Rebecca
Webb Carranza, 98;
Pioneered Creation, Manufacture of Tortilla
Chip
By
Valerie J. Nelson, Times Staff Writer
The
headline in Popular Mechanics magazine
saluted a manufacturing triumph in Los Angeles:
"Tortillas Meet the Machine
Age." It was 1950, and the
El Zarape Tortilla Factory, among the first
to automate the production of tortillas,
had used a tortilla-making machine for three
years. Corn and flour disks poured off the
conveyor belt more than 12 times faster
than they could be made by hand. At first
many came out "bent" or misshapen,
as company President Rebecca Webb Carranza
recalled decades later, and were thrown
away
For a family party in the late 1940s, Carranza
cut some of the discarded tortillas into
triangles and fried them. A hit with the
relatives, the chips soon sold for a dime
a bag at her Mexican delicatessen and factory
at the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and
Arlington Avenue in southwest Los Angeles.
By the 1960s, the snack the family packaged
as Tort Chips and delivered up and down
the coast had evolved into El Zarape's primary
business. Carranza, who was recognized by
the tortilla industry as one of the pioneers
of the commercial tortilla chip, died Jan.
19 from complications of old age at a hospice
in Phoenix, her family said. She was 98.
In 1994 and 1995 — the only years
the award was given — Carranza was
among the recipients of the Golden Tortilla,
created to honor about 20 industry innovators,
said Mario Orozco, an employee of Irving,
Texas-based Azteca Milling, who thought
up the celebration.
Carranza
was born Rebecca Webb on Nov. 29, 1907,
in Durango, Mexico. She was the only daughter
of Leslie Webb, an engineer from Utah who
worked for an American mining company in
Mexico, and his Mexican-born wife, Eufemia
Miranda. As a young girl, Rebecca and her
five brothers lived through periodic raids
by Mexican bandit and revolutionary Pancho
Villa and other thieves in northern Mexico.
"Pancho Villa did not like her father,
because he was American," said Mario
R. Carranza, the first of her two sons.
"She had pictures of her father on
his horse dashing away from danger."
When Rebecca was a pre-teenager, the mining
company moved the family to El Paso, Texas.
After her parents divorced, her mother brought
the family to Los Angeles in the 1920s.
She met her future husband, Mario Carranza,
on a blind date, and they married in 1931.
She made ties for a neckwear company, and
he worked in finance at O'Keefe & Merritt,
an appliance maker. On the advice of a friend
who ran a successful tortilla shop in East
Los Angeles, the Carranzas opened one in
the early 1940s and moved into an apartment
above the factory and shop.
Once
tortilla chips were on the menu, Eddie "Rochester"
Anderson, who played Jack Benny's valet
on radio and television, often stopped in
to buy them, said Victor Luis Carranza,
her other son. After Carranza and her husband
divorced in 1951, she signed the business
over to him. He soon opened a tortilla chip
factory in Long Beach but closed it in 1967,
partly because of competition from national
companies that had discovered the sales
potential of the salty chip. Rebecca Carranza
returned to East Los Angeles and worked
into her 80s, first as a meat wrapper at
grocery stores and then as a U.S. Census
taker. She had three more relatively brief
marriages, two to the same man, Augustine
Zuniga. Three years ago, she moved to Phoenix
to be near her two sons. In addition to
her sons, Carranza is survived by 12 grandchildren,
19 great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren.
Copyright
© 2006 Dimes
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