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There was a wearied pride in Fernando Ruiz’s voice as he led me on a tour of his family’s flour tortilla plant, La Gloria Foods in Boyle Heights.
We started in the back, where a massive sifter tossed flour inside a machine that spat out perfectly formed balls of dough. Two workers fed the orbs into a pneumatic press that smushed them into flat discs. Those raw tortillas slipped onto a seven-tiered conveyor belt that passed through an oven. The cooked results moved down the length of the factory, to men and women who stuffed them into bags decorated with La Gloria’s festive logo.
A family-run tortilla factory in Boyle Heights is in danger of closing amid an eminent domain dispute with the city over relocation fees for its tortilla machines.