The couple, now in their early 40s, live next door to Marina's parents in Pirtleville, a small community just west of Douglas, where they are raising three children. That's where they developed the Dicho recipe, testing it on anyone who dropped by. "My Mom and Dad tried them," says Marina, "and friends came over and gave us feedback."
Marina, whose associate of arts degree comes from nearby Cochise College, worked in a local photography studio for many years, restoring and retouching old pictures. Today she juggles Dicho office chores -- orders, accounts, bills, paperwork, and payroll of some 14 part- and full-time employees -- while Raul oversees the factory operations, calibrating ingredients, machinery, production, packing and shipping. The couple have lived up to one of their first dichos: Cada quien construye su propio destino. (Everyone creates his own destiny.)
For the first burst of production, the Montanos have selected 100 dichos suggested by friends, relatives, restaurant customers, from books of Mexican folklore, and, increasingly, sayings that have been e-mailed to them by strangers. Marina, who maintains a waiting list for the next round of sayings, has her mother check the Spanish and its translation into English.
What strikes a visitor most on entering the 2,500-square-foot building that houses the Dicho operation is the Rube Goldberg machinery that manufactures each Dicho: gears, levers, pumps, pipes, metal bars and other apparatus all functioning in sync.
The process starts with ingredients blended together in an oversized Hobart mixer more than 4 feet tall. The batter then goes to machines where it's mechanically ladled into small cupcake-wide molds one at a time. Forty-eight molds are evenly spaced along the outer perimeter of a huge metal disc, much as a pearl necklace laid flat on a massive circular device.
Creating the shells
THE DISC moves slowly into the oven to bake each shell. When the molds emerge on the other end of the machine, each shell is lifted out of its mold and, as it's crimped in half, an arm simultaneously inserts an individual bilingual dicho.
It's wonderfully confusing to scrutinize and entirely mesmerizing to watch, reminiscent of the assembly line that produced chocolate bonbons in a famous "I Love Lucy" episode.
Raul Montano traveled twice to Boston to work with the machine's designer. On his second trip, he brought along his technically minded father-in-law to inspect and approve the machinery. "It's like a car," Montano says. "It'll last you forever if you maintain it."
