Making pupusas is second nature to 71-year-old Reina Torres.
She’s been filling and flipping the Salvadoran staple for more than 50 years, a technique she learned from some of the best pupuseras she’s known: Her mom, her aunties, and above all, her abuelita.
Torres grew up in San Miguel, a city in southern El Salvador, with 11 siblings. She was raised by a single mother following her father’s death when she was a child.
From a very young age, Torres started helping her mom. At the age of 8, she was assisting at the family’s tortilla stand at a local market, working with her siblings to grind up to three sacks of corn.
“I didn’t have a childhood. My childhood was work and work,” said Torres in Spanish when asked about how she remembered her childhood.
“I’ve been working since I’ve been conscious.”
And she’s still going.
On a recent Friday afternoon, Torres tended to customers at her pupusa stand at 22nd and Mission streets. As she caught up with regulars, she grabbed a handful of masa with one hand and filled it with a mixture of cheese, beans and ground pork.
She then closed it into a little ball and flattened it with both hands before throwing it onto the hot comal, or griddle. Torres has made so many pupusas in her life that she can repeat this process without looking.
When one has made pupusas for more than half a century, and some 60 a day currently, she said, everything is muscle memory.
She breaks up the routine by gossiping with customers — “chismeando,” as she called it —over coffee.
An older Asian woman selling produce, walking by Torres’s stand, slowed down to watch Torres prepare a hot plate of pupusas with curtido — a typical Salvadoran relish — and salsa.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Pupusas,” Torres replied.
“Owwww, pupusas,” said the woman as she sat down.
The woman, who visits Torres regularly trying to sell her produce, often stays for a while, and they overcome the language divide with smiles.
Torres emigrated to the United States in 1988 looking for better opportunities, she said. El Salvador was still going through a civil war that left an estimated 75,000 people dead.
Thousands of Salvadorans fled during the war, many ending up right here in San Francisco, specifically in the Mission District. In fact, many of the murals throughout the Mission during this time were inspired by the fighting that Central Americans endured throughout the ’80s.
Torres was one of those immigrants who made the Mission District her home.
“I’ve always been here, and I’m still here,” she said.
Torres managed to bring six of her seven children, all of them boys born in El Salvador, to the United States, one by one. She did it all by herself, she said, by working two jobs at a time, for years. At some point, the whole family lived in an apartment until their children left one by one.
None of her children chose to go to college, Torres said, despite her willingness to work even more to help pay their way. Today, Torres lives alone in an apartment on Guerrero Street. She doesn’t see her children much, aside from one who drops her off and picks her up from the corner where she sells her pupusas.
One was deported in 2010 during the first Obama administration. Today, she’s added 18 grandkids and six great-grandkids to her family.
For a time, she supported her family by cleaning houses and babysitting. But six years ago, when those jobs dried up, she was forced to start selling pupusas instead.
“Customers just look for people who are under 50,” she said.
Initially, Torres set up shop Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, until the city confiscated her whole setup twice, at a cost she estimates at $2,000, for lack of a permit. She then switched to only Saturdays and Sundays, but as sales declined recently, she added Fridays back to her routine.
What does a pupusera do when she’s not making pupusas? Torres said she likes music (Antonio Aguilar and religious songs are her favorites,) videos on YouTube and TikTok, black coffee and cheese-and-bean pupusas. She also likes going to restaurants and parks with her sons and grandkids.
As for how long she plans to work, she said: Until her body no longer can. As of now, she feels good.
“What makes your pupusas good?” I asked, as I ordered two revueltas for $10.
“Everything’s fresh and simple.” And the recipe for the seasoning, she added, was handed down from her abuelita.