A food anthropologist looks back at a middle school program that helped her students celebrate the wide range of tamales across the Latinx food diaspora. As school leaders are deciding, how, when, or if to re-open, programs like these are on hold for now, but hopefully not forever.
by Keitlyn Alcántara
July 21, 2020
t first glance, a tamal may fool you with its innocence. The simple cornmeal masa, grains united by steam until they sit as one, firm within the leafed wrap. Yet its wisdom, its capacity to feed and nurture, is thousands of years old. A simple portable and filling comfort food, tamales originated in Mesoamerica, and were adapted in cultures throughout the Americas. And now, in Nashville, the tamal is my accomplice, a trojan horse that has allowed me to breach the formidable emotional barricades ingrained in the average middle schooler.
In the fall of 2019, I entered my third year of Sazón Nashville, a series of cooking workshops I had slowly been cobbling together, propelled by a feeling I didn’t quite understand yet. Teaming up with an after school program hosted by Conexión Américas and the Nashville After Zone Alliance (NAZA), once every few weeks I would join these groups of Latinx middle schoolers to chop up delicious ingredients, filling the drab classrooms or cafeterias with a bright and pungent palette: the juicy gold of ripe mango, the sharp emerald nip of fresh cut cilantro.
I started these workshops when I was a graduate student in anthropology, studying the ancient worlds and foodways of Central Mexico – my country of birth. Nose deep in well-worn library books (F1219 my aisle of preference), I was worlds away from the country I loved, struggling to remember why I had done this to myself. During semesters spent at a predominantly white, elite private institution, my spirit was reduced to citations on a page, caricatures of what drove my heart. I spent my summers escaping back to Mexico, relishing the chaotic Saturday morning walk to the street market to fill my cloth bag with pungent yellow guayabas, big reams of crisp greens, damp earth still clinging to their stalks. Even walking through Walmart, salsa and bachata rhythms fill the dairy aisle, and my satisfied smile finds company in the millions of babies and toddlers everywhere. In Mexico, I was sister, daughter, prima, salsa dancer, la antropóloga. In Nashville, my shrunken world was a sallow hipster monochrome of meals eaten alone in front of a computer, Red Bull-flavored sighs escaping my lips as I try to get through yet another arduous reading, or write a final paper that no one will read. I felt invisible. I felt collapsed. Instead of “hello,” one friend would greet me with, “You look tired,” which I repeatedly explain does not, in fact, assuage the fact that I am mentally, emotionally, and physically depleted.
Yet when we cooked, the peeling grey walls and dingy linoleum of that middle school cafeteria impossibly brightened.
At three different middle schools along Nolensville Pike, students got to learn cooking techniques and share their own food histories. Photos by Keitlyn Alcántara and Conexión Américas volunteers.
Energy and excitement bubbled up past my end-of-day exhaustion, as I bustled between cooking teams, each arranged around a plastic cutting board. As we chopped ingredients for a mango salsa, I felt a joyful thrill seeing students’ deeply guarded personalities begin to peek out. Silent, other than the swish of the knife, one polo-uniformed student with a mohawk fade minced cilantro with skills on par with the best trained chefs. From beneath the emo shadows of a black-hooded sweatshirt, another casually demonstrated to his partner how to dice whisper thin onions. My arcane archaeological knowledge found new life, as I explained the proud history of maize, food of the Mesoamerican gods. We joked and told stories while they worked, finding a familiarity in the shared tasks, and a confidence I had seen in Mexican family kitchens — everyone with a task, everyone with a place. Sazón was a program I had designed for the students, but it ultimately bloomed into exactly what I needed, too. Sazón became a space of finding myself, of existing exactly as I was; a healing that embraced many of those who became a part of it.
