Tortilla makers are going off the grid in Querétaro.
Mexico’s history of making tortillas goes back centuries but in the state of Querétaro today’s tortilla makers are producing the staple food in a thoroughly modern way — using solar power.
According to the Federation of Producers of Corn Flour and Tortillas, a trade association for tortilla shop owners and other related producers in the state, 40% of its 389 tortillerías are currently powered with solar panels, which are not only more environmentally friendly than conventional electricity but ultimately cheaper for the proprietors as well, says association president Arturo Campos Novoa.
The eventual goal, says Campos, is to get 100% of shop owners off the grid.
The initiative, which is financed in part by the organization and in part by the state government, allows tortilla shop owners to take out 40,000-peso, low-interest, no-collateral three-year loans to purchase and install the photovoltaic equipment.
As soon as a participating business gets the panels, it stops paying for conventional electricity. Meanwhile, the loan’s monthly payments end up costing about the same or less than owners are used to shelling out for monthly electric bills.
“Over three years, they have to pay [monthly] for the [solar panels], but after that, it will be a benefit to the business,” said Campos, explaining that after the loan term, the owners make more profit since they have fewer overhead costs.
He estimates that altogether, participants in the program are already saving 20,000 pesos bimonthly against projected electricity costs.
And what’s good for tortillerías is also good for Querétaro citizens, he added, since more profitability means that tortillerías can afford to keep their prices down, even when the cost of ingredients goes up.
The state’s price ceiling on tortillas, an amount regulated by the government, has stayed the same in Querétaro since 2018 at 18 pesos per kilo, and Campos predicts that it will remain the same into next year thanks in part to the program.
The transparency watchdog Inai is among the agencies to disappear.
President López Obrador said Thursday that his government intends to incorporate autonomous organizations such as the national transparency watchdog and the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT) into federal ministries and departments.
The president told reporters at his morning press conference that he would meet with his cabinet next Monday to present his plan to disband a range of autonomous bodies in their current form.
He said legal reforms for their incorporation into government ministries and departments – over which he has ultimate control – would subsequently be presented to Congress. The initiative could save the government up to 20 billion pesos (US $1 billion) and that money could be used to purchase Covid-19 vaccines, López Obrador said.
“We’re going to carry out this administrative reform and we’re going to adjust the government to the new reality [and] no longer continue creating these [autonomous] institutions, these bureaucratic apparatuses,” he said.
“Just as they created these [public] trusts and funds willy-nilly” – 109 of which the government abolished late last year – “… autonomous organizations were also created … by executive agreements,” López Obrador said.
“So we have to review all these bodies so that there is no duplication [of responsibilities] because we have to save, be efficient, not have so many apparatuses that eat up the budget.”
The president said that the IFT could be incorporated into the Communications and Transportation Ministry, that the National System for Protection of Children and Adolescents could become part of the DIF family services agency and that the National Institute for Transparency and Access to Information could be absorbed into the Ministry of Public Administration, the Federal Auditor’s Office or the office of the anti-corruption prosecutor.
He said the aim of his proposal was not to dismiss employees of autonomous bodies, saying that they could be reassigned to other roles.
Government critics have long accused the president of attempting to concentrate power in the federal executive and his latest proposal gives them another reason to assert that is the case.
“Institutional destruction and the concentration of power continues!” Claudio X. González, a lawyer, activist and outspoken government critic, tweeted Thursday morning.
“We have to stop this before they kill off the whole institutional framework and the autonomous bodies! Vote to throw them out!”
López Obrador: 'If there's censorship on social media, what's left?'
President López Obrador on Thursday criticized social media platforms for blocking the accounts of United States President Donald Trump after a violent mob of his supporters broke into the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.
Speaking at his regular news conference, López Obrador said he doesn’t like censorship and that nobody should be deprived of their right to convey a message on Twitter or Facebook.
