I really miss having the option to go into any crappy Alsups in West Texas and get tamales if I wanted them... I recall buying 10 homemade tamales at a clip from an old woman outside the grocery store in Hobbs too.
Good tamales are where you find 'em. Best I ever had came from a vendor in the Athens, TX city square. Black gentleman named Early Raymond, who defined his 7-day weeks as "three makin' days and three sellin' days, with Sundays for church".
He drove all over Henderson County looking for what he called "#1 corn husks".
Wonderful tamales...
And, if you can make friends with a Tex-Mex family where the women get together every holiday season and make literally hundreds of tamales, and come into a dozen-or-two for yourself, you can't go wrong.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm....hot tamales....cold Mexican beer.