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Born in Oaxaca, Rosa Lucia Hernandez launched a tamale business in 2018 to fulfill a longtime dream. After her death, Rosa’s children are keeping that dream alive.
It’s not unusual to find Stacey Hernandez in the kitchen of her family’s restaurant, La Mixteca Tamale House. On a Thursday afternoon, her hands were deep in a big bowl of masa. That dough will get turned into tortillas, sopes – a traditional Mexican dish consisting of a thick, fried corn dough with pinched edges to hold toppings, and picaditas, a kind of corn cake common to Oaxaca, where her family comes from. Stacey’s mother, Rosa, used to make picaditas for breakfast, topping them with a bit of lard, salt, and queso fresco for her nine children.
What was unusual, though, was the color of the dough that Stacey was shaping: It was bright pink; and rather than circles, she was shaping them into hearts. After taking balls of the pink masa and flattening them underneath a pan, Stacey pressed a heart-shaped cookie cutter into the dough, revealing the reason for the pink coloring: This is a Valentine’s Day special that La Mixteca serves every year.
La Mixteca was founded by Stacey’s mother, Rosa Lucia Hernandez, who was born in Oaxaca and moved to the U.S. in the 1990s. The family resettled first in East Tennessee, where they had a supermarket, before moving to the Atlanta area. The business that became La Mixteca began in Rosa’s home kitchen, when she started selling tamales to make some extra income while she took care of her grandkids. In 2018, she and three daughters—Stacey, Patricia, and Antonina—opened La Mixteca Tamale House in Suwanee. For the first two years of the restaurant’s existence, the family members worked together closely, making between 1,500 and 2,000 tamales a day, Stacey said, in an industrial kitchen to serve fresh in the Suwanee outlet.
The restaurant became so successful that the family opened a second location last year in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhood. Rosa, though, wasn’t there for it: She passed away in 2020.
The new location is being managed by yet another Hernandez sibling, Valentin, who’d decorated the dining room with roses ahead of Valentine’s Day—a tribute to their mother, he said, whom the children try to honor in both small and big ways at the restaurant.
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As Valentin moved around the dining room, arranging Valentine’s Day balloons and centerpieces, Stacey reflected on the privilege of being able to work alongside her mother for two years—and to continue working with her siblings now. “In memory of her, we kept going, so that’s where we are now,” Stacey said, tearing up. “Going through the loss of a parent, you just want to freeze time. You don’t want to go to work anymore. You want to be at home. But when you own a business, you can’t do that. You have to keep going every day, no matter what.”
La Mixteca’s regular tamale recipe is the same one that the siblings’ mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother used, though that’s all Stacey will say about it: “It’s a different way from your typical Mexican tamale,” she said. “It is a secret recipe, so I’m not allowed to go into detail.” Today, Stacey and her sister Patricia make the tamales that are served at La Mixteca in 11 different flavors—pork or chicken in spicy green or mild red sauce, mole, rajas, quesabirria—in addition to tacos, burritos, and other Oaxacan specialties like tlayudas.
Although sopes are usually on the year-round menu, the pink heart-shaped ones will only be available for the first half of February, to walk-in customers only—along with cheese-topped, heart-shaped pink picaditas, pink tacos, and other colorful seasonal offerings: pink tamales filled with strawberry jam and topped with vanilla ice cream for dessert; scarlet-colored agua de jamaica; and strawberry atole, a warm masa-based drink. It was Stacey who came up with the idea of doing pink heart-shaped sopes a couple years ago; she gets the color naturally, with beet puree.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone do it, and it became a very big hit,” she said as she shaped the masa. People come from all over Georgia to try them, and the success of the Valentine’s Day tamales has led to other seasonal variations—sweet calabaza tamales, for instance, during fall, and purple and yellow tamales for Halloween. Each innovation reflects hours of work by the siblings and La Mixteca’s staff, trying out ingredients and playing around with recipes.
“One thing that I’m very blessed with is that sometimes people say you can’t work with family because it’s hard. But I think it’s the opposite of us. We all work together,” Stacey said. “That’s the beautiful thing about our family, is that my mom raised us to have a very good bond with each other. Even though she’s not here, we’re still here for each other.”
This story was first published in 285 South, a news publication dedicated to Metro Atlanta’s immigrant and refugee communities, and is part of a partnership with Rough Draft Atlanta.