No Innovation Without Tradition
Q&A: Lucia Barrios of Guatemala's Nixtamal Magazine
“Innovation will always be inspired by tradition, because innovation in itself doesn't have enough substance to sustain itself on its own-- it will always require the deep roots of a tradition to even exist.” -Lucia Barrios
It’s true: the large majority of restaurant chefs are men-- stats hover around 80 percent worldwide, possibly higher.
The reasons for this are many-- as with any male dominated industry— it becomes iterative. This leads to a lack of role models and mentors, plus work environments that are not appealing to many women, which include all of the isms we have come to know, and not love, about the industry.
I met Lucia Barrios in Boliva, where she traveled around the country with us on our Indigenous culinary tour back in April. Lucia began her work in 2012 with a restaurant guide in Guatemala City where she grew up-- no such guide existed at the time, so she decided to make Mr. Menu, which aggregates restaurants, recipes, and food histories around the country. In addition to the app, Mr. Menu is a beautiful print publication with artful photography, but if you flip it over, you’ll find Nixtamal, devoted to the women home cooks of Guatemala, who-- you guessed it-- are the people preserving ancient culinary wisdom and knowledge.
Lucia says that even though she’s lived in other places around the world, she’s since become “hooked” on Guatemala, now that she spends her work life documenting the Indigeneity of what is Guatemalan food, as well as participating in her generation’s movement towards chronicling, preserving, and in some cases, modernizing it.
With the magazine’s sexy photography, in-depth writing, and free access at pretty much any trendy foodie stops in Guatemala, including malls, Nixtamal has succeeded in getting the younger generation of Guatemalan foodies (aged 28-40) to pay attention to their country’s traditional culinary contributions— information that Lucia says was once presented in too “solemn” a way for younger people to connect with.
But presenting the women together with trendy restaurants, often headed up by male chefs, somehow legitimized their stories.
“There was this beautiful collaboration between the investigations that we were doing. . . A beautiful thing where both sides were feeding each other kind of.”
Her project was an organic one-- she did not mean to do deep dives into these women’s stories, but her interest in restaurants ultimately, inevitably, landed her there.
This work has led to collaborations between restaurant chefs and traditional home cooks, in exchanges where they learn from one another, stage dinners together, and contribute to the movement of a true Guatemalan Gastronomy.
Q: How did you get started doing this work?
A: “We had no aspirations of documenting women or getting deep into culture or anything like that. It was a very basic restaurant guide. But food is the element that unites all of the aspects that have to do with being human. You can begin in the most superficial way, but if you ask the right questions, you will arrive at what is important.”
Q: When did you first realize that what you were making was going to turn out to be much more than a restaurant guide?
A: “Guatemala City is very westernized. A lot of people speak English, a lot of people visit the US and Europe, etcetera. But we don't really travel much throughout our own country. It's still very much unknown for most people, but because I wanted to explore restaurants all over the country, I really began exploring [the countryside] of Guatemala. It was from the very beginning that we had these encounters with “real” Guatemala, where the culture is very alive, not so westernized, where there's a heritage, where there's all these [Indigenous] ingredients, where there's a cosmology vision, and where there is a way of life that brings a lot of value to our modern world.”
Q: What were some of your first impressions of the women cooks you began documenting?
A: I didn't grow up having any Indigenous friends, or any Garifuna (Afro-indigenous people who live primarily along the Caribbean coast of Central America, including Guatemala) friends at all. I grew up with children that were like me-- Criollo (Creole) or Latino, mixed race. But sitting at the table, really breaking bread, really trying to talk to each other and understand each other was definitely new. I think the first thing that I realized was that there was this lack of trust-- in the beginning, the women really wanted to know why I was there. So the first thing was to tell them: ‘I don't want to steal your recipes. I don't even want you to give me your recipes.’ Of course, I do think that sharing recipes is important because a lot of the young people don't really care about these recipes anymore. They don't value them, and it's only the grandmother who still does them. But they are protective, because of everything that's happened-- everything that we are all “grandchildren” of-- racism, colonialism, division, classism. All of this has generated a gap, but the moments in which I found that the gap closed, and that there was real interaction between human beings that was not commercial-- that’s when I realized the power that gastronomy has. Because me, and the members of my team, and the women were coming to tears, because it felt like something was stolen away from us. It's not like we chose to be separated. It’s just how it was.”
