This essay explores fugitivity in Puerto Rican culinary practices, centering the cooks María Dolores “Lula” de Jesús and Viña “la Gran Pastelera” Hernández. By analyzing two visual texts—Eat, Drink, Share Puerto Rico’s episode “El Burén de Lula” and Hernández’s recipe video for pasteles dough—it examines how nostalgia and a longing for “lost” culinary traditions are shaped by notions of space, race, and gender. Drawing on Pedro Lebrón’s concept of cimarronería analéctica, this essay argues that these practices represent a fugitive relationship to food, escaping Eurocentric modernity and affirming a distinct world.
In her 2019 article “A Pilgrimage to the Keeper of Puerto Rico’s Past, before She Disappears,” the food writer Illyanna Maisonet recounts her journey to explore Puerto Rico’s culinary past. Her voyage takes her to el Burén de Lula, a restaurant in the coastal town of Loíza, “the cradle of African traditions in Puerto Rico,” to capture the contributions of the Afro–Puerto Rican cook and restaurant owner María Dolores “Lula” de Jesús, whom Maisonet considers to be Puerto Rican cuisine’s “last connection to the pre-contact gastronomic world.” For Maisonet, de Jesús is “a living, breathing piece of history.”1 In her article, she expresses concern for de Jesús’s fading craft because of her illness and the fear of losing a connection to Puerto Rico’s precontact gastronomic world. Her use of words like past, disappears, and last produces a fear of loss and longing for an unreachable past. This past is Afro-diasporic and Indigenous Taíno. This sentiment resonates in comments on cooking videos celebrating traditional Puerto Rican recipes, reflecting a nostalgic tone with a hint of fear.2 Maisonet perceives a loss that can be averted only by capturing de Jesús’s essence, which proves challenging because it eludes written representation. This sense of potential loss is inherent in Puerto Rican food and taste.
Why are cooks like de Jesús celebrated as preservers of the past and the essence of Puerto Rican cuisine? What aspects of their cooking methods evoke ideas of nostalgia? How are their ways of utilizing space connected to the idea of disappearing culinary traditions? In this essay I argue that what some consider to be lost culinary traditions in Puerto Rico are fugitive praxes that trace their roots to the slave-based plantation economy. I explore the meanings of expressions like, “This is true Puerto Rican cooking, this type of cooking is becoming a lost art.”3 Furthermore, I follow the yearning of tasting foods cooked using tools like el fogón (wood-fired stove) or el burén (an Indigenous Taíno clay cooking surface) in the hands of Afro-descendant cooks in spaces like the mountainside or the coast. To begin to understand this I follow two examples: the episode titled “El Burén de Lula” in the YouTube series Eat, Drink, Share Puerto Rico and Viña “la Gran Pastelera” Hernández’s YouTube video Preparación de la masa de los pasteles con Viña “la Gran Pastelera” desde la zona montañosa de Yauco.4 De Jesús and Hernández master the cooking of viandas, a diverse category encompassing starchy root vegetables, rhizomes, and fruits, including the main ingredients both cooks incorporate into their recipes: cassava, sweet potato, yam, plantain, and green bananas. According to Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra, viandas played a pivotal role in Puerto Rican subsistence, particularly benefiting the impoverished population by increasing the volume of their meals. Additionally, the cultivation and versatility of viandas made them indispensable in the culinary culture of the archipelago.5 Because these foods speak to the existence of subsistence economies alongside plantation economies, it is through them that I am able to historicize the fugitive aspects of these culinary traditions. I argue that both videos articulate a relation to food that is “fugitive” as it appeals to the fugitive aspects in marronage, or what Pedro Lebrón calls cimarronería analéctica (analectic marronage).6 This means that de Jesús and Hernández practice being in fugue from Euromodernity and instead affirm a world that is their own.7 This fugitivity defines Puerto Ricans’ (and Caribbeans’) relation to food as a sensorial experience escaping what it names.8 I examine these texts because of their popularity in mainstream food media in Puerto Rico and its diaspora, intrigued by the prevalent emotions of nostalgia and longing in the comments, which evoke a strong yearning for the past. I argue that what people long for often escapes any fixation to ingredients, space, or even time. What both María Dolores “Lula” de Jesús and Viña “la Gran Pastelera” Hernández craft is food meant to be fugitive. Further, I posit that this fugitivity in food allows us to craft possible food sovereign futures.9 As an archipelago heavily dependent on food imports, due to colonial mechanisms, Puerto Rico currently grapples with concerns regarding food sovereignty. Amid these challenges, discussions about the future of food have emerged. However, such futures are often perceived as existing elsewhere. In contrast, cooks like de Jesús and Hernández highlight the possibility of conceiving Maroon futures within racialized spaces, centering generational practices.
By juxtaposing these two visual texts, I emphasize the manipulation of space, race, and gender embedded in foods Puerto Ricans yearn for, like arroz con jueyes (rice with blue land crabs), empanadas, and pasteles de guineo (green banana pasteles), which leads to over-representations of the coastal city of Loíza and the countryside, known as “el campo,” as the primary sources and embodiments of sabor—a distinct, indescribable flavor that holds great significance in Puerto Rican culinary culture.10 “El Burén de Lula” and Preparación de la masa de los pasteles represent spatial practices through food in Loíza and Yauco’s mountainous area, both spaces disproportionately represented as isolated, backward, and stuck in time. By reading the interactions between the comments and the videos, this essay, on the one hand, centers how the episode “El Burén de Lula” focuses on the practices and knowledge of the Afro–Puerto Rican cook “Lula” de Jesús, while the comments articulate a spectrality of the body as someone on the verge of disappearing. On the other hand, I pay attention to how Viña Hernández self-identifies as someone who inhabits and practices the mountainside and negotiates ideas of nostalgia that situate origins of taste.
