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NACO, Sonora, Mexico — Many of the Bisbee-area residents who travel regularly to this Sonoran border town do so to visit friends and family.
Others come for the authentic Mexican food, the affordable dental care or the pharmacies selling medications at bargain-basement prices.
Not Debbie Klimek. She comes for the popsicles.
 Laura Gonz‡lez, 7, reaches for a frozen treat at her parents’ popsicle stand, La Flor de Michoacan, in Naco, Sonora. (By Jonathan Clark-Herald/Review) |
“I always go over and get a paleta (the Spanish word for “popsicle,” also translated as “trowel”) and I sit in the little park,” the 58-year-old former special education teacher said. “And either I get to see people just being with their kids or I go with a friend and we chat while we’re eating. It’s like a little occasion every time I eat one.”
Naco has two paleter’as, or popsicle stands: La Flor de Michoacan, a local landmark with 25 years of service at its Hidalgo Street location, and Mi Lindo Michoacan, a relative upstart that opened two years ago just a block away from its older counterpart. The shops represent two stages of a Mexican popsicle-selling tradition that dates back more than 60 years to one small town in the west-central state of Michoacan.
Small-town roots
In 1938, a 12-year-old boy named Ignacio Alc‡zar left his home in the village of Tocumbo, Michoacan, and, as legend has it, walked 300 miles to the city of Guadalajara, where he sold ice cream in the street. By 1943, he had relocated to Mexico City and opened his first La Michoacana paleter’a.
A decade later, Alc‡zar’s older brother joined him in Mexico City and the two men were soon running a thriving popsicle and ice cream business in the capital. The brothers wanted to share their success with their fellow Tocumbans, but instead of selling franchises, they offered low-interest loans to anyone back home who wanted to start their own paleter’a.
By the end of the 1950s, Mexico City was filled with independent Alc‡zar-financed popsicle shops with names such as La Michoacana, La Flor de Tocumbo and La Flor de Michoacan. In this way, the first generation of Tocumban popsicle sellers, or paleteros, was born.
Folks from nearby towns such as Los Limones and Los Reyes eventually noticed the success of their neighbors in Tocumbo and began opening their own La Michoacana shops or selling the frozen treats from pushcarts. The growing network of paleteros fanned out from Mexico City and Michoacan to the farthest reaches of the nation.
Today, La Michoacana paleter’as, most featuring a pink-dominated color scheme and a little-girl-in-pigtails icon, are almost as ubiquitous in Mexico as taco stands. As an example of their reach, Mar’a Gonz‡lez, co-owner of Flor de Michoacan paleteria in Naco, talks of driving through a tiny village high in the mountains of Jalisco state and coming across a paleteria run by Tocumbans.
Because the Michoacana popsicle shops are a network of independent entities rather than franchises in a single corporate chain, it is hard to know exactly how many there are nationwide. But Gonz‡lez’s husband and business partner, Eduardo, recalled a recent article in a business magazine estimating that Michoacana paleterias are outnumbered in Mexico only by the outlets of the national telephone monopoly, Telmex.
From Michoacan to Naco
A photograph hanging on the wall at La Flor de Michoacan in Naco shows the monument that greets visitors at the entrance to Tocumbo: a giant popsicle bisected by an ice cream cone. The town’s biggest local celebration, the Fiestas del Paletero, or Popsicle Seller Festival, is celebrated each December with paleta-themed fun. During the fiestas, the town abandons the traditional Mexican peso for a new form of currency, the palepeso, or popsi-peso.
Mar’a and Eduardo Gonz‡lez are Tocumbo natives, and part of the third generation of popsicle sellers from the town. Mar’a Gonz‡lez has seven brothers, all of them running popsicle stands in central and northern states like Zacatecas, Nuevo Le—n, Guanajuato and Coahuila. Eduardo Gonz‡lez, who took over the shop in Naco from a fellow Tocumban 20 years ago after an 8.1-scale earthquake convinced him to leave Mexico City, has 10 brothers and sisters, and all but two are now selling popsicles. His family’s shops stretch from Sonora in the north all the way to the city of M/rida, on the Yucatan Peninsula in the south.
“Those of us in this third generation can walk into any Tocumban paleter’a in Mexico and know the owners personally,” Eduardo Gonz‡lez said.
The Gonz‡lezes make all their frozen products in the shop: pure-fruit paletas, helado (ice cream), raspados (shaved frozen fruit juice), aguas (fruit-and-water drinks) and chata (a rice-based drink). They are an independent and self-contained operation, which suits them and other sellers just fine.
