Made of Corn
I
Authentic Goat Mole
Every Friday, Mamá Lolita would begin her day among the song of the crowing rooster and the rising sun. She would water her bright pink bougainvillea using a punctured milk gallon and feed her turkeys cracked corn by the handfuls; she’d tend to her trees so they would bare her fruit or she would reap the seeds of her labor, picking the plumpest figs from her trees, milky sap running down her fingers, and filling woven baskets to the brim. And then, she would take one of her goats while it was bleating and frolicking in its pen, and slit its throat.
With the next day came the visit to the market, a bustling street packed with obstinate vendors where she would handpick the finest ingredients, sometimes by their smell, sometimes by the texture of their rind, sometimes by a logic secret even to her. She would go back home where she’d put my grandma and her sisters to work, shredding, tearing, rubbing, marinating, and simmering, until the meat was melt-in-your-mouth tender and the flavor bursted in your mouth. In just a few years, her daughters would be carrying along their own children, my seven-year-old father and his cousins, some younger and some older than him. The children would grind the seeds and nuts, the dried chiles and the spices all together with a molcajete––unless Mamá Lolita had already taken it to the mill, then they would go outside and chase the turkeys instead. It wasn’t until the spices the children had ground had been simmering alongside the tomates and chiles tatemados, their juicy interiors hidden under the blackened skin, that she’d add a single triangle of dark chocolate for its bitter gooeyness spread across the dish.
Mama Lolita didn’t need “open” and “closed” signs; she just needed to set up the plastic chair and tables outside her house for the street to be transformed by her lively and hungry neighbors in a matter of minutes. She would make small talk with her diners and then swirl back to the kitchen, slather the goat meat with the mole and sprinkle some sesame seeds on top of it as a finishing touch. Mamá Lolita passed on her recipes, her knack for finding the best nixtamal at the market, and her ability to turn dried beans and discounted tomatoes into delicacies for the many hungry mouths she had to feed. When her children were grown, my grandma would single-handedly make at least five dozen steamed tamales, stuffed with pork and chicken and beef for her growing family to enjoy. It was meant to be their legacy, the sizzling of the fat, the browning of the tissue, the cleaning of the guts. And I rejected it.
II
The people
First, the Maker created the beasts—but as these were creatures of simple minds, they were incapable of worship. Thus, he shaped beings out of mud and earth—but they were misshapen, speechless, and their wombs were barren. So he destroyed them. Next, he carved people of sturdy wood—but their minds bore no thoughts, their hearts harbored no devotion and their bodies carried no blood. So he destroyed them. At last, of a handful of cornmeal he made limbs. Of these limbs he sculpted people—and to them, he gave them beasts to devour and his image to worship.
III
Tacos de lengua
I first attempted to tell my mother I wanted to stop eating meat, when I was sixteen. “You’re loca if you think I plan on cooking two different meals every day,” she scoffed, and that was that. In our menu rotation of beef stew, pollo con verduras, and pulled beef tostadas, there was little room for an idealistic teenager. My proclamation was met with even more skepticism by my extended family.
“We don’t waste anything around here,” my uncles said, puffing out their chests. “Here we eat the whole cow.”
And I knew it to be true: the cow’s lengua would be displayed at the butcher’s, its soft tissue resting on a shelf, mollusk-like; the spongy sesos were scooped from the boiled head and into a soft corn tortilla; the tripes were thoroughly cleaned and then deep fried. While these meals have been hailed as delicacies in recent years––in the same way most inventive cuisines are derided before they’re stolen and repackaged–– they very much weren’t in the late 90’s. It was part child-like distrust towards suspiciously complex meals and part positive reinforcement that made me declare that I abhorred tacos and taquerías alike. My stance was met with praise and banter from the adults, declaring me a “fancy little lady” with a “sophisticated palate.” At school, it wasn’t much different. The children of the middle class were learning from their parents the aspiration of American-ness. On the field trips to the San Diego Zoo and the La Jolla aquarium, the students with American passports would hand in their passports with a smugness they hadn’t yet learned to hide. During lunch time, kids with their refried bean burritos wrapped in tinfoil were begging their parents to replace their made-from-scratch lunches with ham sandwich Lunchables, the currency of Ritz crackers and dairy products being used to play shop with proximity to whiteness, the allure of American-ness.