This essay considers how visual storytellers and cooks in Puerto Rico elaborate a relation to food that stems from fugitive practices of space which originate in slave-based plantation and subsistence economies. In doing so, they re-signify affective networks that make up nostalgic imageries often grounded in prescriptions of race and gender. Throughout the two close readings, I consider Katherine McKittrick’s work on spatial and racial practices in relation to food, emphasizing the significance of space for Black experiences.11 I also engage with Puerto Rican scholars like Isar Godreau and Pedro Lebrón to understand the construction and lived realities of race in Puerto Rico.12 Because nostalgia plays a central role in the reproduction and consumption of these two visual texts, this essay considers how racialized cooks negotiate and challenge nostalgic memories. Nostalgia, as Nadia Seremetakis explains, is linked to the sensory perception of history, prompting a discussion on origin stories, particularly those of plantation and subsistence economies.13 In approaching how de Jesús and Hernández embody culinary practices that challenge notions of Euromodernity I also note how they reorganize the distribution of the sensible that, as Jacques Rancière notes, is made up of “space, time, speech and what is visible or invisible.”14 I see the redistribution of sounds, smells, flavors, and ingredients as central to the fugitive aspects of culinary practices. While historical violences and political projects shape the gender and racial dynamics of coastal and rural areas differently, I focus on the shared spatial practices of Afro-descendant women and their everyday contestation of gendered and racialized scripts. Dialoguing with Lebrón’s concept of cimarronería analéctica, I explore the embodiment of freedom through the rejection of Euromodernity and the affirmation of ancestral memory and philosophy. Ultimately, these food texts challenge the historical narratives that confine racialized women to domestic spaces and support the Puerto Rican modern nation’s agenda.
Cooking Methods
In this essay I read two visual texts. To do this, I employ a multimodal text analysis approach that considers the diverse textualities of the visual, audio, and written text. In the first section I read the Eat, Drink, Share Puerto Rico episode titled “El Burén de Lula.”15 In the second section I read Viña “la Gran Pastelera” Hernández’s YouTube video Preparación de la masa de los pasteles. In both readings I pay attention to formal aspects like frames, shots, and soundscapes. In the reading of “El Burén de Lula” I consider the particularities of the food documentary genre à la Netflix’s Chef’s Table, visual narration, speed, and the position of the bodies. When analyzing Viña “la Gran Pastelera” Hernández’s video recipe, I explore her interactions with the live-streaming audience and the subsequent interactions between the uploaded YouTube video and the comments section. In analyzing both texts, I read the message and content: greetings, instructions, stories, ingredients, cue to substitutions, and send-offs. While it is important to consider the role of the visual image and self-fashioning through live-streaming platforms, I focus on reading how each of these cooks relates to the ingredients and the space in which they cook. I follow Tina Campt in her practice of “listening to images” as a research method.16 Her invitation allows me to further develop a theorization of sabor—an imaginative tool for constructing lifeways in the Caribbean—and approach flavor as an embodied practice and research method. Saborear, or savoring, in its active form entails living and tasting the present.17 It implies movement of time and space and articulating the affective networks of the dishes. Within this approach, I emphasize the connection between visual texts, their creators, and the viewers who comment on each video. This positioning highlights cooking as a collaborative practice that involves exploration, culinary expertise, adaptation, and open dialogue. Moreover, it challenges the notion of the cook as an individual entity by reframing them as part of a larger collective.
María Dolores “Lula” de Jesús and the Visual Image of el Burén
The opening shot for the Eat episode “El Burén de Lula” shows a house-like structure made up of different materials: concrete, pieces of diverse woods, and zinc. Guided by the image of a sign and a crowing rooster, we learn this place is el Burén de Lula. The combination of these two sensorial images transports viewers to the space and time of the coast, almost tasting the salt in the air and smelling the burning firewood: the preferred heat source for cooking in food establishments in Loíza. The following shot moves inside of the kitchen, where the camera captures de Jesús from the back. Two images follow: a side profile shot of de Jesús’s face and the olla (cooking pot), which is visibly used, or curada (seasoned or cured), as it is often said in Puerto Rico (fig. 1).
The voice of de Jesús immediately guides these images. Then—in a change of scenes—de Jesús talks to the viewer directly in the form of an interview: “I would say I’m a blessed woman. It hasn’t been easy. I have diabetes, high blood pressure, and the glaucoma I told you about. I never worked because my husband never allowed me to. Never!”18 The story of how de Jesús came to open and own her restaurant serves as a contextualization for the dishes the audience is about to witness: arroz con jueyes, dulce de coco (coconut fudge), cazuela de calabaza y batata (pumpkin and sweet potato casserole), and a mix of patties, arepas, and cassava bread (fig. 2).
