A yellow door in East Austin leads into the minuscule space of Comadre Panadería. A glimpse through the Dutch door on the right shows staff in the kitchen sliding pastry trays into tall racks. To the left is the small glass case that displays the day’s pan dulce. There might be crumbly, powdered sugar–dusted polvorones (what some call Mexican wedding cookies), made with pecans and mesquite flour; tacos de piña, rectangular puff pastries with pineapple jam; mole croissants; or candy corn conchas. The spongy pastries—a fall specialty—convert even the most stalwart candy corn hater. I watched it happen as a friend and I were eating them off the hood of his car: one moment, he was spouting hateful words; the next, he didn’t want to share.
Comadre Panadería is a shrine to the possibility of Mexican pastries and the imagination of 36-year-old baker Mariela Camacho. The San Antonio native experiments with tradition, and her shop sells products from other companies that do the same, such as café de olla from Houston-based coffee roaster Amanecer and chocolates from Austin’s Hijita chocolatería. Similarly, the customer base is a mix of new wave and old school: elderly neighborhood folks; Chicano emo and punk kids; families with young children. At Comadre Panadería, kinship is in the air as much as flour.
Such familiarity is in the word “comadre,” which literally means “godmother” in Spanish but is better translated in daily usage as a dear female friend. Or, as Camacho says, “your homegirl.” And the feeling of being with a beloved pal is what Camacho infuses into her foods, such as the sweet and tart berry-flavored concha with a bounce only the best conchas have.
Camacho was born in Los Angeles to a mother from Aguascalientes, Mexico, and a father from Zacatecas. At age five, she moved with her family to San Antonio, where her parents continue to live. Camacho describes her upbringing as a struggle. “We were the poor, ghetto kids,” she says. “That’s a part of the reason why I started my own business. So I could create financial stability for myself, even though I know small businesses don’t really ever offer that. I just felt that I could do that for myself.”
She moved to Austin in 2012 to work in restaurants, and it was there that she met her partner in life and business, Aaron Kimmel. Two years later, they moved to Seattle, which provided Camacho the distance she needed from home in her youth. In 2017 she held her first Comadre Panadería pop-up, and when she sold out, she realized she had something special. The owners of the bakery where she worked during the day allowed her to use the equipment at night. Many days she worked around the clock. She couldn’t help it—her parents instilled a strong work ethic in her and her siblings. “It was work, work, work,” Camacho says. “That’s what we did. That’s what I grew up with.”
When she and Kimmel saved enough money to rent space in a commissary kitchen, things improved. They took on wholesale accounts on top of operating the pop-up. “Then I was like, ‘I don’t want to stay here,’ ” she says, laughing. Seattle felt isolated and lonely. It was gray and wet. She was homesick for her family and the culture in Texas. “I missed speaking Spanish every day,” she says.
In late 2019, after five years in Seattle, Camacho returned to San Antonio with Kimmel. He worked as a bartender, and she worked in bakeries and continued her pop-ups by cooking in her home kitchen. The sweet life was coming her way. Then the COVID pandemic struck.
While food businesses faltered and even closed, Comadre Panadería flourished, in part because of Camacho’s hustle. Another contributing factor was the baker’s sense of responsibility to make sure food was available to those who needed comfort. “I think my initial response to continuing to try and make food was honestly just from being scared of not having money,” she says. “I think that is so ingrained in us.” The trauma from growing up poor is a critical motivator for many young Hispanics, especially the children of immigrants. But the ideal of community is also rooted in the culture. “I just wanted people to know that I’m around to be able to deliver,” Camacho says. “I think it’s also still important for people to know that there’s other people struggling.”
Camacho set up preorders for her pastries and buttery Sonoran white wheat tortillas. On weekends, she and Kimmel drove across San Antonio delivering the orders. But she noticed the demand for her baked goods was coming from farther north. “It’s really hard to keep a [panadería] business afloat [in San Antonio],” Camacho says. “There’s too much competition.” She also mentions her light skin. Other Hispanics didn’t believe she was Mexican American and balked at paying five bucks for a concha. However, the number of orders coming from Austin was so high, she and Kimmel had to make two trips there every week. They needed to follow the customer base and move to Austin. And so Camacho started Comadre Panadería anew. This time, though, she didn’t have to start from scratch. Her friends at Nixta Taqueria lent their space for pickups.
Setting up in Nixta’s side yard, Camacho saw the line grow quickly. Eventually it stretched around the block. It was the kind of line I’d only seen at barbecue joints. I usually grabbed some conchas or pink cake, the sprinkle-topped slices made from corn flour and featuring prickly pear buttercream. I tumbled into childhood with the first bite. It was hard to tell the pink cake wasn’t made of traditional commercial baking ingredients. Rather, most of Camacho’s pastries rely on amaranth flour, mesquite flour, or nixtamalized corn masa. Using Indigenous Texan and Mexican ingredients isn’t only a matter of heritage; it’s also a road to a healthier diet.
“They taste good, but I watched a lot of my family members, neighbors, and community get sick because we were poor,” Camacho says of more traditional baked goods. Access to healthy food was scarce, so Camacho learned about other grains and ingredients she could use. They were ingredients also used in ancient Mexican cooking, so it just felt right.
Her customers were excited by the new flavors, so it was time to grow again. The building behind Nixta was due for a remodel, so the landlord, who also owned Nixta’s building, offered the space to Camacho. After raising money with a GoFundMe campaign in 2023, Comadre Panadería opened its brick-and-mortar the same year.
At first, fulfilling orders and serving walk-in customers consumed the staff. But after Camacho settled in and received a James Beard Award nomination in 2023, I assumed the customer demand would even out a bit. That wasn’t the case. Sometimes I waited in line behind only two or three customers, but most of the time I was much farther away from the front of the line.
“Nothing makes sense,” Camacho says, bewildered. Such unreliable sales numbers have made business difficult. Camacho would take weeks’ worth of data and scale down. Then the bakery would sell out in three hours. Sometimes she and her team prepared too many pastries, creating waste she was uncomfortable with. Or folks who read about Comadre Panadería would arrive late to find that the pastries they wanted were gone. “Look, brother, this is a bakery,” Camacho would think. “We sell out of things.”
But she isn’t about to give up. She’s committed to working with high-quality indigenous ingredients at the fastest pace she can to make the best pastries she can—line or no line.