Q: Can you say more about why these experiences resonated so deeply with you that you decided to change the trajectory of your project and career path?
A: Well, for the first time, we started asking the question: ‘What is Guatemalan food?’ We all came from a time when [we thought] anything foreign was way better and way cooler and way more amazing than anything Guatemalan. This is a road that many countries have taken in recent years, but I think our magazine was the first that really asked the question.”
Q: Why do you think it is women who are keepers of the culinary knowledge that makes true Guatemalan food what it is?
A: The first tool that a woman has is to begin cooking. They're thinking about how to bring food to the table for themselves, for their children, for their grandchildren. So the motives behind women cooking were very refreshing and touching compared to sometimes how it is in restaurants with very masculine energy and chefs. And whenever you speak to a chef, they will always recall a grandmother or a mother or an auntie that taught them, which brings us to that very origin of why we eat. These women are almost institutions of certain recipes.
Q: Why do you think the male aspects of the culinary world, like restaurant chefs, seem to receive the most attention and energy?
A: “Maybe it's because, in general-- it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman-- the masculine values of going out there, making a lot of money and having a big restaurant and success and all of that is just the masculine drive. This has taken up a lot of space. It's an important aspect of life, but not the only one. The feminine aspect is more about caring. It's more about nurturing, cocooning, creating. It's really different. In general, the feminine characteristics of life have been forgotten, and sometimes even as women in the search for our space in society, we take on a masculine role because that's the first thing that comes to our mind, and we want to go out there and compete and everything. But there's always a missing piece. And for me, the missing piece is to make space for those other characteristics-- the nurturing, the caring, the protection.”
Q: How do you think restaurant food and home cooking differ?
A: “Sometimes you can have very fancy food that is really not nutritious. I mean, I’ve come out of tasting menus that make me feel sick afterwards, for instance, but my grandma's food doesn't make me feel sick, because it's not made for a show. It's not made for my grandma to impress-- it's made because she really wants to nurture, so it's just a different way to approach life. And giving space to these women reminds us that all innovation will always be inspired by tradition, because innovation in itself doesn't have enough substance to sustain itself on its own. It will always require the deep roots of a tradition to even exist.”
Other stuff to know:
-Check out this project out of Guatemala, El Comalote, which honors the women-led tradition of handmade tortilla making (Guatemalans eat tortillas three times daily— it’s their bread) and yet, traditionally, this work has not been recognized or venerated. "One of the sounds that really tells you that you're in Guatemala is when you hear the women clapping to make the tortillas by hand,” says Lucia. “And you will see the tortillas every breakfast, lunch and dinner, but even though it's the most eaten thing, these women are the least well paid in the whole chain. So what [founder] Gabriela Perdomo is saying is, ‘if we value bakers, and a French bakery opens, or a German bakery opens, and everybody is so impressed by the baker, why not do the same with a tortilla?’ Her project is really based on making the highest quality tortilla and creating space for women tortilleras to have that same respect and that same economic payment.”
-Last week the father of one of the team members at El Sazon Cocina & Tragos was detained during an unexpected immigration encounter. He now faces the risk of deportation and the heartbreak of being separated from his family. El Sazon is creating a six course dinner where one hundred percent of the proceeds will to to the family to help cover legal fees and other expenses related to this situation. The entire team is donating their time. Tickets are pay-what-you-can. If you can’t make it, they are taking donations by Venmo at @elsazonmn. More information on the event here.
-If you didn’t already get a chance to see it, take a peek at last week’s feature story that was published in the Star Tribune on Immigrant Kitchen. Our next (sold out) event is this Wednesday, featuring mom and son duos Jeremy & Elsa Moran and Alex & Areli Gadea (check back here for story on the event.) If you want to come to our July event, featuring Safa Abdulareesh from Palestine, (date TBD) keep checking back here for pre-order tickets!