El Burén de Lula is a restaurant located in the Jobos sector in the northeastern town of Loíza, Puerto Rico. According to the video description, “[It] is one of the most iconic gastronomic experiences in the northeastern coast of Puerto Rico. Its Afro–Puerto Rican cuisine has Taíno’s touches and techniques, making it a unique and delicious culinary experience.”19 Since the 1970s, local and international media outlets have been captivated by el Burén de Lula, primarily because of its continuous use of the Indigenous Taíno cooking surface known as el burén. The restaurant is named after its owner, María Dolores “Lula” de Jesús, a third-generation artisan of the burén.20
The burén, a clay cooking surface, emerges as the true protagonist, symbolizing the culinary patrimony of the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. Its deep connection to coastal economies, which are strongly tied to Blackness, firmly establish this cooking surface and the diverse array of ingredients it unites as the central focus of attention.21
National identity agendas that wish to create narratives of racial harmony in Puerto Rico have deemed Loíza as the designated space of Blackness.22 “Many consider the coastal regions of the island,” Petra Rivera-Rideau says, “to be primary sites where Black communities reside due to the history of plantation slavery and agriculture there; however, the town of Loíza is often considered the place with the most ‘authentic’ Afro-Puerto Rican culture.”23 Loíza’s authenticity promotes what Godreau call “scripts of Blackness,” which are the dominant narratives and stories that set standards, expectations, and temporal or even spatial templates for what is publicly recognized as Black.24Alcapurrias, bacalaítos, and arepas de coco, among other fried foods, are often fixed to Loíza and to these scripts.25 This fixation invites the pilgrimage of locals to the Afro-descendant gastronomic culture of Loíza through the form of chinchorreos, a type of gastronomic excursion through small local businesses typically in rural areas in Puerto Rico. Because of this, I argue that food plays a part in the scripts of Blackness because foodscapes are tied to the construction of spaces that are gendered and racialized. Identity discourses in Puerto Rico have tended to over represent the idea of a “white(ned) ethnonational consciousness” in which being Puerto Rican equals being a mixture of three races and cultures: White Hispanic, Indigenous Taíno, and Black African.26 However, as scholars point out, Loíza is seen as a separate Black space in which Blackness is contained.27 While the image of de Jesús is inseparable from the places Blackness is allowed to occupy, I find this episode posits de Jesús—her body, her voice, and her expertise—front and center of the story. In doing so, it allows the Afro–Puerto Rican woman to narrate her story, beyond the script of Blackness.
If Eat crafts a story about what Puerto Rican food is, it does so from the Afro–Puerto Rican cook and her culinary expertise. By beginning with de Jesús and her restaurant, Eat is telling the story about Puerto Rican cuisine being first and foremost Afro-descendant. The episode establishes the link between the historical African populations in the archipelago and the present existence of both Afro-Puerto Ricans and Afro-diasporic culinary practices. As Sidney Mintz argues, “The use of cooking by slaves as a means to escape the definitions of themselves imposed on them by others is a case of tasting freedom.”28 Mintz’s conceptualization of escape through cooking alludes to the fugitive aspects of marronage; as a form of escaping a world other to affirm an own world.29 Hanna Garth and Ashanté Reese argue that “rather than being static or historical acts that happened in the past, Black fugitivity is a central and ongoing part of envisioning other ways of being and relating. In other words, Black fugitivity is and perhaps always has been part of the work taken up by those who survive in spite of constant attacks on Black life.”30 In this way, de Jesús’s cooking in Loíza, a space that is represented as existing outside of the modern, speaks to a fugitive culinary practice. One must ask, then, what does this say about the imaginaries attached to food in Puerto Rico? Responding to this question requires consideration of ideas of authenticity mediated through nostalgia vis-à-vis everyday food practices. Two of the comments made on this video refer to notions of nostalgia and authenticity in Puerto Rican cooking. The first one shares in English: “Can’t stop watching this! It carries the pure nostalgic taste of seeing my great-grandmothers and my grandmother from Vieques, cooking everything from scratch! Especially, extracting the coconut milk to make el dulce de Coco! This is a real treasure!!!”31 The second one, also in English, says: “This is true Puerto Rican cooking, this type of cooking is becoming a lost art.”32
Nostalgic Tasting
The first is a common intervention of Puerto Ricans of the diaspora when they encounter contemporary food practices on the mainland. For the commenter, this image carries ideas of displacement, family separation, and gaps in memories with family members. While some forms of nostalgia allude to “the desire or longing with burning pain to journey” and “evoke the sensory dimension of memory in exile and estrangement,” Seremetakis argues, this representation of nostalgia “freezes the past in such a manner as to preclude it from any capacity for social transformation in the present, preventing the present from establishing a dynamic perceptual relationship to its history.”33 This nostalgic capacity highlighted by the commenter is an important role of food, especially when considering the forces of coloniality, forced migration, and the current cultural genocide carried on by crypto settlers and other Act 22 beneficiaries in the archipelago.34 However, these forms of interactions bring about ideas of a Puerto Rico stuck in time;35 they do not consider the ongoing decolonial and everyday practices of the bodies that inhabit the archipelago. The video addresses the tension between confining the past and ignoring the transformative capacities of nostalgia. It is not by coincidence that the theme song for the episode, composed and performed by the Puerto Rican folk artists Andrea Cruz and Rafa Rivera, is titled “Nostalgia del recuerdo.” El recuerdo (memory) becomes a key agent in the production of nostalgia. Director Rafael Ruiz Mederos seems to embrace the nostalgic weight of the images of de Jesús in the kitchen but does so noting that, as Seremetakis argues, memory “is a culturally mediated material practice that is activated by embodied acts and semantically dense objects.”36 In other words, Ruiz Mederos elaborates a culinary imagery that considers the material conditions of memory and understands the transformative capacities of nostalgia.
