When Celeste Oliva came to the States at 16 years old, she left behind her favorite food: Guatemalan tortillas de harina, which refers to both the thick, chewy wheat tortilla and the dish it’s made with, smeared with mayo then topped with beans, pickled vegetables and meat. To Guatemalans like Oliva — who is from the coastal city of Livingston, and of Garifuna ancestry, an Afro-Indigenous people living in the Caribbean and Central America — tortillas de harina are a weekly tradition, made at home or enjoyed streetside. In Oakland, she found that most iterations of the dish used “compradas,” store-bought flour tortillas. Oliva, who has been making them since the age of eight, is uncompromising in her belief that Guatemalan-style flour tortillas must always be handmade.
Now 24, she hand-stretches them four nights a week at Guate Vibes, a food stand that she started in September, in between another job and attending college full-time. Located next to Castillo Appliances on International Boulevard, you can watch her stretch dough into tortillas about the size of a 16-inch Corolla rim. It is, perhaps, the Bay Area’s only spot offering the coastal Guatemalan cuisine, and it’s only available on the streets of deep east Oakland.
I’ve encountered Guatemalan tortillas de harina at “La Walgreens,” the street food corridor in Fruitvale, but those use compradas, and they’re made in the style of Guatemala’s central areas, where the dish is rolled, like an open-ended burrito. Oliva’s tortillas de harina are served open-faced, in the Departamento de Izabal tradition. Visitors, she said, come from as far as Stockton, Santa Cruz and Sacramento. Like me, they probably came across her stand on TikTok, where videos of her stretching tortillas have garnered hundreds of thousands of views…