Susanna MacManus was teaching Spanish at Occidental College in 1997 when the family business came calling.
She had grown up helping out at Cielito Lindo, sometimes falling asleep in the booths of the tiny restaurant while her mother, Ana Natalia Guerrero Robertson, and grandmother, founder Aurora Guerrero, prepped for another day at the Olvera Street classic.
MacManus initially embraced her mother’s admonition that education was the way to get ahead and didn’t make a career out of Cielito Lindo.
She earned a master’s degree in medieval Spanish at UCLA before landing at Occidental, where generations of students enjoyed her classes as much for her humor as for the works of Latin American literary greats such as Borges, García Márquez and Fuentes.
But when her mother retired and the future of Cielito Lindo seemed in doubt, MacManus and her sisters took over.
“She understood the legacy — we all did — but she was the one capable of preserving it,” said her niece, Jacquie Goodman. “She was always the leader of the family, the fearless one. I grew up with my aunt being the one you’re supposed to emulate.”
MacManus died June 25 of cardiac arrest in Pasadena. She was 82.
The vivacious MacManus became Cielito Lindo’s co-manager and public face even as she continued to lecture at Occidental. Blessed with a palate that could catch even the slightest tweak, she made sure that the restaurant’s hallmark meal — beef taquitos in a small paper boat or plate, two to an order and floating in steaming, piquant avocado sauce — always came out crunchy yet supple. She brought the restaurant into the 21st century by participating in food festivals and panels that introduced Cielito Lindo to a new generation of eaters.
MacManus liked to greet customers as they stood in lines that regularly stretched out to the sidewalk of Cesar E. Chavez Avenue. Tourists took selfies; regulars hugged her. People treated their grandchildren to a Cielito Lindo lunch the way their own grandparents once did for them. Newcomers usually offered immediate praise, among them Anthony Bourdain. In a 2017 episode of his CNN show “Parts Unknown,” Bourdain proclaimed that he was “loving the sauce already” within his first bite of a taquito.
“She felt it was such an iconic L.A. institution,” said Viviana MacManus, Susanna’s daughter and chair of Occidental’s Critical Theory and Social Justice department. “It wasn’t just part of the tapestry of our family, but the tapestry of L.A. and the nation.”
In 2020, Susanna MacManus told L.A. Taco that Cielito Lindo was “a symbol of immigrants’ contribution to this vibrant city.”
“It’s the magic of simplicity,” she said. “There’s nothing artificial. No preservatives. Even the corn is non-GMO. Just simple, fresh and produced daily.”
MacManus was born and raised in Lincoln Heights, on a street filled with relatives and family friends — mostly women — from Zacatecas. Her grandmother had brought them over to work at her businesses, which included a warehouse where the taquitos were prepped and Las Anitas, a sit-down restaurant across the way from Cielito Lindo. Both remain in the family.
“We were always reminded as children, ‘No, we weren’t just pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps,’” said Viviana, who remembered her mother asking her and her brother to wrap gifts for immigrant children every Christmas. “These women were their support system that made our family’s success possible. They all struggled. My mom remembered that. So she taught us you always have to give back — always, always, always.”
MacManus met her husband of 51 years, Carlos MacManus, soon after he migrated to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1970s with aspirations to make easy money.
“She brought me down from my cloud fast and said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to continue your education if you want that,’” he said. They were driving by Los Angeles City College when “she slowed down and said, ‘That’s your next school.’”
At Occidental, where she worked for 34 years before retiring in 2011, Spanish professor Salvador Perez described MacManus as the “anchor” of their department. She especially loved to teach Spanish classes tailored to native speakers, seeding her lessons with stories from the Chicano movement that she had witnessed in real time.
“Her love was really food and storytelling, but behind the love was a genuine intellectual person,” said Perez, who said that when his wife was pregnant with their first child, the food she craved above all was Cielito Lindo’s avocado sauce. “Susanna inculcated the value of tradition and heritage to everyone she knew.”
Even before she and her sisters took over for their mother, MacManus helped out whenever possible. One year, she noticed that a nightclub up the street from Cielito Lindo was always busy on weekends. She volunteered to stay open late and beckon the crowd for a late-night snack, bringing in more revenue in a few hours than they had earned the whole rest of the day.
“She felt a great responsibility to her family, but also to the city at large and what it meant to everyone,” said her son, Carlos Eduardo MacManus, an attorney.
In her spare time, MacManus liked to travel with family and raise funds for Sacred Heart High School in Lincoln Heights, the all-girls academy she attended. Though a proud torchbearer for what her mother and grandmother had created, MacManus didn’t allow tradition to weigh down Cielito Lindo, as did too many of its Cal-Mex contemporaries.
She “was more hip to new restaurants and cafes than we were,” Viviana said, always checking out trends around town to see if they might fit her family’s stall.
Carlos Eduardo remembers chuckling when his mother introduced soyrizo to appeal to vegetarians — it’s still available in Cielito Lindo’s burritos. When Viviana was finishing grad school at UC San Diego, her parents took her to a local Mexican restaurant, trying carne asada fries for the first time.
“She said, ‘What is this abomination-slash-delicious thing?’” Viviana said. “And she put it on the menu.”
MacManus is survived by her husband, Carlos MacManus; children Carlos Eduardo MacManus and Viviana MacManus; one grandchild; and sisters Gloria Calderon Goodman and Mariana Robertson.
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