“I don’t accept that. We all have to show self constraint and guarantee freedom. … How can they censor someone? Let’s see, I punish you because I as a judge, as the holy inquisition, deem that what you’re saying is harmful,” he said.
“… Imagine that Twitter, as a company, decides ‘you no, because what you’re saying is damaging or harmful’ – it goes against good manners. … If there’s censorship on social media, what’s left?”
Twitter and Facebook blocked Trump’s access to his accounts on Wednesday after he used the platforms to publish what The New York Times described as “a string of inaccurate and inflammatory messages” as a violent mob overtook the United States Capitol.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday morning that a block on Trump’s accounts on that platform and Instagram, which it owns, would be extended at least until the end of the U.S. president’s term.
“We believe the risks of allowing the president to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete,” Zuckerberg wrote on his own Facebook account.
The Twitter suspension was due to expire this morning but Trump remained silent on Thursday.
López Obrador, who has maintained an unlikely friendship with the U.S. president since assuming Mexico’s top job in late 2018, told reporters that he too has suffered censorship but didn’t elaborate.
As for the turmoil the United States faced on Wednesday, López Obrador said that Mexico wouldn’t intervene in issues that U.S. authorities have to resolve because the Mexican constitution enshrines the principle of non-intervention in the affairs of foreign countries.
However, he expressed regret about the events that took place in Washington and the loss of human life. (A female Trump supporter was shot dead by Capitol police.)
His failure to condemn the events in Washington was criticized by some.
“Mexico’s president, who has described himself as a humanist/pacifist, declines to comment on the violent assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters, saying he doesn’t opine on other countries’ affairs. Yet just on Monday, AMLO said he favors the U.S. pardoning Julian Assange,” said Eric Martin, a Bloomberg business reporter and former Mexico correspondent, on Twitter.
Juan Carlos was looking forward to Kings' Day when he was killed.
A 5-year-old boy’s death from a stray bullet in the first minutes of the New Year has left a Michoacán community in shock and mourning, and many say that the practice that led to his death — residents greeting the New Year with a hail of gunfire into the air — was inexcusable and criminal.
Juan Carlos Aburto died when a stray bullet passed through the roof of his home in Apatzingán and entered his thorax while he slept. He never even managed to open his eyes, his mother said.
“He tried to breathe, but already he couldn’t,” she said. “That was his last gasp of air, and then my son was gone.”
The Catholic Church declared three days of mourning for the boy. The bishop called the boy’s death a crime and said that in the six years that he has been assigned to the diocese, at least three people have died from related incidents during celebrations.
Authorities publicly condemned the tragedy, which they said happened despite preventive measures this year to avoid the New Year’s tradition. However, no one has been arrested. Apatzingán Mayor José Luis Lucatero said celebratory gunfire had been reduced this year.
Known to family and friends as “El Güerito,” or “the light-skinned one,” Juan Carlos was laid to rest in a tiny white coffin on New Year’s Day, just five days before the Kings’ Day holiday, when he was hoping to receive a ball as a gift from the Three Wise Men.
Instead, his family held a wake and mourned with friends and neighbors for the boy who all described as friendly, interested in learning, a lover of arcade games and prone to singing and dancing. He was known to share with his two siblings, aged 2 and 7, the abandoned toys he collected from the street while selling bread to help his family’s finances.
According to his mother, the bullet that killed her son entered the house through the thin sheet of roofing covering the family’s house and struck Juan Carlos as he clung to a stuffed animal in his sleep.
The boy was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he was confirmed dead.
His funeral brought out several members of the community, including a group of taxi drivers who presented the boy’s father with money they had collected on the family’s behalf. Others expressed indignation on social media at Juan Carlos’s death, repeating the slogan, “Not one bullet more.”
The New Year’s practice is not unique to Apatzingán. Federal, state and municipal authorities all over Mexico have called for it to stop. In various locales in the states of Sonora and Sinaloa, people reported injuries from similar celebrations.
