Introduction
El Salvador always felt like a movie to me. It required imagining, editing, and borrowing scenes from films and stories to connect with the country of my birth. The first months of my life took place in the buzzing capital city of San Salvador, but when I was three months old, my family and I became refugees fleeing a war. My roots grew into a distant tale as we found ourselves in Los Angeles, California. When it came to visualizing my homeland, I had to piece together the tape in my mind from whatever exposure to Salvadoran culture I could find.
When my dad shared stories about fighting in the war, I didn’t yet have many pictures of El Salvador, so Hollywood was my reference. Scenes from Platoon flooded my mind; watching that movie was my dad’s way of understanding the memories he had battled in his youth. Instead of young white American soldiers, my mind projected a youthful version of my dad: a skinny, wide-eyed teenager with dark hair that stuck up from his forehead. I imagined a look of fear on his face. Actors playing soldiers on a set in Vietnam helped me fill in the gaps of what life must have been like for my young father fighting in the jungle. But I learned that movies, however helpful, were not enough. They could never capture the essence of El Salvador—they just gave me fragments. They could not portray the good times, the sarcastic humor, or the endearing aspects of our culture.
When my mother shared her stories, cumbia music filled in the score, its exciting rhythm filled the soundtrack. I saw a light-haired little girl running fast through a Salvadoran marketplace in her school uniform. My mother’s stories conjured images of mischievous play, adventures, tree climbing, fruit feasts, and friendship—a reimagined
Little Rascals meets
The Sandlot, with a touch of
Pretty in Pink. There was a lightness in her tales, a curiosity, and a sense of playfulness that clashed with what my father told. Their experiences were polar opposites, yet they were both true.
My parents told these tales at the table, over frijoles licuados, crema, queso duro blando, and Salvi tortillas. There was hardly a time when eating family dinner didn’t involve recounting memories about El Salvador; I came to expect a side of story to be passed along with the tortillas. I realize now how crucial those moments were in my formation. As the food nourished my physical form, these stories nourished my soul—the truly hungry part of me, the part that wanted to understand the land I had left as an infant. The movie I constructed in my mind gradually faded, and food, family, and Salvi friends helped me put flesh and soil into El Salvador from afar.
Each evening’s menu told me what kind of stories we would hear at the dinner table. Pollo Guisado con Aceitunas (page 158) meant I might hear about my grandmother and how she learned to cook while working as a housekeeper for upper-middle-class Salvadorans in the 1960s. I listened intently as I curated each perfect spoonful of chicken, rice, and olives and chased them with bites of Salvadoran green salad—a platter of sliced radishes, cucumber spears, watercress stems, and fresh lettuce.
If, by some miracle, someone managed to forage the national flower of El Salvador, flor de izote, in Los Angeles, my mom would cook it for breakfast. She would sauté onions and tomatoes before adding the petals and scrambling in eggs. Over all the sizzling, she would say, “Cómole gusta la flor de izote a tu papá.” She served it with frijoles Salvadoreños, fresh tortillas, and aguacate. “Mmmm, que rico, ¡flor de izote! ¿Quién encontró la flor Tere?” my dad would ask.
It was during one of those food-and-story sessions that my dad said, “When you go to college, you can’t forget where you came from. I’m going to make sure of that.”
Afraid that I would forget mis raíces, my papito told me when I was seventeen that we would take our first trip back to the homeland. He didn’t know about the movie I had constructed in my mind as a child, nor did he fully comprehend the stories I had archived to piece together my identity. My Salvadoran roots were already as impossible for me to forget as my own name, but I knew this trip would encourage them to grow deeper.
This trip was a pilgrimage, a visit to the holy places and sites where my family had lost their innocence and joy and taken up the burden as survivors. I’d already been doing the work of remembering when my father urgently decided it was time to go back:
Trust in the Lord. Remember what He has done for you, Karlita. Remember what He has done for our family. Don’t forget what happened. Don’t forget who you are. Don’t forget our pain. Don’t forget the joy we fought for. I felt most Salvi when I was surrounded by family and food. I felt rich, eating dishes from our roots and listening to my parents talking about fincas (farms), arboles de mango (mango trees), and their many adventures in bachillerato (high school). Salvadoran food and flavors brought my life a sense of grounding and belonging.
When I was in elementary school, asking my mom about our traditional recipes became a habit. She often found my curiosity frustrating because I was looking for an easy answer to something that had taken her whole life to develop. As I got older, I tried different methods. I asked her to dictate her techniques so that I could write them down. She’d roll her eyes and say, “Ay, Karla.”
She defaulted to the tried-and-true custom of passing down recipes, techniques, and tips orally; at other times, she suggested hands-on practice.
“¿Mami, cómo sabes que le falta?” I asked.
“Ay, Karlita, solo sabes. Tu paladar te dice que es lo que falta,” she said. How did she know what was missing when she tasted a dish she was cooking? Her palate was her answer.
My pressing curiosity about Salvadoran cooking led me to the internet, where I was shocked to discover that—in this country where more than two million Salvadorans reside—Amazon listed only two Salvadoran cookbooks. One was in Spanish and published in El Salvador, while the second was in English and self-published. This severe lack of representation fueled me to take matters into my own hands. I decided to interview the Salvi women in my life and record their recipes because their stories were too precious not to document and share. And this documentation became the start of my life’s work.
Copyright © 2024 by Karla T. Vasquez. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
