By Tressa Versteeg
Photos by Dave Waddell
From our July 2024 issue
Behind the counter at Vazquez Mexican Takeout is a constant whirl of activity: pork sizzles, fresh tortillas get pressed, peppers are chopped. Three generations of the Vazquez family are back there, assembling orders of tacos, tamales, tostadas, and more. It all started a little more than 25 years ago, with Romana Vazquez cooking meals for her husband, Gosafat, while he worked the blueberry harvest, as migrant laborers have long done. Soon, her culinary reputation spread, and she was making meals for more pickers. “It just got bigger and bigger,” their daughter Juana says. Her parents, originally from the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, started selling meals out of their house and eventually moved into their current takeout location on Main Street, which is painted a festive, can’t-miss-it shade of lime green.
“I always remember when we first came here and we wanted to have authentic Mexican food and there wasn’t any,” Juana says. She was in third grade at the time, one of six kids in the family, arriving in Milbridge after years of following harvests elsewhere around the country. There were only a few other immigrant families around back then, Juana remembers. Those first years, she says, it was hard to relate to where they’d landed.
But her mom’s food helped forge connections. She remembers cookouts at the Wyman’s blueberry-harvest work camp in Deblois, where people gathered to eat and play football. Eating, she realized, could bring people together. “That, to me, is really, really special,” she says. And these days, seasonal rakers still come by for dinner at the takeout, as do crowds of residents and tourists. Over the last two decades, the local immigrant community has grown, and Vazquez family members have started other businesses around town, like Roberto’s Auto Shop, Paredes Painting, and Sugar & Crumbs Bakery. At the takeout, Romana’s teenage grandkids now pitch in too.
“It seemed like we always had to support one another to make it work,” says Juana, who in addition to still helping out in the kitchen is also the executive director of Mano en Mano, a nonprofit organization that supports immigrant and farmworker families, helping connect them with employment opportunities, education, medical care, housing, and other services. In a sense, she says, that work feels like an extension of what her parents started — of “bringing the community to a shared spot for food.”
Vazquez Mexican Takeout is open seasonally, Monday through Friday, for lunch and dinner. 38 Main St., Milbridge. 207-546-2219.
