Caught Traveling: December 16th - Somerton Tamale Festival

Every year, in the small town of Somerton, they hold the big Tamale Festival. When we found out about it, we had to go. Laurie and I drove down with her friend Amy, and we were to meet Norma and her husband, Dale. Somerton is not a large town just a few miles south of Yuma. The biggest thing in the town is a campus of the University of Arizona. We drove around and found where the festival was and then searched for a decent place to park.

That done, we entered one end of the part of town that was closed off for the festival. The first thing we came across, was a children's dance class where the dancers were of varying ages and doing traditional Mexican dances if full historic costumes. It was a fun show to watch a bit.

Strolling down the walk, What we saw, was a lot of booths side by side, each one belonging to a different tamale kitchen. The people in them were pulling tamales out of warmers, and serving up to the customers. There was a couple of booths that gave information and directions. They took your money for a packet of coupons. Every tamale being sold cost two tickets and you could buy any number of tickets with a discount for a packet of 10 or twenty. This kept the sellers from having to deal with money.

There were more varieties of tamale than I could imagine. Veggie, pork, beef, lamb, chicken, seafood, and then, pineapple, strawberry and many others. There is a basic contest between the vendors for the best tamales. A cheat sheet told you which vendors had what to offer, and the nice people at the front booth told us who were the winners from the previous year.

I'm not a big tamale person. I don't care for the corn meal casing. That said, I had quite a few different tamales, and though it wasn't the best food adventure ever, I did enjoy them all.

We met our other friends and walked around and saw what there was to see. On the opposite end from where we came in, they had a stage with a local band playing some rocking country music.

On our way out, we watched the kids dancing again and then started the long drive home. I would love to do this sort of thing again.