The second comment echoes the fear that guides Illyanna Maisonet’s article and speaks to an idea of authenticity; the commenter perceives something has been lost and what we find instead are copies of an inaccessible original.37 But what, precisely, is lost? If racialized bodies still inhabit and practice spaces like Loíza, what does this fear tell us about notions of temporality through food? The idea of a lost art evokes a spectral body. However, the Eat episode rearticulates a living image of ancestral cooking. After the opening scene centers on the physical structure of el Burén de Lula, the camera immediately takes the viewer inside the restaurant, where de Jesús is shown cooking at the center of the frame. She then explains how she came to work at what is now known as el Burén de Lula: “My husband was an alcoholic, and then I said, well, . . . we couldn’t just stay at home doing nothing. So I helped my mother while she was still alive. I used to take the earnings from her business to her bedside. I put the money on her bedside until one day she told me: ‘Lula you don’t have to give me any more money, what you earn from working is yours from now on.’”38 De Jesús’s relation to cooking is one of labor, survival, and economic sustenance. This relation to cooking brings into discussion notions of economic freedom that relate to fugitive and informal economies.39 Through cooking and her ability to position her cooking as a sellable product, de Jesús was able to (1) gain economic freedom and personal independence in her marriage and (2) sustain her family.
De Jesús’s description of her culinary practices goes beyond labor too. In the first minutes of the video she says, “I consider it to be traditional food, traditional food which I make with love.” The explanation of her practices informs the audience of the meaning of these foods to her and even provides a glimpse into negotiations of the traditional within the national. When talking about the recipes she makes, de Jesús explains, “I make rice arepa, corn arepas with sugar, and ‘cazuelas,’ which are made from pumpkin and sweet potatoes. We cook it the same way my mother used to do it, with firewood on top and firewood on the bottom.”40 This expands Pedro Lebrón’s idea that ancestral knowledge plays a central role in naming one’s own world, with de Jesús embodying both the ancestral and memory.41
Maroon Food Practices
The labor of cooking in “El Burén de Lula” revolves around the Indigenous Taíno clay cooking surface, known as the burén, where the seven recipes in the almost-thirteen-minute video are prepared. The recipes use Taíno and African cooking techniques and ingredients like crabs, coconut, corn, squash, sweet potatoes, and cassava: foods historically associated with subsistence economies.42 The last cluster of recipes in the episode combine a mix of dishes, all considered labor intensive: patties, arepas, and cassava bread. Without romanticizing the intensive labor and the violence in cooking through enslaved pasts, I read de Jesús’s cooking as a decolonial practice.43 Her ongoing practice of cooking and selling foods with strong Afro–Puerto Rican and Taíno connotations calls for another understanding of cuisine in Puerto Rico, one that grounds itself in an own world. De Jesús is worried about feeding herself and her family through food practices that she is aware are not part of ideas of progress and modernity. The closing words of the episode inform the viewer, “El Burén de Lula has been in Loíza, Puerto Rico, for decades. [De Jesus’s] Afro–Puerto Rican cuisine with Taíno elements and techniques ha[s] played a key part in our cultural culinary scene.”44 While marronage and fugitivity are associated with movement, de Jesús’s being in place is a fugitive practice of “refusal to accept standards imposed from elsewhere.”45
This interpretation of de Jesús’s praxis as cimarronería analéctica is also influenced by what Sidney Mintz conceives as taste of food and taste of freedom. Mintz argues that “the homely everyday experiences of the slaves bore importantly, if indirectly, upon bigger issues—perhaps even on the abolition of slavery itself, and the eventual realization of freedom in different epochs and countries.”46 I see the burén and de Jesús’s cooking as a form of liberation linked to resistance in the afterlives of slavery and the dual oppression of coloniality faced by Afro-Puerto Rican women.47
From Yauco’s Mountainous Area: Viña Hernández
Viña Hernández, popularly known as “la Gran Pastelera,” launched her Facebook page in 2016. There she shares recipes either by uploading videos or by live streaming from her home in Yauco’s mountainous area in Puerto Rico. In an interview with the local Puerto Rican newspaper El Vocero, Viña mentions starting her page with the intention of evoking nostalgia in those from the countryside who no longer reside in Puerto Rico.48 In the Facebook page’s details section, she uses the phrase “los tiempos de antes” (the old days) to signify the nature of the shared content.49
Hernández’s recipe video Preparación de la masa de los pasteles begins with a greeting: “Saludos amigos, saludos. Buenas tardes. Buenas tardes mis amigos.”50 The recipe was Facebook Live video streamed in October 2020.51 Because of the modality of live streaming, after Viña greets the initial audience, she waits a few minutes and runs out of frame to grab her glasses. As she peels green bananas, she talks to the people joining the live stream. Her conversation resembles a moment when someone walks into the kitchen while the cook is in the process of preparing food: “Mis amigos, aquí mondando unos guineitos para hacer pasteles.” She then moves on to say, “Me está llamando mucha gente, mucha gente escribiéndome que cómo usan la verdura. Yo no le hecho más ninguna verdura a los pasteles. Yo la muelo en el procesador. Hay que apagarlo, obviamente y volver a acomodar el guineo.”52
As of the writing of this essay, this pasteles recipe has 112,000 views and 274 comments. The comments fluctuate between childhood memories, memories of grandmothers’ kitchens, advice from fellow cooks, and questions regarding modifications and other variations of the dish. For instance, one viewer shares, “Que recuerdos de la casa de mi abuelita q tenia el fregadero en la ventana de la cocina!!! Puro campo y hogares humildes.”53 Indeed, Hernández is famous for having a sink by her kitchen window facing the outdoors, a feature that used to be common in rural homes in Puerto Rico. A trope in the comments to Hernández’s videos is nostalgia for a rural culinary past and simpler days. While the reactions from the audience have much to analyze, I want to focus on how Hernández approaches cooking and sharing her recipes. I find that in her quotidian streaming practice, Hernández poses the continuity of life and reinvention in the mountainside of Yauco.