IV
Tamales tradicionales
Nestled between the pages of the Dresden codex are hundreds of references to tamales: an offering to a Mayan ruler from his kneeling subject, a celebratory meal gathering a community around a fire, nixtamalized corn being grounded by a girl under her mother’s patient tutelage. The first tamales are older than colonization, older than corn, but never older than the sense of community they were born from. Upon the Spaniards’ arrival to modern-day Mexico, they tried to eradicate not only its people but also its cuisine. They knew that this recipe wrapped in husks and tradition posed a threat to their hopes of complete genocide and unfettered expansion. But tamales, like the people who made them, are resilient. In their origins, tamales were made not of corn, but of teocincle, filled not with pork or beef, but with shrimp, reptiles, or wild turkey. After the Spaniards imported cattle with them, and after years of reluctant cultural exchange between the colonizers and the Natives, the recipe was updated to include lard, resulting in an airier and fluffier sponge, as well as to come in variations with pork and beef, which were originally seen as dirty and unhygienic and would grow to be among the more popular and recognizable variations. The Spaniards and, eventually, the criollos––the children of Spanish parents born in Mexico––refused to partake in the cuisine local to the lands they’d claimed for themselves, arguing that it was unrefined and bore no nutritional value. In the most extreme cases, they saw maize as a pagan symbol that threatened the tenets of Christianity, and firmly believed that giving in to the local cuisine would turn them into “savages”, with the the only way to protect themselves being by consuming copious amounts of wheat, pork, rye and wine as some shield of sorts. Over the years, Natives and lower-class mestizos would continue to preserve and champion local cuisine like tamales, while criollos and upper-class mestizos chasing whiteness would favor European recipes. It would take over three hundred years for the culinary divides to be bridged. The Mexican revolution brought renewed pride towards recipes rooted in tradition and made with the local crops that the campesinos tended to, and exalting them as a symbol of national identity. Despite the colonizers’ best attempts to erase it, the staple dish persisted and not only was it not subjected to erasure, but would branch into over 500 variations over the country, from the banana leaf-wrapped tamales Oaxaqueños to the triangular corundas from my father’s Michoacán.
V
Bacon, Egg, and Cheese
It wouldn’t be until I turned twenty that I would finally be able to plunge into vegetarianism. Two years prior, I’d graduated from my Tijuanense high school and made the leap into a university in San Diego. For a city that had felt mine by extension my entire life, from weekend shopping and dinners at chain restaurants and too-loud carne asadas at my family’s backyards, it was immediately clear I wasn’t by extension hers. Whether it was my too-thick accent, or my unfamiliarity with classic TV ads, or all the invisible details that to this day I don’t know I was missing, I was seen as a foreigner. And within myself, my relationship with my nationality was nebulous at best. I saw myself as fronterizo first, Mexican second, and American somewhere in the mix. But now coming of age also meant coming into an identity of American-me. And American-me ate edamame salad wraps. American-me scoured the blogs of white ladies for vegan recipes that used ingredients like nutritional yeast and red palm oil. American-me avoided Mexican chains at the cafeteria, blaming the lack of authenticity but also in the hope that people would see and understand that Mexican wasn’t the only cuisine I knew. American-me was eager to belong.
It was the early 2010s, and Obama had been president for half a decade by then. Society was filled with optimism and an enthusiasm for diversity that was well-intentioned yet naive. I navigated these formative years with praise for my ethnicity being effusive to the point of exoticization, of condescension. And I transitioned from existing in my culture to practicing a calculated curation of it, a version that wouldn’t distance me from my latinidad to the point of feeling implausible but that also wouldn’t highlight it to the point of otherization. And when I decided to stop eating meat, the choice to do so was easy because it aligned with the brand new image I was aiming to create for myself. Because when my parents asked me where I wanted to eat meat for the last time, we drove to Panera for a bacon, egg, and cheese on ciabatta bread. Because when people asked if I wouldn’t miss my cultural food, my tostadas de deshebrada, my pollo con mole, my pozole, my birria, my cochinita pibil, what I said was that of course I would but what I meant was that
I’d been told my entire life to embrace my culture only to a certain extent and not eating meat allowed me to do exactly that. Not realizing that I was willingly throwing myself into the purgatory of severing myself from a culture that had nurtured me and fed me and raised me, in the hopes of achieving a proximity to a culture that would never want me.
VI
Chiles en Nogada
When Agustín de Iturbide marched into the city of Puebla, the people rejoiced. It had been eleven years of daily public executions to deter any sympathizers from taking up arms, of seeing Miguel Hidalgo’s head displayed on a spike atop the Alhóndiga de Granaditas, of shouts of “La patria es primero” chanted with less and less conviction as the war dragged on. But today, Mexico could finally call itself an independent country. The war had been kickstarted by criollos hoping to rally the people to earn the same right as motherland-born Spaniards for themselves. But as firing squads took out the leaders one by one, they were replaced by more and more mestizos and mulatos with pre-Columbian ties to the land. It could almost be––if you didn’t look at the debris, if you didn’t think about the men who’d never come back and the women who’d never be the same––a grand spectacle, full of merriment and freedom.
