Maria Luna arrived in Dallas in June 1923, a 23-year-old widow with two children from San Luis Potosí who spoke no English, and bought a used corn grinder. In 1924 she opened Luna's Tortilla Factory, selling tortillas to families in Little Mexico. She took out a building permit in 1938 for a factory at 1615 McKinney Avenue, which shared its block with close to twenty houses and became one of the last visible remnants of that neighborhood; the company stayed there for 69 years, until 2007. In June 2013 the business burned down at the 8500 block of Harry Hines Boulevard, all seven employees escaped, and the family said it would rebuild. In 2023 it was 99 years old and run by the founder's grandson.
Twenty-one years after Luna started, and about 300 yards away, José R. Guerra founded the Texas Tortillas Factory on 15 March 1945 at McKinney and Maple. Most tortillas in Dallas were made at home by Mexican-American families then. That company is Rudy's Tortillas, it is on this page, and it is the oldest surviving wholesale baking business in these Dallas listings. Two tortilla factories on one street, twenty-one years apart. One is still family owned and one is not.
The reason this matters is not sentiment. No other bakery page in this directory has a tortilla trade, and here it is a bakery trade: four of these thirty rows are tortilla, chip and masa manufacturers selling to restaurants and distributors, and two more sell into tortillerias and pupuserias specifically. If you run a Tex-Mex kitchen in this metro, the supplier that matters most to you is a tortilla plant, and none of the national bakery names on this page will quote you on it.
Luna's is not in the table, and that is deliberate. It is plainly still trading and the operator comments below buy from it, but no capture exists of a website the family controls, so there is nothing to write a listing from. It belongs in this article and not in that list, which is the rule this whole directory runs on.