Practicing and Living “el Campo”
Many Black and White immigrants settled in the countryside as farmers in isolated communities as part of processes of migration or marronage. I argue that Hernández’s recipe for pasteles reflects connections to these communities and suggests a relationship with food that embodies fugitivity, aligning with aspects of marronage as an embodiment of freedom and an affirmation of an own world.54 Hernández simultaneously embraces both ancestral practices of physical fugue and a departure from Euromodernity, affirming a unique world of her own. Hernández’s videos capture a mountainside sensibility, providing insight into everyday fugitive practices through food in Puerto Rico and highlighting the historical racial spatiality conveyed in her videos.
While coastal cities and towns like Loíza are recognized for their sugar production economies—and by extension are considered the only spaces where Blackness exists55—western and central Puerto Rico are recognized for their coffee production. As a southern municipality spanning the western and central regions, Yauco has played an important role in the Puerto Rican coffee economy from the nineteenth century to the present.56 Coffee crops fostered a distinct approach to land use compared to sugar crops because coffee cultivation allowed for the use of family labor and minimal capital investment, offering a chance to generate income while maintaining the cultivation of traditional subsistence agricultural products.57 According to census data at the beginning of the twentieth century, interior coffee municipalities like Yauco, “where slavery never developed on a significant scale, had the lowest percentages of their populations classified as black/negroes and as mulattos in both 1910 and 1920.”58 However, scholars like Godreau have pointed out the “role of discursive distance in constructing blackness as a singularity, exception, or vestige of the nation” and the displacement of Blackness through narratives of demographic Whitening.59 Godreau argues that this leads to indirectly creating a racial Puerto Rican identity closer to Whiteness than to Blackness.
Because the distribution of the sensorial is constituted by “space, time, speech and what is visible or invisible,” it is important to note what is visible, invisible, audible, or muted in the video and the comments from the audience.60 The recipe for pasteles includes a distinct rural Puerto Rican soundscape, with the recurring crowing of the rooster.61 This soundscape, intertwined with Hernández’s instructions, contributes to viewer comments romanticizing the purity of the countryside in Puerto Rico. This idealized image of rural life characterizes literary and cultural productions of the latter half of the twentieth century, emphasizing spatial practices and spaces while assigning a central role to the jíbaro, the Puerto Rican simple man. Antonio S. Pedreira describes the jíbaro as a racially ambiguous descendant of the Criollo-European, “paliducho y ágil.”62 Critics like Judith Rodríguez argue that the allegorical figure of the jíbaro disavows the presence of Black and Indigenous enslaved bodies.63 Although not explicitly mentioned in the video comments, Hernández’s popularity can be attributed to her association with the mythical jíbaro figure. Her racial ambiguity, proximity to Whiteness, occupation of rural space, and connection to her surroundings align with Pedreira’s portrayal of the Puerto Rican simple man. Carmelo Esterrich’s analysis of films produced by the Puerto Rican Division of Community Education reveals a paradox in the representation of the jíbaro: a simultaneous progressive push for modernization and nostalgic crystallization of rural subjects and spaces.64 Hernández’s culinary and spatial practices defy rural modernization and instead utilize the nostalgic crystallization of rural life to demonstrate visually and sensorially the vibrant existence of people in “el campo.” Furthermore, her relationship with space can be understood as a form of marronage. I see Hernández’s practices of space as constantly evolving, escaping, and negotiating nostalgic imagery, challenging static representations of “el campo” and fading traditions.