My ability to shrink myself into a palatable unit of convenient existence was a skill that had slowly accumulated throughout my life. But in graduate school, I found academic professionalism and had turned it into a full-time job. As part of the ebb and flow of the global Latinx diaspora, the boxes used to corral us shift with time (Check one: Spanish, Hispanic, Latino, Latinx), despite experiences that have always been an elusively diverse historical smattering of Indigenous, European, Black, Asian, Middle Eastern, mestizo and criollo storylines.
A student carefully spreads the masa, preparing the surface for their tamal filling. Photo by Keitlyn Alcántara.
Among those diverse stories, there is mine. My mother came from a poor, white missionary family with roots in the Midwest. My grandfather was a fighter pilot, who moved his family of nine to 1960s Panama to proselytize. Growing up bilingual, my mom left home at 16 to travel the world on mission trips until she met my father through a church group in Mexico. My father grew up in Puebla, Mexico, selling bread on the colonial-tiled streets as a child. In a one-room home, one wall was the bread oven, and the remaining space housed his mother and her five children. His curious mind earned him scholarships and a path toward the world of academia (and Marxism).
Together, they formed a pseudo-religious hippie-esque pair, moving to Seattle for my dad’s education, joining 1970s protests, working for a season as farmworkers in a Wenatchee apple orchard, birthing my older sister at home with the help of a midwife. A decade later, they returned to Mexico, my father as a professor of Spanish Literature, my mother a photographer. Both maintained a passion for social justice, and as a kid, I played happily in the dirt of forgotten fringes of Mexico City as my parents sat with community members, brainstorming how to build grassroots change from extreme poverty.
I was born amidst the slow unraveling of their relationship. After my parents’ divorce when I was five, my mom and I moved back to the U.S., and I spent the ‘90s seasoning my childhood with the taste of perpetual new-kid-dom, ricocheting between bustling cities (Vancouver, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Seattle)and lesser known locales (Valparaiso, Ind., and Danville, Pa.). I would arrive mid school year to defend my existence, fighting against the woefully elemental understandings of what it meant to be me.
“No, I’m not from here…Yes, I speak Spanish…No, I don’t eat tacos every day.”
How could I possibly encompass everything that I contained in such clipped curiosity? My mom, tall, fair-skinned and blue-eyed, didn’t know and didn’t have the vocabulary or lived experience to help me navigate what it meant to have my petite, brownish body incessantly met with the question, “Where are you from?” A question whose answer was only accepted when reduced to a caricature of all that I was: “I’m from Mexico”. My dad, an “alien” in the United States, had long ago learned to detach and ignore — not an option for a kid whose heart yearned to fit in.
Once, returning from Christmas break in Mexico, my dad suggested I take my third grade classmates some Mexican candies; a cultural exchange or something. He picked his favorites from when he was a kid in 1940s Mexico. “Glorias,” a goat’s milk-based fudge-like candy wrapped in dark red cellophane, twisted shut on each end like a bow. Delicious, but after travelling eight hours squished in a suitcase, the texture and appearance were suspiciously poop-like. I watched my classmates squeal in disgust, the trash can bursting with unopened cellophane bows. After this failed offering, I stopped speaking Spanish, stopped offering pieces of myself to people who would never get it.
Nearly two decades after those rejected cellophane offerings, I would once again take a chance at sharing my full self, finding an unexpected refuge in the lush green bluegrass and hot chicken red of Nashville, Tennessee. Walking through the sticky blanket of August air and the towering magnolia trees of Vanderbilt’s campus, I searched for any vestige of familiarity. A new kid yet again, I had moved to Nashville to start graduate school in the fall of 2013, my first time living in the unfamiliar South. On a bulletin board layered four deep in ragged pin pricked posters, a tagline caught my eye: “Spanish-speaking volunteers needed.” This poster led me just three short miles southeast, to a middle school on Nolensville Road, a corridor lined with a hodgepodge of businesses, signs brightly painted in the colors and prose of the Latinx diaspora.
