Co. struck me:
“Elvira was something else,” her granddaughter Lena Leal told the NPR affiliate station. “She ran four boys and a business all at once. She was a millionaire in the ’80s, she was Hispanic, she was a woman.”
Elvira Leal, who died at age 95 in 2016, was born in the bygone Little Mexico neighborhood of Dallas and started the business with her husband in 1950.
The Leal family still runs the 70-year-old business, which has locations on Marsalis Avenue and in Red Oak and Grand Prairie.
It’s amazing what a lot of masa and hard work can do.
