Recipes & Reflections on Latino Food & Culture
After a week's worth of splendid weather in San Miguel de Allende and festivities with family and friends leading up to Easter Sunday, getting back to the classroom has been, frankly, difficult. I love my job as a teacher and always delight in seeing my students after a long break. But I'm also thinking of my trip over Spring Break, the recent memories like the sun warming my back. … [Read more...]
I have lived seven Novembers without him and somehow survived them in different ways. We knew that November 2005 could be the last with our son, Alex. He was about to deploy to a raging battleground in Iraq for the second time. Our hearts were heavy and so he asked that we celebrate Thanksgiving twice, once on the Thursday and again on Friday. So we did. We went around the table articulating our thanks for special things in our lives. When it came to Alex, he looked at us and thanked us for having been his parents and loving him as we did. Then he left, and we would never again be blessed with seeing this child, this man, whom we loved so much. We would never see him grow old, become a father, raise children and teach us things only our children can teach us. Our lives would change dramatically. … [Read more...]
As I gathered the ingredients for this post, I thought about a woman my family once knew in Laredo. Her name was Ana María. She was born in Nuevo Laredo and moved to the U.S. side of the border after her marriage to a Laredoan. Ana María was an eccentric woman who made it clear in subtle and not so subtle ways that she belonged to Nuevo Laredo's well-connected families. However, in Laredo, Ana María and her husband were as poor as church mice. That is, until the 1980's when gas drilling along the Rio Grande made overnight millionaires out of ordinary people like Ana María and her husband. … [Read more...]
Just the other night, I sat across from a poet and tried to figure him out. We talked about writing, both the craft and the urge to do it. For him, writing is a personal endeavor, his intention being primarily to get the words out of his head and onto paper. He is a writer who writes for himself. This strikes me as mysterious and I ponder the conversation while cooking a few days later. As I peel and chop vegetables, my mind wanders and I begin thinking about my friend, Valerie, who shared her tomato soup recipe with me recently. It occurs to me that sharing recipes and cooking for others is much like writing a poem for a lover or reading a story to a child, the common denominator a desire to impart something earnest and special. … [Read more...]
My mother was born near the beginning of the Great Depression in the dusty cattle town of Sonora, Texas, to parents who never quite assimilated. My Mexican grandparents had crossed the border into the United States to escape the violence of the Mexican revolution but, for a variety of reasons, they never returned to their mother country. … [Read more...]
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