Not only was Puebla a fertile land, surrounded by volcanoes, but it was also nestled between Mexico City, rich in cultural preservation and indigenous recipes, and the port of Veracruz, the gateway to foreign ingredients and cooking techniques. The amalgamation of the two traditions was inevitable. When news of the war hero’s imminent arrival reached the convent of Santa Mónica, the Augustinian nuns residing in it made it their sole purpose to come up with a recipe that would be both a delicacy meant to scintillate his palate and an emblem of pride for the budding nation. They picked ingredients in the colors of the Trigarante army, the banner Iturbide and his allies had wielded: the red of pomegranate seeds, like the bloody corpses of the people lost in the war, scattered throughout the white mantle of the walnut sauce, like the peace that hadn’t been achieved in years, settling over the green chile poblano, the central focus of the dish, a symbol of hope and freedom. Verde, blanco y colorado, the colors the Mexican flag would one day bear.
VII
Tamales de Chile Relleno
On the morning of Christmas Eve, my dad and I poured coffee into our to-go cups, packed some diced papaya in Tupperware, and braced ourselves for the two-hour line that awaited us at the San Diego crossing. Immigration officers were cocooned into every station, twelve of them in a row, and would only pop out and wave their hand from time to time to let you know it was your turn.
“Espero no nos toque un Filipino,” my dad said under his breath, as he often did.
It was a widely-accepted fact among my family that mexicano and filipino border agents were to be avoided at all cost. The rationale being that they were so hungry for belonging, for being seen as American above anything else, that their questioning would often be more aggressive, that, despite the features we mirrored on each other, they were on a quest to prove that they and us were not the same. The truth is white officers, despite their occasional smiles and gentler demeanor, believed the same thing. But in a nation built on white supremacy and xenophobia, they just didn’t have to put any effort into proving it. And when the Mexican officers worked at holding their posture straight, or pretended to not understand our accented Spanish, our feeling of betrayal and resentment was just the latest iteration in a centuries-long cycle. Because my family ourselves and many Latines alongside us had found many ways to align themselves and gain proximity first into Spanish colonialism and then into American culture.
It was the first Christmas since I’d stopped eating meat, and a few months before, I’d stumbled into a stand in North Park that sold lard-less vegetarian tamales, a rare find at the time. I'd googled the tamal stand the day before and found out that, apart from their Saturday commitments at the North Park farmers market, their food was also available at Whole Foods.
We drove all the way there while my aunt and grandma gave the finishing touches to their own Christmas dinner. When we asked around for the vegan tamales, the people mostly directed us towards the frozen aisle, where we would find frozen tamales made with fake beef and manufactured in Vermont. It wasn't until several questions later that we found them in the cooked meals area, with a tiny sign that read "Tamales (vegetarian): Chile relleno $36/dozen."
We bought two dozens, and a man came out several minutes later, holding the twenty four tamales in his arms as other people would cradle a newborn. He passed the tamales onto my open arms, and I couldn't help but to notice the calluses on his hands and the firmness of his triceps. How had the hands that made these tamales looked like? Were they big and strong like this man's here? Or were they soft and delicate, with fold of skin over fold of skin, with dark spots peppering their peachy shade, like my grandma's? I feared that I was eating from the hands of a stranger, and holding the newborn tamales was an act of hijacking another person’s legacy.
VIII
Ensalada Caesar
The year was 1924 and the easiest way to escape Prohibition for Californians was to cross over to Tijuana and party, imbibe, and indulge in as much hedonism as their hearts desired. More so when they wanted to celebrate the independence of their own country. On that Fourth of July, Americans flocked to a small restaurant tucked away in Avenida Revolución. Behind the endless lines, the checkered tablecloths, and the frazzled servers’ careful choreographies around each other, was the hectic kitchen of an increasingly overwhelmed Cesare Cardini. Cesare was no stranger to chaos. He and his six siblings had been born and raised in Northwest Italy and, as they came of age, many of them left their homeland for America, with Cesare sailing as a steerage passenger to Ellis Island before joining his older brother in Pasadena. They opened a local restaurant, but it was soon clear that their American dream was not meant to be fulfilled here, but in Prohibition-Era Tijuana, where business was booming.
