She has sold tacos in Bronzeville for 40 years. Her customers keep coming back, say her food is ‘made with love.’
Bronzeville has changed a lot since Roidell Sanders was a teenager. But one thing has remained the same — every summer weekend, he could find Maria Salamanca selling carne asada tacos at a neighborhood park.
Every summer weekend for about 40 years, Salamanca and her husband have driven from their home in Bucktown to Bronzeville to sell tacos and tortas, first at Dunbar Park on 31st Street and Indiana Avenue, and in recent years at Vincennes Avenue near 37th Street, next to Ellis Park.
Sanders tried her tacos for the first time at Dunbar Park when he was “15, 14, 13, one of those years,” he said. It’s been a long time, and he considers her family now.
“I got her number in my phone as OG,” Sanders said. “We know what her name is, but I just call her OG, (or) Momma.”
Also known to her customers as Grandma, Auntie or Taco Lady over the years, Salamanca has watched generations of teenagers like Sanders grow up and build families of their own.
She has also seen the neighborhood change, as the Ida B. Wells Homes between King Drive and Vincennes Avenue south of 35th Street were demolished, and as the neighborhood has, in recent years, started to rebuild.
On a recent Sunday, her last one of the season, Salamanca, 73, stood behind her usual setup: two folding tables, a grill to keep the oil hot for fried tacos, and a second grill for the carne asada. She sells her food from May to early October, as the weather allows.
Salamanca prepares the tacos dorados — or fried tacos — with potato and either steak or roasted chicken. She takes payments and keeps the toppings stocked.
She keeps gloves and soap and a portable water dispenser nearby to wash her hands between payments and food handling, and to rinse vegetables.
Her nephew, Jorge Hernandez, grills and cuts the steak and puts it in warm corn tortillas before handing plates to hungry customers. Her husband, Aurelio Salamanca, helps too, restocking items from their van.
On one table, Salamanca lines up her homemade jalapeño salsa, pico de gallo she prepares at the park, shredded lettuce, chiles and vegetables soaked in vinegar, and bottles of mayonnaise and sour cream. Two big bottles of Valentina hot sauce are available for customers, and Salamanca will chop cilantro or add shredded cheese to tacos as requested.
Once people choose their toppings, the tacos don’t always follow tradition, because Salamanca caters to what she knows her customers like. Also key to her success is the high-quality arrachera, or skirt steak, forming the flavor-packed base of each taco, she said.
She sells the soft, asada tacos at $4 each, cash only. The tacos are stuffed with plenty of meat, leaving little room for toppings. She goes through about 80 pounds of steak each weekend, she said.
Another ingredient is just as present, longtime customers say.
“It’s made with love,” Sanders said. “Anybody can’t just sit up here and just make no damn tacos. That ain’t gonna work.”
Salamanca and her husband moved to Chicago from Mexico City as newlyweds in 1969, when she was 21 years old. She always loved cooking, and after living in Chicago almost a year, she suggested to her husband that they start selling food for extra money.
They started selling tacos at Humboldt Park, where soccer leagues including teams of Mexican players would play, she said. In those days, she sold tacos with ground beef, potato and carrot, out of a plastic foam cooler. She started making carne asada tacos at Humboldt Park shortly after, she said.
When a new league, made up of Hispanic players, was created and the teams played at several parks around the city, Salamanca decided to follow them. She took her food wherever the league was playing that weekend, including to Dunbar Park, where she found loyal customers.
She kept following the soccer league to different parks, including Ellis Park in Bronzeville, but eventually stayed in Dunbar, going back every summer for more than 20 years before moving to Ellis Park.
She can’t remember how long she’s been in Ellis Park, but she remembers being there when some of the Ida B. Wells Homes stood adjacent. Those homes were torn down between 2002 and 2011.
She said she feels happy seeing people she met as teenagers grow and build careers and be successful. But she has also felt sorrow when she hears one of her customers has been a victim of gun violence, she said.
“I’ve seen youth who, in the summer when we come back to sell again, I don’t see them, and I know something happened to them,” Salamanca said in Spanish. “And that makes me sad because they’re part of us, because they always support us.”
Whether it was Dunbar Park or Ellis Park, most of her customers have made it a point to go find her almost every weekend in the summer. Some have since moved to northwestern Indiana, to other Chicago suburbs or to different neighborhoods, but still make the trip to see her and eat her food.
Salamanca said selling tacos every weekend gives her something to look forward to and helps her manage her stress.
“Because I know they’re part of my family, everyone in the neighborhood,” she said. “I feel healthy in the hours I’m here, and while thinking about the upcoming week, because they treat me, and I treat them, like family.”
Salamanca said her customers, especially the young men who hang out at the park a few hours after getting their food, have helped her feel safe over the years.
“I’m thankful that my clients have taken care of us, they protect us,” she said. “And I’m thankful, my husband and I are, that we’ve been able to do business with them.”
Salamanca has become so close with some of her longtime customers she attends and sometimes cooks for their children’s birthday parties. She advises the children to keep up their grades, find something they love to do and go to college or make a career out of their passion.
On a recent Sunday, a boy and a young woman gave Salamanca a hug, and reminded her of the boy’s birthday coming up. She pulled up the tag on the back of his shirt to check his clothing size for his present.
Sanders, who founded the nonprofit Children Matters Corp., now has 13-year-old twin boys who have also grown to love Salamanca’s tacos, he said. His diet has changed since he was a teenager, and he’s now mostly vegetarian but eats fish every so often, he said.
Salamanca continues to cook for him on summer weekends, buying and preparing salmon for him and selling him a salmon torta.
On Salamanca’s last Sunday of the season, Sanders sat in a camping chair eating his torta — a sub-like sandwich made with a fluffy, oval bread — and occasionally talking to others he knew who were hanging out nearby in groups.
Whenever a breeze picked up, colorful leaves would fall from above, layering on top of leaves already covering the grass.
Thick gray clouds threatened to burst, but the park was lively with music and cheering as young adults played flag football and friends and family watched.
Between noon and 5 p.m. — her usual time selling food at the park — Salamanca rarely went more than five minutes without a new customer — usually, it was in groups.
“Hola mamá,” one guy said as he approached her.
“Hi, how are you?” she said.
She speaks enough English to get by, her Spanish accent woven into the words.
“Fine. I miss you,” he tells Salamanca.
“I miss you, too,” she said.
“Damn, last day,” another said as he sprinkled shredded cheese on his tacos.
A third tried to convince her to come back the following weekend.
Christopher Madison, now 45, was about 8 or 9 years old when he met Salamanca at Dunbar Park. He said he and his family look forward to her tacos every summer.
“When the summer comes, you expect tacos on Saturdays and Sundays,” Madison said
He said as a young boy growing up in a historically Black community like Bronzeville, it was eye-opening to see a Mexican family come into the neighborhood on weekends and become like family.
“My neighborhood was all Black,” he said. “So they were the first culture that came to our neighborhood, and we embraced it.”
Salamanca hopes to open a taqueria next summer or in the near future. She wants to name the business “Taco Lady,” as she’s become known to so many of her customers.
As she gets older, she’s talked to her daughters about opening the business, passing down her recipes and having her daughters take over the restaurant, she said.
She’s still looking for a location to open up shop, but it has to be in Bronzeville.
“After so many years here, we won’t struggle because they know the kind of food we sell,” she said. “And that we’ll continue to make it with pleasure, as always.”
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