In Sonora, a 23-year-old Nogales man got a bullet lodged in his back after it entered his home through the roof. In Hermosillo, a woman standing outside her home was grazed in the hand and a 28-year-old man was wounded in the forearm.
In Culiacán, Sinaloa, municipal and state officials had also made appeals that fell upon deaf ears. Four people sustained minor injuries from stray bullets this year after a hail of gunfire at the stroke of midnight New Year’s Day.
The deputy minister in Zipolite, Oaxaca, last week.
Four doctors in Cuernavaca, Morelos, have quit in light of Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell’s end-of-year vacation on the coast of Oaxaca.
The coronavirus point man’s trip to the beach was the final straw that precipitated the doctors’ decision to resign, according to a colleague at the Carlos Calero Elorduy ISSSTE hospital in the Morelos capital.
The doctors were already discouraged by the federal government’s pandemic strategy, the lack of medical personnel, supplies and equipment to adequately treat Covid-19 patients and the irresponsibility of some citizens in the face of the virus threat.
“Four of our colleagues – we’re 23 doctors in the Covid area – resigned because, they said: ‘It’s not possible that we’ve been working our butts off for eight months … and the guy [López-Gatell] does this,'” said a doctor who spoke to the newspaper El Universal on the condition of anonymity.
The deputy minister’s decision to leave the nation’s coronavirus epicenter, Mexico City, to travel to Oaxaca was in clear defiance of the stay-at-home advice he has repeatedly asked citizens to follow.
The anonymous doctor told El Universal that the government’s strategy to combat the pandemic, which López-Gatell leads, has failed, noting that it hasn’t been a forceful advocate for face masks, especially early in the pandemic.
Asked what message he would like to convey to the public, the doctor responded that he would use colorful and forceful language to chide them for not following health recommendations.
“The majority don’t understand; we’ve been without medications for months, literally all the [coronavirus] patients who enter intensive care die, we don’t have enough doctors for the number of patients we have,” he said.
“Now we have an approximate fatality rate of between 60% and 65%, in other words out of 100 patients that come in [to hospital] 60 or 65 die. We’ve saved people who’ve come in not such a serious condition … but the reality is … if you go into intensive care, you die.”
Another suspected victim of Covid-19 is wheeled into a hospital in Mexico.
Wednesday was the worst day of the entire coronavirus pandemic in Mexico in terms of both new cases and deaths reported by federal health authorities.
The Health Ministry reported a single-day record of 13,345 new cases, pushing the accumulated tally to just under 1.48 million. Covid-19 fatalities also hit a new daily high of 1,165, lifting the official death toll to 129,987.
It was the third time in the space of eight days that the Health Ministry registered more than 1,000 additional fatalities on a single day.
There are currently 76,101 active cases across the country, according to Health Ministry estimates.
Data shows that 55% of general care beds across Mexico are occupied by coronavirus patients, while six states have an occupancy rate above 70%. They are Mexico City, 88%; México state, 83%; Guanajuato, 80%; Nuevo León, 79%; Hidalgo, 77%; and Baja California, 74%.
Coronavirus cases and deaths in Mexico as reported by day. milenio
Nationwide occupancy of beds with ventilators is 46%. In Mexico City, 83% of such beds are taken, while México state has the second highest occupancy rate at 79%.
Of 952 healthcare facilities treating coronavirus patients across Mexico, about 200 are completely full in at least one of three areas: general care beds, beds with ventilators or intensive care beds.
In Mexico City, the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, 30 hospitals are at 100% capacity for general care beds, 20 have reached a 100% rate for beds with ventilators and 19 are at that level in their intensive care units.
Of the 200 hospitals that have reached maximum capacity in at least one of the categories, 111 are located in just four states, the newspaper Milenio reported. They are Mexico City, México state, Hidalgo and Guanajuato.