I first joined the NAZA and Conexión Americas program because I missed the rebellious banter of Spanglish, but as I helped the students with their homework, I was quickly drawn in by the mischievous familiarity of chile and mango candies students snuck surreptitiously out of backpacks, the jumble of beautifully chaotic, vibrant personalities, the mix of students who traced their roots to Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Peru, each with their own origin story. We were united by the cafeteria scent of bleach and over-steamed vegetables, the aroma of after school programming — still the same as I remembered 20 years later. But amidst my rapture at having found this community, I would also experience a flashback of shame.
Following homework time, the students rotated through “enrichment activities,” like science experiments with Mr. Bond the Science Guy, or film critique with the Belcourt, a local independent movie theater. Once a month, the enrichment activity was a workshop on nutrition, led by a tall blonde woman, whose southern drawl held no space for Spanish. Thinly cloaked in good intentions, she lectured about how to make “healthy pizzas” out of a triscuit and cucumber, or “yogurt parfaits” with fresh $5-a-pint-strawberries. The students sat glassy-eyed, the theme song of “La Rosa de Guadalupe” drifting up from under someone’s desk as they caught up on the telenovelas they’d missed during the school day. The thing is, they weren’t bored. What I saw, I recognized from my own childhood. They had given up.
Implicit in the speaker’s lecture about health was the idea that these poor public school kids ate junk out of ignorance, out of brownness, rather than culturally devoid school systems that counted tater tots as a vegetable, entrapping students in an over-processed food hell that spanned from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. I sat, simmering in polite silence, trying to identify where my anger should land. These students were not a charity project. Nor were they impotent and abandoned. Through casual conversations, I knew the wealth of nourishment they received at home. Thick steaming caldos floating rich with carrots, tomatoes, chiles, greens. Beans, nopal cactus, avocados. These foods would never show up on any USDA Food Pyramid. Yet these ingredients told the complex stories of Latinx history - the rise and fall of ancient civilizations, persistence through colonial traumas, the massive human ebb and flow across space and time.
Pettily productive, I decided to counter this whitewashed idea of health with culturally relevant cooking workshops. The first year of Sazón, I bumbled. Excited to share myself, the inaugural session was all about my favorite food: the elote, a boiled cob of luscious corn covered in mayonnaise, cheese, chili powder and lime, found on any downtown Mexican street corner. It was fun to share, but when I asked students to reflect on what they were learning, more than a few responded, “We are learning about Mexican food!” If I continued on alone, I would risk trivializing the wealth of varied Latinx experiences. Stepping back, I sought out friends from other parts of the diaspora, who could give examples of worlds I didn’t know. Two colleagues, fellow graduate students who identify as indigenous Maya women, taught the students how to make handmade corn tortillas. Three of the quietest students, recent immigrants whose first and dominant language was a Mayan language, isolating them from both their English and Spanish-speaking peers, beamed in recognition of the thick-bodied patties : “Las tortillas… los de GUATEMALA!” Through cooking, and hosting guest chefs, we were learning to listen and to be curious about the secret lives we each contained — the stories, the knowledge, the shifting and complex identities.
For students born in the U.S., traditional cooking tools, like the molcajete (grinding stone) were distantly familiar. We created new memories by grinding our own Salsa Molcajeteada. Photo by Keitlyn Alcántara.
The decision to end the year with a tamalazo (a tamale feast) was one based in intention. It was a way for everyone to say, “I know what MY tamales look like. But what about yours?” Before going ingredient shopping, we asked the students what they put in their tamales. “Chicharo!” Yelled one student. “Salsa verde!” exclaimed another. In an effort to not screw up the ingredient prep, I ended up in a deep internet rabbit hole of recipes and found that there are in fact 500-5,000 types of tamales in Mexico alone. Tamales have been adapted for thousands of years, spanning the length of the Americas. In Nicaragua, nacatamales are filled with potato, tomato and pork. In Peru, the choclo-based humita rules. More recently, the hot tamale has been adapted and spread through the Mississippi delta, the result of meals shared by African American and Latinx laborers, perhaps with roots in Native American practices.
