Background Research for Multiplicities and Mutualities at the Table
When I was in New York during the first summer of our Art Practice journey, I went to a locally owned music shop in Spanish Harlem. Everything for sale in this store was music related – records, CDs, even cassette tapes, instruments, and a few books. The one exception was that someone had taken the time to handcraft magnets. The magnets were dollhouse miniature-sized plates of beans and rice, complete with a sunny side up egg and a tiny Puerto Rican flag (Figure 8). The beans and rice were the real, uncooked comestibles preserved in lacquer. The eggs were made of small white circles cut out of foam craft sheets with smaller yellow circles of the same material glued onto the center. Even to an outsider, the aura of these lovingly created intimisms revealed the importance of beans, rice, and egg on a plate, and made a statement about identity that their creator knew other people would recognize.
In New York City, the largest Latinx populations are Puerto Rican and Dominican.[1] In my corner of the country, the largest Latinx population is Mexican[2], so I associate beans and rice with Mexican food, but these magnets made me realize something obvious. Pretty much every Latinx culture has at its center beans and rice. Beyond that though, beans and rice dishes are found all over the world including Israel, Korea, New Orleans, India, and Ghana. Surely, I thought, this has been studied from a socio-cultural perspective.
I wanted to know what it means for beans and rice to be in relationship on a plate. I began to research, and to my surprise, while there are numerous cookbooks centered on beans and rice dishes, there is not as much scholarly work tracing their history. I did find one book, however, that has done exactly that, Rice and Beans: A Unique Dish in a Hundred Places. Borrowing from the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, authors Richard Wilk and Livia Barbosa explore how beans and rice “form a grammar” expressing both common histories and local specificities.[3] They explain, “Many cultures eat rice, and also eat beans. But it is something very different to eat rice and beans, a recognized dish in which the two ingredients are combined with other ingredients according to a culturally defined formula.”[4]
Interestingly, many countries think beans and rice are a unique emblem of national identity, but there is a reason this combination ends up on so many plates. In fact, “tracing the ancestry, distribution, and variation in rice and beans is a broad, straight avenue right into the heart of the history of the Atlantic world, from the trauma of conquest, to the tragedy of African slavery, and onward into the more recent saga of nation-building and neocolonialism.”[5]
In some ways, entering a culture through food can be problematic because it can be reductionist or surface-level. On the other hand, excavating the stories of how certain foods end up on our plate can help us to resurface forgotten, and often marginalized histories of exploitation and survival. Furthermore, cooking can be thought of as an art practice. It is an art practice that perhaps isn’t always recognized as such because it largely relates to the unpaid labor of women, but a highly creative practice that is central to our survival. When someone makes food for you, it is one of the most intimate art forms. A friend recently pointed out to me that food is an art that engages all five senses, so even with countless Instagram food photos, the full array of sensory qualities can only be experienced by the relatively small audience for which the work was intended. It is an art practice that often has more to do with hospitality and connection than fame and recognition but is perhaps as effective at transmitting cultural knowledge as a masterpiece in a museum.
My white grandmother, Lillie Mae, adopted my Mexican mother, Neta Beth, and raised her in the very small, very white town of Elk City, Oklahoma (Figure 9). My grandma lived in a tiny, but well-kept house with a painted white picket fence. It was the kind of place where if you went to the store you knew almost everyone you came across. Growing up I constantly heard well-meaning but somewhat awkward comments from different people. “Neta Beth was just the most beautiful baby…that olive skin and dark eyes, and so much dark hair.” She was like the town’s legendary, exotic brown baby.
My grandma was an incredible cook. She was raised on a farm, and in adulthood she and my grandpa continued to grow a much of their own food in their garden. She would can fruits and vegetables, and as a Dust Bowl survivor, she would never be so frivolous as to buy Tupperware but would store everything in left over jelly jars and butter tubs. One of her best dishes was her dessert cobbler, which she made of every fruit variety from her garden. I have no idea how she made that cobbler, and I can only assume there was more Crisco involved than I would care to know about, but no restaurant version has ever come close to tasting the same. She is gone now, and although I could have learned to cook from her, I didn’t because it was the 1980s and I subscribed to the oversimplified idea that women in the home didn’t lead very interesting lives. Recently, a friend’s mom brought her cobbler to a church potluck. I grabbed some, and when I took a bite it brought tears to my eyes because it almost tasted like my grandma’s and I realized that this was the closest I would ever be again to her recipe. I quickly got another serving of cobbler and plopped it down in front of my daughter, brushing the dinner plate she was still working on aside in the process, and said, “Here, eat this, and remember it! It’s the closest thing you’ll ever taste to your great-grandmother’s cobbler.”
My grandma passed away when I was in high school, but shortly before that my mom set out to find her biological family, which she did. To our surprise, most of this family lives nearby in Oklahoma City. I went from a small, four-person white family with almost no other surviving relatives to being part of an extensive Mexican family of around fifty people (Figure 10). So, I don’t have childhood memories of Mexican beans and rice, but I do have a lot of memories of being lovingly force-fed beans and rice in my teenage years by those in the older generation, some of whom have also now passed on. In particular, I remember a conversation with my great aunt, Margaret, upon arrival at her house one day:
Aunt Margaret: Are you hungry?
Me: No, thank you, we ate already.
Aunt Margaret: Ok, I’ll make you a taco.