Meanwhile, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has called on Mexico to increase spending on healthcare, contending that a budget equivalent to less than 3% of GDP will be insufficient to respond to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 even as Covid-19 vaccines are rolled out.
PAHO representative Cristian Morales Fuhrimann acknowledged that the Mexican government is making efforts to increase the efficiency of the health system and stamp out corruption but urged that more money also needs to be injected into public health.
Those challenges, Morales said, include the coronavirus pandemic, progressing toward universal health care and establishing a more resilient health system capable of responding to future pandemics and health problems people face every day such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, dengue and HIV.
Mexico has historically spent about 3% of GDP on healthcare, putting it near the bottom of the list in Latin America, where Cuba led with 11.7% followed by Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina with 9% each, according to 2017 data.
Each baker puts his or her own stamp on rosca de reyes, a traditional Candlemas bread.
The day starts early when you own a bakery, and Francisco García Castillo is in his bakery by 3 a.m.
“I start early,” he explains, “so I can finish by 12 or 1.”
That’s when he turns his attention to his adjacent carpentry shop, which had been his primary source of income until he decided to start a bakery.
“I wanted to have a bakery because I like doing different things,” he said, adding, “it advances my family.”
He’s mostly self-taught. “A baker worked with me for three months,” he said.
But since then, he’s gotten his information from the internet, often altering the recipes he finds.
“A little more of this, less of that,” he said. “I change the recipe to my taste.”
For most of the year, he makes typical Mexican baked goods: conchas, orejas and cookies. But after Christmas, he turns his attention to baking rosca de reyes (Kings’ Day bread), which he makes from December 26 until January 7.
January 6, the day when the bread is traditionally served in households all over Mexico, is Kings’ Day, the date that Christians believe the Three Wise Men (also known as The Three Kings) located the baby Jesus.
“The recipe is from a woman I knew,” said García. “It is a recipe from her family that goes back many years.”
Cynthia Goyri’s bakery makes different variations on the classic rosca recipe.
Rosca de reyes has a long, if somewhat uncertain, history. Some sources trace its origin to the fourth century and Saturnalia, the Roman festival celebrating the winter solstice. During that festival, Romans enjoyed a round cake made with figs, dates and honey. That may have led to the rosca de reyes, which was popular in 14th-century France. The bread eventually made its way to Spain.
“Then,” says Cynthia Goyri Cerezo, the owner of La Sémola bakery in Cholula, Puebla, “it arrived in Mexico with the Conquest.”
Like García, Goyri is mostly self-taught, learning her craft through some courses, practice and “… from what I like and from my mind,” she said. And, like García, she changed the recipe a little to reflect her own tastes.
“I added some sweeter ingredients,” she admitted.
Her bakery is located in a more upscale part of Cholula, with a restaurant upstairs, and she employs several bakers. García’s bakery, Los Ranchos Tenamaxtla, is about a mile from the center of Chipilo, located on a small street right at the edge of where farmland begins. It is a one-person operation.
“There was no bakery here before,” García said as we walked into the small kitchen where he bakes. “I waited, saved and built it. The first time I made [rosca de reyes], it was all by hand and I didn’t have the bakery. I just made them in my home and sold to neighbors. It was very tiring.”
He now has equipment to mix the dough.
“Like just about everything in the kitchen, this is more of an art,” he explained as the dough mixed. “It is mixed until it is smooth and doesn’t cling to the sides or to gloves. It takes longer or shorter time, depending on conditions.”
Francisco García started out selling to neighbors.
When the dough’s ready, García shapes it into three rings and decorates them. The various toppings, and even the bread’s shape, have religious significance.
The bread is oval and has been interpreted as symbolizing God’s love, said to be without end, as well as the crowns that the Three Wise Men wore. It’s decorated with a variety of crystallized fruit, and these also have several meanings. Some say they symbolize the grace that Jesus brought to the world and also the jewels in the crowns of the wise men.