Pasteles de guineo: An Afro-Taíno Recipe
If Hernández personifies the jíbara, as imagined by Pedreira, her culinary practices reveal the complex interplay of Black and Indigenous Taíno influences inherent in this figure. While the narrative of demographic Whitening dominates highland areas like Yauco, examining pasteles sheds light on other possibilities. In the recipe, Hernández demonstrates the preparation of green banana pasteles. In fact, it is this dish that earned her the nickname “la Gran Pastelera,” or the great pastel maker. The recipe combines a seasoned dough made from grated root vegetables that is filled with a stew of pork, chicken, or other meat, folded in banana leaves, and ultimately boiled. Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra highlights that while “the origins of pastel de guineo are not easily traceable,” three elements highlight the significant influence of African culinary traditions: “achieving a specific texture through dough mashing, wrapping in leaves, and boiling.”65
Hernández’s mastery of making pasteles exemplifies an enduring Afro-descendant practice that complicates notions of race in Puerto Rico’s countryside. She embodies a connection to Blackness and Indigeneity that represents alternative ways of life on the island, transcending the persisting colonial circumstances. Hernández shares her pasteles recipe as a gesture of delighting her audience with a highly requested dish, and from the outset she emphasizes that this is her own way of preparing them. She disregards the need to adhere to a family or traditional recipe, a gesture that reclaims the vitality and contemporary relevance of jibaridad, which is steeped in Afro-diasporic and Taíno influences. This sentiment is reinforced by her signature sign-off: “Desde la zona montañosa de Yauco,” from Yauco’s mountainous area. By identifying herself as someone who inhabits and practices the countryside space, Hernández asserts the ways of life that are often perceived as frozen in time, disconnected from notions of progress.
In the recipe Hernández shares tips and tricks, one of them for the color of the dough for the pasteles. She says, “Y les voy a enseñar el truco para el buen color, otra vez.”66 This trick is a way of doing and knowing Hernández has acquired through experience. She shares that for the rich color in the dough she uses the stock from the meat filling, which allows her to add less salt and lard at the end. In contrast, recipes for pasteles in cookbooks like Cocina criolla call for achiote-infused lard.67 Her expertise and creativity in the form of tips and tricks challenge notions of backwardness and making do with scraps in racialized spaces.68 This expertise pulls cooks in because they understand that Hernández cooks with sabor, or an unnameable flavor. One of the interactions between cooks in the comments section exemplifies what some consider to be a difference between following a recipe and creating based on ancestral knowledge and relation to their surroundings:
[comment] Monda los guineos y tira las cascaras al patio yo voy recogiendola y echándola a la basura, hay sra si hacer un pastel no es ninguna ciencia.69
[response] Usted dice hacer pasteles, no es una ciencia. . . . pero es el sabor lo que importa,,,, yo he comido pasteles de diferentes personas y no saben muy buenos que digamos,,,,, pero yo me atrevo apostar que estos saben riquizimos.
70
([comment] You peel the bananas and throw the peels into the yard. I pick them up and throw them in the trash. Oh lady, there is no science in making pasteles.
[response] You say making pasteles, it is not a science. . . . But it is the flavor that matters. . . . I have eaten pasteles from different people and they do not taste very good, let’s say, . . . but I bet that these taste delicious.
The first cook comments to say that what Hernández is doing is nothing special because anyone can make pasteles. However, the responding cook emphasizes that even if making them were a science, what matters goes beyond scientific knowledge; it is about flavor or, as the comment in Spanish says, “sabor.” The responding cook intuits, based on Hernández’s use of the space, her way of speaking, and her way of following a recipe, that this is where sabor resides. By reclaiming life in Yauco’s mountainous area and sharing her ongoing practice of the space through cooking, Hernández shows that sabor is a fugitive practice. Its unnamability is precisely a result of its inability to conform to relations to food mediated through Euromodernity.71 Moreover, the mediatic form of the live-streamed video contributes to the mixed temporalities that coexist in the mountainside:72 it brings together experiences, times, and spaces from the commenters in direct conversation with the video recipe. This mediatic preference highlights the fugitivity characteristic of Puerto Ricans’ relations to food because she recognizes that it is only by coming together temporally, through a virtual space, that cooks are able to approach the wholeness of a dish.
Buen provecho
What can de Jesús’s and Hernández’s culinary practices tell us about possible political praxes in the Puerto Rican archipelago? How can we craft political projects that stem from our relations to food? I reflect on these questions in my research in order to expand what food means and does in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. While memory is fundamental to food, I want to expand its centrality by considering how cooks such as de Jesús and Hernández embody the tensions of nostalgic imagery: a product of prescriptions of race, space, and gender.
De Jesús’s and Hernández’s being in fugue is central to how Puerto Ricans relate to food. The perception of food as always at risk of disappearing reflects a valid deep-rooted fear amplified by the current displacement of Puerto Ricans and the ecological crisis that interrupt our physical relations to crops and cooking traditions. However, the fear present in the comments on de Jesús’s and Hernández’s videos is driven by anti-Black logics of backwardness and discursive distancing.73 In challenging notions of racial harmony and romanticized national identity, de Jesús and Hernández reclaim alternative spaces and economies through food. Ultimately, their examples expand the understanding of culinary cultures as political practices, going beyond colonial logic and national imaginaries and offering new modes of belonging. Shedding light on their food practices aids in expanding conversations about food sovereignty in Puerto Rico. Moreover, their cooking and sharing serve as an invitation to explore exchange and solidarity economies as foundations for decolonial praxis.74
Notes
Illyanna Maisonet, “A Pilgrimage to the Keeper of Puerto Rico’s Past, before She Disappears,” San Francisco Chronicle, 15 February 2019.
