Peninsula Part 4

The next day, we visited the Anthropology museum, the Ciudadela park, and a taqueria where a small group of steampunk/Rastafarian young men sold their DIY zines with essays on contemporary art house cinema, furry fandom poetry and alternative communal living advice. Visiting the Anthropology museum can feel like putting together a puzzle of 5000 pieces that is missing a few crucial segments. The museum is enormous and the amount of information to digest is even bigger.

The introductory poster at the museum writes that Mexico had seven major civilizations: The Olmec, Teotihuacan, the Toltec, the Aztec, Zapotec, Mixtec, and the Maya. The Olmec settled in Mexico in 1600 BCE and today, Mexico is home to 68 Indigenous peoples, each speaking their own native language and together accounting for 364 variants. All of these populations have unique cultural expressions, dances, culinary practices and rituals. All of them share the tragic narrative of colonization, governmental neglect and vanishing traditions. I’ve visited this museum several times in the past, but on this visit I found myself fascinated by chanting that I recognized but couldn’t properly identify. It took me a few minutes to locate the source of the singing, a recording played in a hidden corner of the second floor: Maria Sabina (a Mazatec poet and healer) chanting prayers through a worn out speaker in front of large Wixárika tapestries. Her singing was monotonous and mumbled, but the effect was hypnotizing and comforting. After five minutes, the speaker slowly failed as if the batteries were running out. Maria Sabina’s singing broke into tiny electronic shards. The experience reminded me of Doña Trini, an 80 year old woman we visited after our two day workshop at Ya’ache. 

Doña Trini has been cooking Longaniza Valladolid for forty years. One bite of Doña Trini’s longaniza forces you to sit down and focus on the kaleidoscope of flavors swirling through your taste buds: habanero, za'atar, cloves, lime, pork and achiote. The depth and complexity of her smoked sausages tell a story of migration, diasporas and resilience. She worked most of her life in a factory but after her husband’s sudden death, she searched for an extra source of income to support herself, her sister and her three sons. She learned how to prepare and smoke sausages from a Lebanese neighbor that played the organ at a cinema and never fully learned Spanish. Her neighbor also introduced her to the church of Jehova’s witness. Doña Trini learned her sausage recipe and new religion through hand signals. Her family disapproved of her new faith but found a stable source of income in longaniza sales.

Doña Trini has been cooking her sausages from home her entire life. The front room of her house is her bedroom and point of sale. The second room is a living room and packaging area. A third room functions as storage. The back patio has two brick smokers next to a large preparation table, a section for wood storage, an old washer and dryer and a bathroom shared with her neighbor. She sleeps in a hammock and wears Terminator style sunglasses all day. The back wall of her bedroom has an old cabinet filled with life mementos, porcelain animals and a fading sepia tone photograph of her deceased husband. “He was a soldier and a great dancer, he had beautiful hair. Sometimes I dream of him, I ask him questions but he never speaks to me. The day I die, I will finally be able to have a conversation with him again”. While Doña Trini tells me her life story, her skinny legs shake. She asks me for a blanket and to help her get up from her hammock. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling that she uses to rise. “I feel energized any time somebody talks to me”. We talked for half an hour. When we hugged goodbye she started whispering in my ear. At first, I thought she was confiding in me her longaniza recipe, I quickly realized she was praying. My eyes filled with tears, my head resting on her withering body. Her embrace extended beyond her arms. I felt energized and protected by an immeasurable strength.

After the Anthropology museum I took my friends to Ciudadela park, where every Saturday a large community of dancers, mostly elderly, dress up in their best attires and rehearse Tango, Mambo, Danzón and Cumbia. My friends and I shared a garrafa ice cream and watched dancers weave a musical web with their graceful movements. A couple approached us offering a lesson and we accepted, with a belly full of guanábana and guayaba ice cream. After an hour of dancing, we wandered through market alleys looking for souvenirs. Surrounded by clay figurines, leather goods and fresh fruits, I recalled the past two weeks of traveling. My introspective tendencies started listing the effects of my search for identity through the culinary traditions of what I had overly romanticized as ancestral cooks. I was fixated on finding grand statements and revealing secrets. Instead, I found the routine of others and their mundane tasks. But in that routine, I re-discovered the vastness of meaning that every person is capable of creating, including myself.

I learned that traditional recipes have rough outlines but not fixed rules; a traditional recipe doesn’t automatically transform a person into a traditional cook. An ancestral cook is simply a person willing to open their space and themselves to others. This willingness creates a space of transformation, creativity and mutual understanding. That is the magic in the simple recipe of human connection. This is what I witnessed in Doña Trini, Don Hector and Wilson: an unencumbered willingness to share their lives and skills with others. This candid temperament and hospitality is not exclusively Mexican, but I consistently find it in Mexico, the land where I am from. I wish I could clearly trace the passing of recipes through generations of immigrants. I’d like to understand the creative transformation of a recipe from the  community that creates it, to a written record and through the interpretation of a young cook. For now, thinking of Wilson shrouded in smoke, of Doña Trini mixing spices and Don Hector digging in red soil, I am certain that the best meal is the one cooked for each other. I didn’t arrive at an absolute proclamation of identity, but I did connect with communal experiences and was able to take photographs that bear witness to the earnest efforts of small communities, dedicated guardians of smoke and advocates of the soil. I understood that what grows together in a farm, pairs well on a plate. I understood that to know and to be known is one of the highest aspirations and privileges of human nature.