On Bad Bunny, empanadas & art

Pork and potato empanadas. I use a flour dough, rather than a corn masa for mine, becuase I am no good at making a masa that holds up!

When I say I grew up eating streetfood in Colombia” or, “I learned to be a woman on the streets of Bogotá, I know it sounds like I’m saying I spent my childhood in Colombia, or that perhaps I participated in salacious acts on the streets.

Neither statement is true” in the way the words evoke meaning: I was born and raised in the US. But I was also raised in Colombia, by my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. I took my first steps there, celebrated my first birthday there, and developed the stomach of a goat there, eating stomachs and feet and streetfoods so glorious I know they are what lines the streets to both heaven and hell.

So when I think of the “tastes of home,” or the flavors of childhood, it is the flavors of cilantro and cumin, yucca and arroz, breads sweet and savory and soft or hard and broken down in changua.

Potato salad and coleslaw are up ther ein the “tastes of home”too, becuase of the foods my dad likes, the Midwestern foods my mom learned to make from my grandma and other rural ladies in the US.

I both called out and lifted up Jello with fruit in it at the beginning and end of my TedX talk, and like so many foods of our youth, I have a love/hate relationship with fruited Jello to this day.

My TedX talk about multilingualism and mentorshop also includes a shout out to fruit Jello.

But Colombian foods… except for chunchulo or brain, which I’ve never quite been able to develop a taste for… the streetmeats and breads are what I crave when I think of “home.

Tomorrow Bad Bunny will play the Superbowl halftime show, and this performance, along with the food, are the only reasons I care about watching the spectacle of sportsmanship that is the North American football championship.

I’m not Puerto Rican, but I’ll be celebrating Latine culture with empanadas and ají, sharing something familiar with millions of other viewers who support this man I don’t know and likely will never meet, a man with whom I feel great solidarity for the way he’s using art to elevate at this moment.

Writing is as familiar to me as food, and yet in these times writing feels less like a call to arms or a way to shake things up than more urgent, physical activism. Yet like the empanada, I’m reminded that we all have our ways, our flavors and styles of being and doing, and we need ALL of them becuase that’s what makes a stronge, more unique and interesting world or part of the world.