Susanna McManus taught Spanish at Occidental College in 1997 when the family business called.
She grew up helping out at Sierito Lind and sometimes fell asleep in the booths of small restaurants, with her mother, Anna Natalia Guerrero Robertson and founder Aurora Guerrero preparing for another day at Orvera Street Classic.
McManus initially accepted the warning from Sierito Lind that education was a way to move forward, and that he had not made a career.
She landed in Occidental after completing her master’s degree in medieval Spanish from UCLA. There, generations of students enjoyed the class for humor as much as the works of great Latin American literature such as Borgis, Garcia Marquez and Fuentes.
However, when her mother retired and Sierito Lind’s future seemed suspicious, McManus and her sisters took over.
“She understood heritage – we all did, but she was able to preserve it,” said her nie, Jackie Goodman. “She has always been a family leader and fearless thing. I grew up with an aunt, the aunt you were supposed to emulate.”
McManus passed away on June 25th of cardiac arrest in Pasadena. She was 82 years old.
The lively McManus has become the public face with Sierito Lind’s co-manager, even as he continues his lecture at Occidental. Blessed with a palate that can even catch even the slightest tweak, she confirmed that the restaurant’s signature meal – beef tachitos in a small paper boat or dish, two to order, steamed and piquitous avocado sauce. She brought restaurants to the 21st century by participating in food festivals and panels that introduced Sierito Lind to a new generation of eaters.
MacManus loved to say hello to customers as he stood in a line that regularly stretched out onto the sidewalks of Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. Tourists took selfies. The regulars hugged her. People treated their grandchildren to Sierito Lind’s lunch, as their grandparents once did for them. The newcomers were usually instantly praised among Anthony Bourdain. On a 2017 episode of his CNN show “Parts Unknown,” Bourdain declared that he “already loves the sauce” in Taquito’s first bite.
“She felt it was a very iconic LA institution,” said Viviana McManus, Susanna’s daughter and chairman of Occidental’s Critical Theory and Social Justice Division. “It’s not part of our family tapestry, it’s the tapestry of LA and the country.”
In 2020, Susanna McManus told La Tacos that Sierito Lind was “a symbol of the contributions of immigrants to this vibrant city.”
“It’s the magic of simplicity,” she said. “There’s nothing artificial. There’s no preservatives. Even corn is non-GMO. It’s just simple, fresh, and produced every day.”
Beef tachitos in avocado sauce with Sierritrindo from Orvera Street.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
McManus was born and raised in Lincoln Heights and grew up on a street filled with relatives, family friends, mostly women from Zacatecas. Her grandmother let them work in her business. Her business included a warehouse where Tachitos was prepared and Las Anitas, a sit-in restaurant that gets in the way from Sierito Lind. Both remain family.
“We were always reminded of as children. “No, we didn’t just pull our own bootstrap,” said Viviana, recalling her mother and siblings asking them to wrap the gifts of immigrant children every year at Christmas. “These women were their support systems that enabled our family to succeed. They all struggled. My mother remembered that. So she taught us that you should always give back.
McManus met 51-year-old Carlos McManus shortly after immigrating from Mexico to the United States in the 1970s.
“She quickly knocked me out of my clouds and said, ‘Well, if you want it, you’ll have to continue education,'” he said. They said as Los Angeles City College was driving, “She slowed down and said, ‘That’s your next school.’ ”
In Occidental, where he worked for 34 years before retiring in 2011, Spanish professor Salvador Perez described McManus as the “anchor” of the department. She especially loved teaching Spanish classes tailored to native speakers, and she seeded her lessons with stories of the Chicano movement she witnessed in real time.
“Her love was really food and storytelling, but there was a real intelligent person behind the love,” Perez said. “Susanna instilled the values of tradition and heritage in everyone she knew.”
McManus helped as much as he could, even before she and her sisters took over for their mother. One year she noticed that street nightclubs from Sierito Lind were always busy on weekends. She volunteered, beckoning the crowd for late-night snacks, bringing more money in a few hours than the rest of the day’s acquisition.
“She felt a great responsibility for her family, but she felt the whole city and what it meant to everyone,” said her son, Carlos Eduardo McManus.
In her spare time, McManus loved traveling with her family and raising money for Sacred Heart High School in Lincoln Heights, an all-girls academy she attended. Though he was a proud torch bearer of what his mother and grandmother created, McManus did not allow tradition to shave Sierito Lind, as many of his contemporaries in Mex, California did too much.
She was “more hip to new restaurants and cafes than we did,” Viviana said. I always checked out the town’s trends to see if it suited my family food stalls.
Carlos Eduardo remembers laughing when his mother introduced Soiriso to appeal to vegetarians. It is still available in Sierrito Lind’s burritos. When Viviana graduated from graduate school in San Diego, California, her parents took her to a local Mexican restaurant and tried out Carne Asada Fries for the first time.
“She said, ‘What is this hateful slash delicate thing?”,” Viviana said. “And she put it on the menu.”
McManus was survived by her husband, Carlos McManus. children, Carlos Eduardo McManus and Viviana McManus. One grandson. sisters Gloria Calderon Goodman and Mariana Robertson;
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