So when Cesare saw his restaurant at maximum capacity, the hum of conversation from empty mouths filling every corner, and the ingredients in his fridge and pantry dwindling, he had to rely on his culinary knowledge, natural cleverness, and air for flair. He plucked the inner leaves from the heads of romaine and set them aside; crackled fresh eggs, separated the yolks and stirred them vigorously until coddled; and finally incorporated Worcestershire for a kick, fresh pressed garlic, and shredded Parmesan. Then, it was time for the show. Because this was meant to be no ordinary dish. The restaurant became a stage, and the preparation was meant to be a spectacle, with his servers bringing the oversized mixing bowl to the diners’ front row. The leaves were small and meant to be held in your fingers like a long-lost cousin to a taco. The strong seasonings were meant to compete with the highballs and martinis that the Americans so adored. This was a dish that could only be created by an Italian immigrant, with the fresh ingredients of Mexico, and the culinary inventiveness imposed by the American Prohibition and its overcompensation across the border.
After the Prohibition ended and business was down, Cesare went back to San Diego. Did he ever look back, towards the city that gave him stability during the American recession, a place to build a business with his family, and mothered his most celebrated creation, which held so many qualities nurtured by the city itself? With the retellings of his salad mythos all centering Americans––the hungry tourists on that fateful day, the Hollywood starlets that flocked to the restaurant as the news of the menu staple spread, the visits from celebrity chefs like Julia Child and Paul Maggiora––Tijuanenses feel like a side note. And maybe to the rest of the world, it was. But never to the city itself.
IX
Champurrado
When I opened the door to our home, we were greeted by an air pungent with cinnamon, clove, and chocolate. My mother had been stirring the champurrado in its twenty quarter olla for the best part of an hour by then, a labor of love that would result in the infusion of the spices and the alchemy that allowed the cornflour and milk to thicken to its comforting slurry. The chicken cutlets were sitting on the opposite counter, frozen just a few hours ago and now pink and plump, and ready to be shredded into an almond chicken salad. I volunteered to take over the stirring of the champurrado, but my mother suggested I write the Christmas cards instead, as I was known to let the boiling milk stick to the bottom of the pot.
After the frenzy that is the Noche Buena afternoon, amidst the presents being wrapped, the pots being left to simmer, and the waves in my hair being straightened, we were ready to load everything onto the car to take to my grandma’s. I set the pot of now thickened and spicy champurrado between my feet to avoid spills. The chicken salad packed in a bowl of glass and covered with Saran wrap rested on my mothers lap. And the pre-bought tamales were delegated to the corner of the backseat opposite to me, still in its original packaging.
My grandma’s home was the yearly rendezvous that beckoned all of my fathers siblings, from the ones still living in Tijuana all the way to the ones living in Los Angeles. The border was an ever-present agent of division in our homes and our celebrations. Our Noche Buena party hosted those who resented my grandfather for missing the childhoods of his sons and daughters, to those who cheered on their children losing their mother tongue, to those who still found Mexican cuisine sacred and untouchable. For those of us who call the border home, to be fronterizo is to be burdened with liminality, with paradox.
In terms of tradition, my grandma is on the furthermost end of the spectrum. Moving from Morelia to Tijuana felt like moving to a different country altogether, which led her to hold on strongly onto the values she cherished from her home in time and space. She believes in God, but not in lactose intolerance; in ghosts, but not in mental illness; and above everything else, she doesn’t believe in the desecration of thousands of years of traditions, either through fusions or due to dietary restrictions.
I raised my tray of tamales in interrogation and my grandma gestured toward an empty spot on the kitchen counter. It was next to the capacious pot holding my grandma’s tamales, the lid resting on the counter and steam emanating from the top, so thick it warped the tiles behind it. My grandma steered me towards the kitchen, giving me a tour of the various dishes as I answered her questions. No, el pollo también es carne. No, los tamales tienen manteca, but I brought my own. No, no puedo comer el puro caldo del pozole sin la carne. No, el caldo sí cuenta. I lowered my eyes as I grew aware of how both of us were struggling to meet each other halfway.
I exiled myself to the living room, where my uncles had their own line of questioning prepared. Y esa idea de no comer carne, ¿de dónde la sacaste? Te vas a malnutrir. Si la biblia dice que los animales están hechos para comerse. Y los tacos, ¿de qué los vas a comer o qué? Son ideas de los jóvenes. Son cosas de gringos.
I looked down and moved my chunks of tamal around with my plastic fork. On my plate, there were two lonely tamales that I’d bought at Whole Foods, from a face I’d already forgotten, while in their plates, my grandmother’s tamales were accompanied by all the meals the rest of the family had brought, meals that I couldn’t eat. All around me, the questions were drowned out by the sound of my cousins speaking to each other in their own combination of English and Spanish words, a brand they’d perfected along the years, and my mom blowing at her steamy foam cup of champurrado, more than ever, I felt like I was rejecting blood and rejecting blood and rejecting blood.
