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Tamale festival dishes up fundraising opportunities
By Ambria Hammel, The Catholic Sun
November 15, 2007
Organizers of the annual Tamale Festival in downtown Phoenix encourage parishes that want to build community while raising funds to become a vendor at this year’s event.
The Food City Tamale Festival is a two-day family affair where up to 30 community groups — mostly churches — offer tamale samples and sell them pre-made by the dozen. Parishes keep all of the proceeds and use the funds for special projects.
St. Martin de Porres parishioners recently made tamales for their own parish festival, but will spend two to three days in the coming weeks cooking up more. They make pork and beef tamales to sell at the community tamale festival every year.
Other groups make red chili or green chili tamales. They often follow family recipes adding their own spices and other ingredients such as potatoes, olives, raisins or corn. Then they wrap it in a cornhusk or banana leaf.
“You’ll be surprised at some of the creativity,” said Jaime Martinez of Food City. He said it was hard for him to select a favorite last year.
Parishioners at St. Martin de Porres enjoy making tamales for the festival every year, but parish secretary Dorothy Contreras admitted the profit was not large last year.
She hopes the parish can make more money this year to pay for a recently installed modular trailer. The building will help the parish’s growing religious education program.
He encourages groups to get involved because it’s an easy way to make money. “Hispanic communities love to make tamales this time of year,” Martinez said.
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