In my hunt for guest chefs, I found kindred souls who were also fighting to exist in their complex and multifaceted brilliance. One volunteer, Bety, has been our resident tamal expert since 2017, when a mutual friend put us in contact. In her 16 years in Nashville, she’s been a full time mother and grassroots organizer. From her kitchen, she infuses her days with the colors, smells, and sounds of her home town of Oaxaca, Mexico, running an informal tamal business among friends. Each tamal is a remnant of the home she left behind - a home she hopes will somehow be absorbed by her Nashville-born son and daughter.
Students fill banana leaves and corn husks to the brim with masa and fillings during phase one of the tamalazo. Photos by Keitlyn Alcántara.
In preparation for the tamalazo, the two-day affair that concludes our cooking season, we spend day one filling a big metal pot to the brim with raw tamales, masa filled with cheese, chicken, rajas, loroco flower, red and green salsa, all rolled into ridged yellow corn husks or the sleek green of banana leaves.
It’s a Wednesday evening and Bety stands at the front of the classroom, the angled neckline of her white shirt embroidered with bright red and orange flowers that radiate sunshine under the neon-bulb gloom. Three long tables form a “U”. Bety stands at the center, while the students have self-sorted; boys on the left, girls on the right. Every one of them leans forward, propped on eager elbows to watch as she explains how to make a tamal. As her mouth rolls over words like “loroco” and “hoja de platano,” one of the boys turns to his friend worriedly. “There’s only four boys!” he says, alluding to the table opposite him, crammed with nine girls from fifth to eighth grade. “That means you’ll have to step up your tamal game!” I joke. They giggle and huddle to create a tactical plan.
Luckily, tamales are hard to mess up. Students begin timidly, but gain confidence, one making a “mega tamal” filled with every single ingredient, salsa dripping from a body barely contained by several banana leaves. At the end of day one of the tamalazo, Bety lugs the overflowing olla home. She returns the next afternoon, steaming tendrils escaping the lid to fill the room with the savory scent of fresh tamales.
Students eat their creations with pride. They hoard tamales to smuggle home to share with family and run to offer tamales to faculty, staff, or the odd parent early for pickup.
They sit, full in tamal-coma contentment.
Over the three years of Sazón, thirteen different guest chefs shared their recipes and their stories. They were fellow graduate students, friends from salsa dancing, activists and nonprofit employees, and came from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, and Peru. With each guest, came new ingredients and new stories that expanded the possibilities of what it could mean to be Latinx.
There are many ways in which we can propel ourselves to move beyond the lazy question of, “Where are you from?” For us, it was cooking. Immersing ourselves in smells, tastes, sounds, awoke crevices of our identities that had been dormant for years in strategies of survival.
What fantastic macrocosms are lost when we only brush the surface, when we are led to believe that our differences are anything short of magic.
Cooking created space to not only ask, but listen, watch, and relish the parts of each other that we bravely chose to reveal. To once again, dare to share our full selves, and to encourage others to do the same.
Lover of people-watching and story collecting, Dr. Keitlyn is now a professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, where she plans to begin a branch of Sazón, Bloomington. Drawn to the role food plays in community resistance and resilience through change, she uses archaeological and contemporary case studies to explore how foodways shape our bodies and social networks. You can follow both her academic and creative writing through www.keitlynalcantara.com
Wendy Alcántara comes from a family of readers and has a master's degree in literature, so it is not surprising that she knows that stories can change the world. She began interpreting at the age of 15 for immersion trips designed to bring people from different cultures and backgrounds together so they can establish personal connections by sharing stories (Facebook @AmextraSemillas). She now runs Advanced Academic Editing (Facebook @ESL.Edit), a translation service that has as its mission helping Spanish speaking academics - in the U.S. and abroad - have their voices heard in the predominantly white, English-speaking world of academia.