As García places three thin strips of dried fruit on his bread, he tells me that they represent the kings. “This is what our elders have told us,” he said.
He slices maraschino cherries and adds three halves in spots. I figure that they must signify the Holy Trinity and ask about them. “No,” he said. “They are just for decoration.”
Sometime after rosca de reyes arrived in Mexico, a bean meant to represent the baby Jesus started to be placed inside the bread as it baked. Later, the bean was replaced with a small porcelain figure, which in turn has been replaced with a plastic one. This buried figure symbolizes the baby Jesus when he was hidden from King Herod.
Herod, known to history as King of the Jews, is said to have ordered all male infants in Bethlehem at the time of the Nativity to be killed because the monarch had been warned about the birth of a child that, according to prophecy, would one day supplant him. Jesus survived because his parents took him into Egypt after his father Joseph was warned by an angel.
According to tradition, the person whose slice of rosca de reyes contains the plastic figure of the baby Jesus hidden inside must buy tamales for everyone present who ate the cake. This is done on February 2, which is El Día de Candelaria, or Candlemas.
When García’s done decorating the breads, he pops them into the oven. After just a few minutes, the smell of it baking fills the room. García lowers his mask, sniffs and smiles. “Good smell,” is all he says.
He keeps a close check on them as they bake, adjusting the temperature. After 10 minutes, he pulls one from the oven to check it by gently pressing on the dough.
“If the dough does not rise back up, it is not ready,” he explains, returning it to the oven.
While García only makes what’s known as rosca de reyes clásico — the bread decorated with different pieces of crystallized fruit — Goyri’s bakery offers a variety.
Roscas start out simple, but nearly every decorative item has a symbolic meaning.
“We make clásico, chocolate and cajeta (caramel),” she said. While the clásico looks the same as García’s, her chocolate and cajeta aren’t decorated with dried fruit. The former variety is covered with stripes of chocolate, while the cajeta one is sprinkled with nuts.
Both bakeries sell about 100 of the breads, and both believe the pandemic will affect sales somewhat this year.
“We will sell maybe a little less because people are not leaving their homes,” says Goyri.
García and Goyri both insisted on giving me a rosca de reyes to take home. Since it would be inhospitable to refuse, I took them home and promptly cut myself a slice. García’s is denser than Goyri’s bread (I chose the cajeta). Hers is also a little sweeter and that caramel inside is a wonderful addition. Both were so good, I had to have a second slice.
As García was packing up his bread, he told me that he’d have a stuffed version — with cream, nuts and raisins — available by January 4, so it looks like I’ll be heading back.
I’ll probably have to try Goyri’s chocolate rosca as well.
Joseph Sorrentino is a regular contributor to Mexico News Daily.
The coronavirus situation in Mexico City hospitals has become even more dire.
Occupancy of general care hospital beds in the capital crept up to 88% on Tuesday from 86% on Monday while 83% of beds with ventilators are in use, also a 2% uptick.
In Mexico City hospitals operated by the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), the country’s largest public healthcare provider, there are just six general care beds and 200 beds with ventilators currently available for coronavirus patients.
However, IMSS said Tuesday night that 183 of the latter could be used by patients who don’t require intubation.
Across the entire health system in the capital there are only 316 general care beds and 998 beds with ventilators currently available, according to Mexico City government data published Tuesday.
At red light “maximum” risk on the federal government coronavirus stoplight map since December 19, Mexico City has recorded just under 343,000 confirmed cases and 22,399 Covid-19 deaths since the start of the pandemic.
Hospital occupancy levels are also concerning in Iguala, Guerrero. The city’s general hospital, IMSS hospital and State Workers Social Security Institute hospital are full or very close to capacity, the newspaper El Universal reported.
There are beds available in a provisional Covid unit set up by local authorities but no medical personnel to attend to patients, said Iguala Mayor Antonio Jaimes Herrera.
