rebecca webb carranza 1907-2006

( REBECCA WEBB CARRANZAThe businesswoman, in an undated photograph, was president of El Zarape Tortilla Factory in Los Angeles, one of the first firms to automate tortilla production.)

ms webb carranza pioneered the TORTILLA CHIP as well as automating the production of tortillas! and am i glad she did too. why? because a woman's work is NEVER done . don't know if you've ever made a tortilla by hand, but take it from me, it's NOT easy (nor is it easy to find the right kind of masa in connecticut)

Rebecca Webb Carranza, 98; Pioneered Creation, Manufacture of Tortilla Chip
By Valerie J. Nelson Times Staff Writer February 7, 2006
The headline in Popular Mechanics magazine saluted a manufacturing triumph in Los Angeles: "Tortillas Meet the Machine Age." It was 1950, and the El Zarape Tortilla Factory, among the first to automate the production of tortillas, had used a tortilla-making machine for three years. Corn and flour disks poured off the conveyor belt more than 12 times faster than they could be made by hand. At first many came out "bent" or misshapen, as company President Rebecca Webb Carranza recalled decades later, and were thrown away.For a family party in the late 1940s, Carranza cut some of the discarded tortillas into triangles and fried them. A hit with the relatives, the chips soon sold for a dime a bag at her Mexican delicatessen and factory at the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Arlington Avenue in southwest Los Angeles. By the 1960s, the snack the family packaged as Tort Chips and delivered up and down the coast had evolved into El Zarape's primary business.Carranza, who was recognized by the tortilla industry as one of the pioneers of the commercial tortilla chip, died Jan. 19 from complications of old age at a hospice in Phoenix, her family said. She was 98.In 1994 and 1995 — the only years the award was given — Carranza was among the recipients of the Golden Tortilla, created to honor about 20 industry innovators, said Mario Orozco, an employee of Irving, Texas-based Azteca Milling, who thought up the celebration. Carranza was born Rebecca Webb on Nov. 29, 1907, in Durango, Mexico. She was the only daughter of Leslie Webb, an engineer from Utah who worked for an American mining company in Mexico, and his Mexican-born wife, Eufemia Miranda. As a young girl, Rebecca and her five brothers lived through periodic raids by Mexican bandit and revolutionary Pancho Villa and other thieves in northern Mexico. "Pancho Villa did not like her father, because he was American," said Mario R. Carranza, the first of her two sons. "She had pictures of her father on his horse dashing away from danger."......