X
The Circus
Whenever my parents feel the need to explain my decision to go vegetarian, they like to preface it with my visit to the circus. “Siempre te has preocupado por el bienestar de los animales y has sido firme en tus creencias,” they always say. I have no memory of this visit to the circus. But I do remember the day we were sat in small circles at school, with the purpose of retelling our weekend to our classmates to practice our English. The classmate next to me, a girl in a high, brown ponytail that swung left and right whenever she was excited, retold her visit to the circus. She described in short sentences the clowns and the tigers and the elephants, ponytail swinging wildly. Before we could move on to the next participant, the boy next to her chimed in.
“El circo es de nacos,” he scoffed. And the girl retreated into herself as the boy got scolded by Miss Connie, but the damage was done.
Had this been before or after I had rejected the circus myself? Had my heart ached for the visible scars on the elephants, or had I taken to heart a callous child’s comments, reeking of classism and mindless repetition? Was this an endless cycle of me choosing the same rejection at every age, at every opportunity?
XI
Cena de Noche Buena
It was now a year later, and I was once again readying myself for our Christmas celebration. I’d spent the last year learning to cook for myself, pondering on the reasons behind my choices and grappling with the newfound feelings of casting aside some of my latinidad in the eyes of my family. When the time came, I was ready to repeat the rituals of procuring my food for the holidays, but this was cut short by a phone call from my grandma.
“Díganle a Beba,” she warned my parents. “Que ni se le ocurra traer de esos otros tamales.”
Now that I was banned from bringing the food that I could eat, I spent the new few hours in an anxious haze. I wondered if I was meant to starve, to be punished in some way. I was torn between being frozen in fear by the possibility of being made to eat meat against my will and the relief of being forced to come back into my traditions. We wrapped the presents. We shredded the chicken. We stirred the champurrado. And it wasn’t long before I found myself sitting at my grandma’s dining table.
“Toma,” she said, as she pushed a plate with two unwrapped tamales in front of me. “Pruébalos.”
I hesitated before trying them, as she’d commanded. I looked at my dad to my right then at my mom to my left. Despite the room being filled with chatter and laughter, the silence between the four of us felt endless. My grandma let out a sigh.
“Ándale, son vegetarianos,” she revealed.
I looked up in surprise. She had made the tamales, she explained, with olive oil and butter. The filling was an assortment of veggies and mozzarella cheese. She’d set apart those for me, making a whole different masa and fillings for my half dozen. I cracked a grateful smile. And with my fork, I cut the soft tamales in half, letting the cheese ooze out and the vegetables release their steam.
That’s the thing about Mexico and our food. We’re birria and mole con pollo and tamales de res and pozole and tostadas de res. But we’re also enchiladas michoacanas and rajas con queso and flor de calabaza and nopal. We’re circus popcorn and lard-less tamales and a world renowned salad made by an immigrant who maybe forgot about what was once home. It’s full of heartbreak and colonization and violence that it will never be able to take back. And full of new traditions and resilience and always keeping a door open for the people who strayed.
XII
Handmade Corn Tortilla with Butter
The asynchronous smacksmacksmacksmack of the balls of masa being repeatedly transferred from our left hands to our right reverberated through the kitchen. Tita Vicky’s technique was impeccable, distinctive of the artist who had honed her craft for decades.
Most of the time, I would be sitting on the granite counter, my feet dangling far from the floor, looking at her well-rehearsed choreography. Occasionally, though, I would become a participant. She used to praise my enthusiasm and natural talent, and then take the mediocre tortilla prototype from my hands and render it uniformly flat and perfectly round before putting it in the hot cast-iron griddle. The tortilla began to plump up as I picked at the white, dried-up masa scabs that had stuck to my hands during the process.
“Este es un burrito” she said, regaining my attention. “Aquí están las orejitas y el hocico.” My great-grandmother’s wrinkled brown hands sculpted a pair of tiny ears followed by a snout— swiftly, as the tortilla would soon lose its warmth and become more stiff and harder to manipulate. She then handed it to me, condensing thousands of years of tradition— from the collective reaping of the corn fields to the first spoonful of lard finding its way to a tamale, from the chef setting a plate of salad upon a table, to the chatter at Mama Lolita’s diner — into a single act.
Because, after all, I too was made of corn.
Arely Guzmán is a queer writer, editor and translator born and raised in the Tijuana/San Diego border. They hold an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University, and were a Kweli Journal 2024 Emerging Writer Fellow and Tin House alumn. Arely is based in New York and enjoys exploring themes on cultural identity, intergenerational dynamics, and home.