A Baker’s Home, Sweet Home

Sitting in the kitchen of his pastry shop, el panadero (the baker) of East Los Angeles is surrounded by the sweet smell of his success.

Around him are dozens of varieties of sweet breads and cookies, heavy aluminum trays filled with pin~ata-colored doughs, two massive tables for decorating pastries and wedding cakes, a broiler and two ovens, including a brick one--the bakery’s original--used for baking French rolls.

This is the hub and heart of La Mascota, where Ygnacio Salcedo, 90, and his wife, Vidala, who died at 72 three years ago, taught their children--Rosina, Edward, Ygnacio “Nacho” Jr. and Victor--the business of making breads and tamales and turning customers--here and across the country--into lifelong friends.

The floor is gritty from flour used by the night shift crew, overseen by Edward, 53, and Nacho, 45. At 5:30 a.m. they finish batches of Mexican sweets using their dad’s recipes for conchas, novias, alamares and picones--a variety of round, croissant and pretzel-shaped sweet breads.

Salcedo runs his hand through his thick, gray hair as he recalls his youth. He was born in 1907 in the village of Mascota in Jalisco, Mexico, where he and his father picked fruit and vegetables. He was 9 when his mother died, 11 when his father passed away. He and his sisters and brother got by on their own. At 14, Salcedo became a baker’s apprentice at 15 cents a day. The owner fed him; Salcedo slept in the shop’s hallway.

By 20, Salcedo was making his way with a small bakery of his own.

Though the Mexican Revolution had ended years earlier, fighting continued in towns and villages throughout the country. Salcedo witnessed the deaths of many men before impromptu firing squads; two men were shot in his bakery because they openly opposed one of the forces of the revolt.

“There were many killers. There were many small revolutions,” Salcedo says.

One afternoon Salcedo found himself before a firing squad. Men with a group opposing the government apprehended him despite his pleas that “I am not for anyone, not for the government, not against the government. I’m just a simple baker.”

“They were going to shoot me,” he says, when townspeople--the majority, women and children--saved his life. “I was in front of the squad and they let me go. The people said, ‘You can shoot whoever you want--the printer, the barber, the grocer, but you will not kill our baker.’ ”

The panadero was spared.

He stayed with the vocation that a third generation of Salcedos are now a part of. Several of his 10 grandchildren are in the business.

“Being a baker all my life has been a calling for me”--a calling he says that has kept the patriarch connected to his community and his culture and has endeared him to customers who grew up in his East Los Angeles neighborhood.

Salcedo immigrated to the United States in 1928--a year after he was released by the firing squad. In 1938, he married Vidala (called Lala), who was from Wilcox, Ariz.

Before starting his bakery on Whittier Boulevard, he worked odd jobs, including washing dishes at the Ambassador Hotel where he was turned down as a busboy and waiter because he was Mexican. Then one day he helped the cook by baking French rolls. He became the cook’s helper.

But that wasn’t enough. Salcedo recalls his father’s advice:

“My father, before he died, told me, ‘You can sell chiles, onions, tomatoes, whatever you want, but don’t work for anyone else.’ ”

So in 1952, he opened La Mascota. Rosina and Edward were youngsters; Nacho, an infant. Ygnacio and Lala worked 18-hour days, leaving the bakery only to pick up the kids from school. The children did their homework in the bakery and later, helped with the baking and cleaning.

“They never had a childhood,” Salcedo says, turning to his children gathered around him.

“Yes we did, Papa,” says Rosina, who works the counter. “We were with you and Mama. That was the best childhood. This has always been our home away from home.”

Ditto for customers. For many who have moved away, Mascota is the last stop on the way to the airport when they have been here for a visit. They take home red and green chile tamales filled with pork, cheese and chicken.

La Mascota is a magnet that keeps them coming back not only for the tamales (on Christmas Eve, 1,800 dozen were cooked) but for the memories the bakery rekindles: Don~a Lala sneaking a cookie to a child while his mother wasn’t looking; customers gladly waiting while Salcedo rushed off to buy some sugar to finish a batch of cookies.

During the Vietnam War the Salcedos filled coffee cans donated by customers with Mexican candy, cookies and Kool-Aid and sent them to soldiers from East L.A. After the war, a man limped into the bakery and handed Don~a Lala his can. It was the only time Rosina recalls seeing her mother sob. “Mama went to the back after he left and she just let go.”

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Salcedo, knowing the life of an orphan, has reunited countless families, sending for wives and children in Mexico.

The Salcedos have supplied down payments on homes, purchased used cars for those without and outfitted numerous children’s baseball teams. Neighborhood kids have worked their way through high school and college with jobs at the bakery. Employees learning the trade from Salcedo have gone on to open their own bakeries with his support and guidance.

And throughout its 45 years in business, La Mascota has provided wares for shelters and orphanages operated by missionaries here and across the border.

Richard Arias, now a great-grandfather, recalls his mother sending him with a dollar to buy 30 pieces of bread and cookies when he was a teenager. Today, his grandchildren send him to La Mascota--a 40-minute round trip--from his home in Hacienda Heights.

“They don’t take any substitutes,” Arias says.

Virginia Romo, 38, a special agent with the local office of the Department of the Treasury, was reared in Boyle Heights and spent Sundays at her uncle’s barber shop, two blocks from La Mascota. Today she lives in El Sereno and regularly drops in for her usual order of sweetbread and one dozen red and half a dozen green tamales.

“Mr. Salcedo has kept our culture alive. He has introduced it to others. That makes me very proud. He is an icon in the community.”

When told about this adoration, Salcedo is filled with humility.

Semiretired now, he says all he has ever aspired to do with his life is “teach my children family values and to always maintain our traditions, our culture.”

“And, of course, to work hard and be honest with the customers. That is the life of a simple baker.”