Some examples, among many, are social media food influencers and food blogs such as the Instagram food-content creator @caroginorio_pr and the YouTube accounts Cooking con Omi and El jíbaro moderno. Carolina Ginorio (@caroginorio_pr), www.instagram.com/caroginorio_pr; Omallys Hopper, Cooking con Omi, www.youtube.com/c/CookingconOmi; Miguel Sánchez, El jíbaro moderno, www.youtube.com/channel/UCZKkgPW60NwDPMmi8U-UcJg (all accessed 25 February 2024).
anibal almodovar, January 2021, comment on Rafael N. Ruiz Mederos, dir., “El Burén de Lula,” Eat, Drink, Share PuertoRico, 17 June 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mjD9RVIQtk (accessed 25 February 2024).
Ruiz Mederos, “El Burén de Lula”; Viña Hernández, Preparación de la masa de los pasteles con Viña “la Gran Pastelera” desde la zona montañosa de Yauco, 7 October 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnm94G9XBwQ&t=449s (accessed 25 February 2024).
See Cruz M. Ortíz Cuadra, Eating Puerto Rico: A History of Food, Culture, and Identity, trans. Russ Davidson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 122–23.
Pedro Lebrón, Filosofía del cimarronaje (Cabo Rojo: Editora Educación Emergente, 2020), 37. See also Hanna Garth and Ashanté M. Reese, “Black Food Matters: An Introduction,” in Hanna Garth and Ashanté M. Reese, eds., Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 9.
See Lebrón, Filosofía del cimarronaje.
Additionally, I approach fugitivity as a “central and ongoing part of envisioning other ways of being and relating” in racialized spaces. Garth and Reese, “Black Food Matters,” 10.
See Adriana Garriga-López and Shir Lerman Ginzburg, “Decolonizing Puerto Rico’s Foodscape,” in Preety Gadhoke, Barrett P. Brenton, and Solomon H. Katz, eds., Transformations of Global Food Systems for Climate Change Resilience (Boca Ratón: CRC, 2023), 206; and Adriana Garriga-López, “Puerto Rico: The Future in Question,” Shima 13, no. 2 (2019): 183.
Mónica B. Ocasio Vega, “Recipe for Rice and Beans: Sabor and Culinary Imaginaries in Puerto Rico in Ana Lydia Vega and Carmen Aboy Valldejuli,” Gastronomica 22, no. 2 (2022): 15–25.
See Katherine McKittrick, introduction to Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xii.
See Isar Godreau, Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and US Colonialism in Puerto Rico (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015); and Lebrón, Filosofía del cimarronaje. See also Valérie Loichot, The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). While Lebrón argues that relying on the difference of gender would be anachronistic for understanding marronage (Filosofía, 33), I focus on the shared notions and everyday practices of creative survival elaborated by racialized women—specifically how they engage in “everyday contestation and negotiation of [gendered and racialized] scripts” (Godreau, Scripts of Blackness, 15) and how they turn “daily gestures of women into political acts and home and kitchen into sites of political resistance” (Loichot, Tropics Bite Back, 65).
C. Nadia Seremetakis, ed., The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2019), 4.
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, ed. and trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 8.
For brevity, hereafter I shorten the title Eat, Drink, Share Puerto Rico to Eat.
Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
Ocasio Vega, “Recipe for Rice and Beans,” 16.
María Dolores “Lula” de Jesús, in Ruiz Mederos, “El Burén de Lula,” at 1:24–43. All quotations from the episode are translations made by the production team for the English subtitles.
Ruiz Mederos, “El Burén de Lula.”
“Lula pertenece a la tercera generación de una familia de artesanas del burén, orgullosa de poder continuar siendo portadora de este legado para las generaciones futuras” (“Lula belongs to the third generation of a family of artisans of the burén, proud of being able to continue being the bearer of this legacy for future generations”). María Dolores de Jesús, El Burén de Lula: Cocina artesanal (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2017), n.p.
See de Jesús, El Burén de Lula.
Since 1949, Loíza and its residents have captivated attention in Puerto Rican discourse on race, folklore, and traditions. For instance, Las fiestas de Santiago Apóstol en Loíza Aldea (San Juan: División de Educación para la Comunidad), a 1949 documentary directed by the historian Ricardo Alegría, portrays Loíza as a tranquil enclave on the northeastern coast, perpetuating a narrative of isolation and timeless existence.
Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, “From Carolina to Loíza: Race, Place, and Puerto Rican Racial Democracy,” Identities 20, no. 5 (2013): 618.
See Godreau, Scripts of Blackness, 14.
Examples of this are food media articles such as Von Diaz, “Dreaming of Piñones,” Bon Appétit, May 2020; Laia García, “Home Is Where the Manteca Is: A Visit to Piñones in Puerto Rico,” Bon Appétit, June 2018; and Cristina Pérez, “‘Try Some Fritanga!’ A Foodie’s Guide to Piñones’ Street Food,” Medium, June 2018.
Judith Rodríguez, “Funking the ‘Jíbaro,’” Hispanófila 189 (2020): 51.
See Isar Godreau, “Changing Space, Making Race: Distance, Nostalgia, and the Folklorization of Blackness in Puerto Rico,” Identities 9, no. 3 (2002): 295; and Godreau, Scripts of Blackness.
Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 14.
See Lebrón, Filosofía del cimarronaje, 37.
Garth and Reese, “Black Food Matters,” 10.
Vimary Couvertier-Cruz, May 2020, comment on Ruiz Mederos, “El Burén de Lula.”
almodovar, comment.