“A lot of them have got sick and a lot of the specialists are quitting because their colleagues have been infected. Others have gone to Mexico City,” he said.
For the past two weeks, the mayor has been calling on the state government to declare Iguala red on the stoplight system (Guerrero is currently “high” risk orange) so that restrictions can be tightened and people’s mobility reduced.
Iguala health chief Federico Ortiz said that last weekend was the worst of the pandemic for the city, which is located just over 100 kilometers north of the state capital Chilpancingo. Of 14 Covid deaths in Guerrero, six occurred in Iguala, he said.
The municipality has recorded 1,188 confirmed coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic and 157 Covid-19 deaths, according to state government data.
In other Covid news:
• The Tabasco government announced that coronavirus restrictions implemented in December will remain in place until at least February 15. That means that businesses such as restaurants and hotels will not be able to increase their capacity above 50% for at least the next six weeks. Beauty salons, party halls and events centers are among the businesses that must remain closed in the Gulf coast state.
Tabasco, which has recorded just over 45,000 confirmed cases and 3,304 Covid-19 deaths, is currently orange on the stoplight map but Governor Adán Augusto López Hernández warned that the state would regress to red if hospital occupancy goes above 50%.
“We have hospital occupancy now of 28% but if the number shoots up to 55%, we’ll have to shut down. I hope we can stabilize [the situation] but if not we’re going to take the step of going to the red stoplight,” the Morena party governor said.
• The Hidalgo government declared that red light restrictions would be imposed in 33 municipalities in the state’s south, some of which abut the Valley of México metropolitan area, the country’s coronavirus epicenter. Health Minister Alejandro Benítez said the municipalities account for 60% of total cases, active cases, hospitalized patients and Covid-19 deaths.
Among the municipalities where red light restrictions were to take effect are the state capital Pachuca, Mineral de la Reforma, Tulancingo, Huasca de Ocampo, Mineral del Chico, Tlaxcoapan and Zempoala.
Hidalgo, currently orange on the stoplight map, has recorded just over 25,000 confirmed cases and 3,513 Covid-19 deaths. Benítez said that case numbers have risen quickly over the past three weeks, and spiked even further in recent days.
“This substantial increase in the number of cases results in an increase of [the number of] people hospitalized,” the health minister said, adding that some hospitals are close to capacity.
According to federal data, almost 77% of general care hospital beds in Hidalgo and 52% of those with ventilators are in use. Among Mexico’s 32 federal entities, the state has the fifth highest occupancy rate in both categories.
• Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell said Tuesday night that a case of possible fraud related to Mexico’s Covid-19 vaccination program had been detected in Quintana Roo. He said that a group of people who passed themselves off as representatives of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer had gone house to house to collect people’s personal details, supposedly as part of preparations to administer the vaccine.
López-Gatell said the Quintana Roo Health Ministry had issued a warning to residents and notified the health regulatory agency Cofepris about the “possible misrepresentation of [Pfizer] personnel.”
No pharmaceutical company representatives have been authorized to participate in the government’s vaccination program, which began on December 24 and currently remains in stage 1 – the immunization of frontline health workers.
• Mexico’s accumulated coronavirus case tally rose to 1,466,490 on Tuesday with 11,271 new cases reported. The official Covid-19 death toll increased to 128,822 with 1,065 additional fatalities. The Health Ministry estimates that there are almost 69,000 active cases across the country.
Mexico’s fatality rate remains at 8.8 per 100 confirmed cases, the highest level among the 20 countries currently most affected by the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University. There have been 102 Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 residents in Mexico, the seventh highest rate among the same 20 countries. The countries with higher per-capita mortality rates than Mexico are, in order, Italy, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Spain, the United States and Hungary.
The nationwide occupancy rates for general care beds and beds with ventilators are 53% and 45%, respectively, according to data presented by the Health Ministry Tuesday night.
Health authorities also said that just over 48,000 people have received a first shot of the Pfizer vaccine and that 107,250 doses have arrived in the country.
