Handmade Tortillas

Tortillas were not always made by machines. They are still made by hand on some of these apparatuses one by one. It is amazing that tortilla machines took so long to permeate through Mexico, because according to Arnold Bauer in Hispanic American Historical Review: "Tortilla production fell to women and required five to six hours per day. Bauer concludes that the slow acceptance of mechanical grinding wheels in tortilla production is related to the low social status of native women and the desire of men to limit women’s independence.”

I have kept asking myself what did the displacement of a matriarchal hand-made process do to Mexicans. What did it mean for women in the 40's to reduce their backbreaking labor to almost an hour per day? Beyond that fact, what was the overall perception of being fed by a grinder-cutter-baking automated mother machine?