“There’s no boss to tell us what to, so we can do as we like,” Mar’a Gonz‡lez said.
Asked how many popsicles the store sells on an average day, she shrugs. Since there’s no boss to answer to, there’s no need to keep track, she says.
In addition to independence, their success at popsicle selling has given Tocumbans a level of economic comfort better than many of their neighbors back in Michoacan.
“Tocumbo is in an area where a lot of indigenous people live,” Mar’a Gonz‡lez said, evoking one of Mexico’s poorest and most marginalized groups of citizens. “(Popsicle selling) has lifted us up over the others.”
And because Tocumbans have found a source of meaningful and sustainable employment within Mexico, relatively few have had to migrate to the United States in search of work.
“There are communities in Michoacan where it seems like everyone has gone to the U.S.,” Eduardo Gonz‡lez said. “But I think that out of our entire population, only about 1 percent is over there.”
The competition
Just up and across the street at Mi Lindo Michoacan, popsicle seller Jos/ Lu’s Mendoza of Los Reyes, Michoacan, represents the scion of that second class of paletero: those from outside Tocumbo who followed their neighbors into the trade back in the 1960s and 1970s.
Mendoza is only a second-generation paletero, but even so, his family’s ties to popsicle selling are already strong. He estimates at least 30 brothers, sister, aunts, uncles and cousins are currently in the business.
“Ever since I was in school, I would help out at my parents’ shop,” said Mendoza, 29, who counts 15 years as a full-fledged paletero. “So it’s what I know.”
Back at La Flor de Michoacan, Eduardo Gonz‡lez is skeptical. He said these upstart popsicle sellers lack the credibility of the original Tocumbo paletero families.
“If you go into any Tocumbo-owned paleteria, they can tell you the entire history of the families who started it all,” he said.
“These others are just generic copies,” he added as he gestured down the street. “We’re the originals.”
Multinational developing
Today, La Michoacana popsicle stands have begun popping up in some areas of the United States, as a few entrepreneurial families have started selling franchises there.
To îscar de la Torre Amezcua, Mexican consul in Douglas and a native of Los Reyes, Michoacan, the growing presence of paleter’as north of the border represents the two-way path of globalization.
“Just as Burger King, Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart are going to Mexico, La Michoacana and Corona beer are coming to the U.S.,” he said.
De la Torre said he really began to understand the multinational potential of the La Michoacana popsicle stands during his previous posting in Detroit. One day in southwest Detroit, an area now home to an estimated 45,000 people of Mexican descent, he encountered a paleter’a owned and operated by an Arab immigrant.
“When you see people of other nationalities selling paletas, it tells you that it is an attractive business,” he said.
De la Torre is not sure why small-town folks from his home state have been so successful at selling popsicles (“If I knew their secret, I’d be a paletero myself,” he joked.), but he suspects it has a lot to do both with the business savvy of the original Tocumbo paleteros and with the quality of their product.
“Unlike other frozen treats, these are made from real fruit,” he said. “There is a trend now towards a more organic lifestyle, and so when people see these types of products that don’t have preservatives and that don’t have saturated fats or artificial sweeteners, they feel good about eating them.”
Continuing a tradition
Hereford resident Claudia Rubio spent her childhood in Naco where she remembers buying paletas from a bell-ringing pushcart. Now she has begun frequenting the Naco paleter’as with her 3-year-old daughter during visits to family across the border.
“I took her to get a paleta one time and that’s all she needed to get hooked,” Rubio said. “Now, if I’m passing by the paleter’a and she sees it, she gets so excited.”
Rubio said that as a mother, she appreciates the all-natural ingredients of the paleta, but mostly she enjoys visiting the shops as a continuation of a Mexican tradition.
Plus, a popsicle stop in Naco also gives her an opportunity to enjoy fruit flavors she can’t readily find in the United States, such as tamarind and guava.
For her part, Debbie Klimek doesn’t speak much Spanish, and so she doesn’t understand the names of many of the rainbow of flavors that fill the coolers of Naco’s paleter’as. But she does know the word mango, and so paletas de mango have become her favorite.
In fact, on one recent occasion as she sat in the park eating a paleta de mango, a man 20 years her younger joined her for a friendly chat. By the end of the conversation, he had proposed marriage. Although flattered, she declined nonetheless.
“It just seems like every time I eat a paleta, something interesting happens,” she said.
JONATHAN CLARK can be reached at 515-4693 or by e-mail at jonathan.clark@bisbeereview.net.
TheSilverRose wrote on Jun 27, 2009 10:22 PM:
Thank You! "