I have two aunts named Carmen. It was collectively decided at some point that one would go by Tía Carmen, and one by Aunt Carmen. Aunt Carmen was the family historian. She kept the records and showed us all of the family photos when we met. Tía Carmen, though, is maybe a different type of historian. When we met, her way of orienting us into the family was showing us how to make some of her recipes and sharing a meal.
My relationship to beans and rice is not “traditional”, but it is characterized by tradition, and it is one narrative within the much broader Latinx story. Food is important in my family, as it is in most. Which foods and why are often related to the geo-socio-political contexts of our stories, but also the personal choices we make in relationship to those histories about what of that context to carry forward. I started thinking about other people who might have interesting relationships to beans and rice. One of my closest friends immediately came to mind. He cooks mostly food from his native Guatemala, but interestingly he didn’t learn to make any of it when he was growing up there. Food is his primary love language; writing in English is not. He was very willing to share his story, but not so enthused about typing it out, so he cooked, and I wrote. We ate. Then later, he edited. This is what we came up with together.
Chocolate Beans and Rice: A Recipe from Old and New Dreams
I came to the U.S.with only my brother. I was sixteen years old; he was fifteen. We left our mother, father, and six more brothers and sisters behind in Guatemala. That was twenty years ago, and we haven’t been able to go back home since.
In the U.S., I work in the restaurant business. I always wanted to cook when I was in Guatemala, but never really had the need or the opportunity. In my family it was sort of an unwritten rule that the men don’t cook, but every day after working with my dad on our farm, I would sit in the kitchen with my mom while she was cooking. When I came to the U.S. there was no one to cook for me so I had to learn. I didn’t speak English yet, so I got a job as a server’s assistant in a Mexican restaurant. I couldn’t afford to eat there, but I noticed that the customers were paying $3.99 just for a plate of beans and rice, so that was one of my first experiments. The first few tries did not come out right. I stirred the rice too much and it was almost like a dough, but I realized that I could use this technique to make a certain style of Guatemalan tamale, so all was not lost. Eventually though I figured out my own version of Guatemalan beans and rice – a recipe made partly from what now seems like a dream of my mom cooking back home, and partly from the reality of learning on my own. Since I came to the U.S., I’ve reached three out of four of my goals. I have worked my way up from server’s assistant, to server, and for the last five years, I’ve been a manager. I’m learning a lot about the restaurant business, but someday I want to have my own place and sell food made from my recipes.
I found family in the U.S…not the kind you are born into; the kind you make out of the circumstances life gives you. In this family there is a daughter who is ten years old, but I’ve known her since she was two. When she was little, I made her my black beans and rice. In Guatemala, we blend our black beans into more of a paste, but where we live in Oklahoma, whole pinto beans are more common. She had never had Guatemalan food before, so when she saw the beans she yelled, “chocolate beans!” because they looked like chocolate to her. I didn’t know if she would like them since they weren’t going to taste like chocolate, but to this day she asks me to make “chocolate beans” for her.
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For some additional context, my friend also has a professional relationship to beans and rice. He has probably served thousands of pounds of them over the last ten years at a local Mexican restaurant, a long-standing Oklahoma City favorite. The predominant workforce there, as in many restaurants in Oklahoma, is Hispanic. It used to be the case at this restaurant that server’s assistants (who are predominantly non-English speaking) wore one color shirt, and servers wore another so that customers knew who they could speak English to. Still, despite the popularity of Mexican food, there has been no shortage of hateful comments to the staff who do not speak English.
It reminds me of TUG Collective’s piece, Who Eats at Taco Bell?, which in part thought about some of the ironies of exploitation centered around assimilation and appropriation with respect to food.[6] It is true that a table can be another social space of domination – a space where we engage with other cultures on the most surface of levels. Or worse, a place where we enjoy the food of the people who serve us while “othering” them, exploiting their cheap labor, and simultaneously deriding them.
A table can also be a place of exchange. If we choose, it can be a place where we pre-enact a form of identity-making that isn’t held hostage by the “identitarian machine.”[7] We can discover connections to marginalized histories. We can remember or reveal those histories as an act of rebellion, where those histories are acknowledged but are also not determinative. A table can be a place to perform the nuance of identity. A table can be Glissant’s “cultural zone” in which we all meet up with the fragile knowledge of “over there” (he says we all come from “over there”) and we care for each other and nourish each other through the exchange of this knowledge.[8] A table can be a place where we pass on family traditions or where we create new family to help heal from the connections to relatives and culture that we have lost. Finally, a table can be a site of domestic servitude or a space of recognizing traditional women’s work as art created for our health and survival.
[1] Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán, “The Latino Population in New York City,” American Sociological Association, July 9, 2019, https://www.asanet.org/news-events/footnotes/jun-jul-aug-2019/features/latino-population-new-york-city.
[2] “The Changing Demographics of Oklahoma” (The Greater Oklahoma City Hispanic Chamber of Commerce), accessed March 30, 2021, https://chambermaster.blob.core.windows.net/userfiles/UserFiles/chambers/1498/CMS/Living-in-OKC-(1).pdf.
[3] Richard Wilk and Livia Barbosa, Rice and Beans: A Unique Dish in a Hundred Places (London | New York: Berg, 2012), 74.
[4] Ibid., 113.
[5] Ibid., 113.
[6] “Who Eats at Taco Bell?,” TUG Collective, accessed March 2021, https://www.tugcollective.org/who-eats-at-taco-bell.
[7] Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World, 8.
[8] Glissant, 9, 14.