The president has over 2 million subscribers to his YouTube channel.
President López Obrador could earn millions if he chose to monetize his personal YouTube channel, according to social media analytics websites.
AMLO, as the president is best known, has 2.39 million subscribers to his YouTube channel on which his morning press conferences are broadcast every weekday. He also uses the video-sharing platform to disseminate his frequent messages to citizens as well as transmit footage of the many events he attends.
According to the newspaper Milenio, only United States President Donald Trump has more YouTube subscribers than López Obrador among world leaders.
The social media analytics websites Social Blade and Noxinfluencer both place AMLO’s channel among the 250 most watched in Mexico. They say that the president could earn up to US $139,400 a month if he monetized the channel, meaning that annual revenue would be just shy of $1.7 million.
However, AMLO doesn’t appear likely to line his pockets with YouTube ad revenue any time soon as the president’s office told Milenio that he has no current plan to cash in on his popular channel.
For now, López Obrador seems happy enough to watch his subscription numbers and video views, rather than his bank account figures, click up at an impressive pace.
Many of the videos on his channel have been watched millions of times. Among them: an interview he did with the Bloomberg news agency in 2019 (6 million views); a message from August 2020 entitled “The neoliberal period in Mexico was a synonym of corruption” (4.7 million views); and a message from June 2019 in which he celebrates reaching 1 million subscribers (2.6 million views).
In addition to those impressive figures, AMLO has more than 7.2 million Facebook fans, 7.7 million Twitter followers and 846,000 Instagram followers to whom he can directly convey messages and thus bypass the traditional media channels he frequently berates.
With that kind of following, and the influence it affords him, it’s no wonder that the president has described the online platforms as benditas redes sociales – blessed, or holy, social networks.
The first days of January always pose a challenge to bakers in Mexico as they face multiple orders for rosca de reyes, a traditional sweet bread eaten on Kings’ Day, January 6. But an 89-year-old baker in Oaxaca has met the challenge for the last few years with some help from his community.
Alberto Carmelo González, known to many of his neighbors as Don Beto, has been kneading, baking, and decorating breads since he was trained in Mexico City and started his business in Santa Lucia del Camino, a municipality bordering the city of Oaxaca, as a young man in need of a trade. He opened a small bakery in his house and for years made a relatively small quantity of products since he could not afford anything pricier than a regular kitchen oven.
These days, his neighbors and customers, both young and old, can be seen in his bakery, doing everything from helping him unload sacks of flour to cleaning and sanitizing items in his kitchen. They have helped him through increasingly difficult times — after González was injured on his bicycle, after he lost his wife a little over a year ago and now through the pandemic.
Over his decades-long career as a baker, González has become well known among his neighbors and others in the city who have encountered him in adjoining neighborhoods and fairs and bazaars to which he would bicycle to offer his wares for sale.
Alma Altamirano was one such person, who met him a few years ago when he arrived to sell his breads at a bazaar she had organized. Enchanted by the octogenarian, she immediately adopted him as a member of her family and kept in touch.
After a truck hit him while on his bike because González didn’t hear the vehicle’s horn, Altamirano began arriving to help her new adopted family member make rosca de reyes during the busy season.
It was a contagious move: over time, more and more members of the community have joined in to help González, spreading the word about his bakery on social media.
His cohort pooled together money at one point to buy him an industrial oven — nicknamed “The Monster” — an effort to which even people as far away as in the United States contributed.
This year, they worry that the pandemic has reduced González’s sales and are hopeful for a productive Kings’ Day selling season.
Despite his age and the fact that he stays in his home bakery now most of the time due to the pandemic and receives help from his supporters, González still works daily in his kitchen, greets customers wearing a mask, and has kept the rosca de reyes coming.
“I remain here waiting for anyone who feels like coming in,” he said enthusiastically in a video recorded by his supporters and posted on social media.