Seremetakis, Senses Still, 4.
During 2012 the Legislative Assembly of Puerto Rico approved Act 22, a piece of legislation that sought to attract high-net-worth individuals to Puerto Rico by offering them significant tax incentives, including a 0 percent tax rate on capital gains. The aftermath of Hurricane Maria set the economic tone for a significant flow of people moving to Puerto Rico taking advantage of Act 22, many of whom were cryptocurrency investors. As a result of the extensive purchase of properties in the archipelago at the hands of Act 22 beneficiaries, many Puerto Ricans are being displaced through high rent and the transformation of housing into short-term vacation rentals.
Godreau, “Changing Space, Making Race,” 283.
Seremetakis, Senses Still, 9.
See Maisonet, “Pilgrimage.”
De Jesús, in Ruiz Mederos, “El Burén de Lula,” 1:47–2:13.
See Garriga-López, “Puerto Rico,” 184.
De Jesús, in Ruiz Mederos, “El Burén de Lula,” 3:49–56, 5:09–19.
See Lebrón, Filosofía del cimarronaje, 136.
See Ortíz Cuadra, Eating Puerto Rico, 122.
See Mónica B. Ocasio Vega, “Op-Ed: Puerto Ricans Turn to Cacerolas When Their Voices Have Been Silenced or Ignored,” Remezcla, 24 July 2019, remezcla.com/features/culture/op-ed-cacerolazos-puerto-rico-voices-silenced-ricardo-rossello. In this essay I talk about the cacerola, or the olla, as a form of resistance when colonial forces and local government negligence result in hunger.
De Jesús, in Ruiz Mederos, “El Burén de Lula,” 11:24–27.
Garth and Reese, “Black Food Matters,” 9.
Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, 33.
See Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); and Yomaira Figueroa, “After the Hurricane: Afro-Latina Decolonial Feminisms and Destierro,” Hypatia 35, no. 1 (2020): 220–29.
“Yo abrí una página de Facebook pensando en que cuando una persona que no viva en Puerto Rico, y haya vivido en el campo, le dará nostalgia. Decidí que mi esposo adaptara mi cocina para poder grabar” (“I opened a Facebook page thinking that it would bring nostalgia to people who don’t live in Puerto Rico but have lived in the countryside. I decided to have my husband adapt my kitchen so that I could record”; Viña Hernández, quoted in Paola Arroyo Guzmán, “Desde la cocina de Viña en Yauco,” El Vocero, 5 December 2018. When not otherwise indicated, translations are my own.
Viña Hernández, Facebook, www.facebook.com/vinalagranpastelera (accessed 21 April 2024).
“Greetings, friends, greetings. Good evening. Good evening, my friends”; Hernández, Preparación de la masa de los pasteles, 0:02–7.
The recipe is now on her YouTube page, www.youtube.com/@VinaLaGranPastelera (accessed 25 February 2024).
“My friends, I’m here, just peeling some bananas to make pasteles”; “Lots of people are calling me, a lot of people are writing to me asking how to use the vegetables. I do not add any other vegetables to the pasteles. I mash everything in the food processor. You have to turn it off, obviously, and rearrange the bananas”; Hernández, Preparación de la masa de los pasteles, 0:53–55, 1:14–1:34.
“What memories of my grandmother’s house who had a sink out the kitchen window!!! Pure country and humble homes”; Gladys Esther, January 2021, comment on Hernández, Preparación de la masa de los pasteles.
See Lebrón, Filosofía del cimarronaje, 37.
See Godreau, Scripts of Blackness.
See César J. Ayala and Laird W. Bergard, Agrarian Puerto Rico: Reconsidering Rural Economy and Society, 1899–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), esp. “The Coffee Economy,” 41–60.
See Ayala and Bergard, 41–42.
Ayala and Bergard, 131.
Godreau, “Changing Space, Making Race,” 293.
Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 8.
Hernández, Preparación de la masa de los pasteles, 5:24–40.
“Pale and agile”; Antonio S. Pedreira, “El hombre y su sentido,” in Insularismo: Ensayos de interpretación puertorriqueña (San Juan: Puerto Rico Edil, 1968), 27.
See Rodríguez, “Funking the ‘Jíbaro,’” 55.
See Carmelo Esterrich, Concrete and Countryside: The Urban and the Rural in 1950s Puerto Rican Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 85.
Ortíz Cuadra, Eating Puerto Rico, 152.
“And I am going to show you all the trick for a good color, again”; Hernández, Preparación de la masa de los pasteles 2:25–35.
See Carmen Aboy Valldejuli, Cocina criolla (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2016), 213–16.
See Garth and Reese, “Black Food Matters.”
Percy Martínez, January 2021, comment on Hernández, Preparación de la masa de los pasteles.
Audrea Padilla, January 2021, comment on Hernández, Preparación de la masa de los pasteles.
See Lebrón, Filosofía del cimarronaje.
See Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 147; and Jaime Rodríguez Matos, Writing of the Formless: José Lezama Lima and the End of Time (Charlottes ville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 32.
Godreau, “Changing Space, Making Race,” 293.
Adriana María Garriga-López, “Debt, Crisis, and Resurgence in Puerto Rico,” Small Axe, no. 62 (July 2020): 125.
