Eating Puerto Rico: A History of Food, Culture, and Identity

Introduction

1 Introduction When the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día interviewed several public figures in 1999 regarding their favorite meal, Orlando Parga—a leading proponent of what has been labeled anexionismo jíbaro¹—replied, “corned beef with fried ripe plantains.” For Senator Norma Burgos, it was “chicken fricassee with white rice and pega’o (rice with the crisp, slightly charred scrapings off the bottom of the pot).” Longtime activist and Puerto Rican Independence Party leader Rubén Berrios confessed to a liking for “viandas (starchy root vegetables) with salted codfish (bacalao).” Renán Soto (the then president of the Puerto Rican Teachers Federation) chose “dry salted beef with potatoes and rice and beans.” The comedian Raymond Arrieta answered that he favored “rice and beans with pork chops.” Senator Velda González was more expansive, declaring “Oh, my goodness, that’s a really difficult question. I love chicken with rice, salted codfish, pasteles (resembling tamales, pasteles are made of plantain dough that are filled with meat and other ingredients and boiled in salted water). . . . There are so many things I like”; and—shying away from naming one dish over others—the singer Ricky Martin declared “Puerto Rican food.”² How should we take these statements? Should we interpret them as the surface expressions of something deeper, more rooted, lending credence to the idea that people, regions, societies, and nations are in fact defined by their respective palates, by what is consumed at mealtime? On one level, food is simply the indispensable element that sustains our physical, social, and material well-being and that enables the human species to reproduce and carry on. On another level, however, food—and the various ways in which we cook and consume it—also reveals and measures how people, groups, and societies interact among themselves, negotiate and experience strange or different cultural traits, and, in the broadest sense, relate to the world. As such, food shapes modes of representing social reality, helping 2 Introduction to stamp onto it structures and hierarchies laden with powerful symbolic overtones.³ Thus the maxim “tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are” has always been a prime factor when it comes both to delineating social and material differences between people and groups and to contemplating or imagining the culinary dimensions of ethnicities, nations, and cultures scattered across the planet. As Massimo Montanari asserts, food and cooking are a great vehicle for self-representation, communication, and the protective covering of identities, while also constituting “the principal outlet for entering into contact with different cultures.”⁴ Broadly speaking, food, cooking, and diet have polyvalent meanings. In all the responses elicited by El Nuevo Día, however, two aspects stand out with particular clarity. First, there is the association between food and identity, in this case national identity. Although today in Puerto Rico one can readily sample cuisine and styles of cooking from various countries and regions around the world, and though the experience may be “the principal outlet for entering into contact with different cultures,” since, as Montanari further states, “food opens up cookery to all kinds of inventions, exchanges, and influences,”⁵ I am confident that the newspaper’s interviewees gave the aforementioned dishes as their preferences, rather than others, because they know that the powerful metaphor of “Puerto Ricanness ” attaches to them, especially in contemporary Puerto Rico. In contrast to how things were in the past, food and cooking have become categories of national identity, of loyalty to country, and of social pluralisms. In responding as they did, these individuals registered their desire to be identified as Puerto Ricans.⁶ Second, there are “the palate’s memories,” the formation of a kind of intimate bond with food and diet molded by material circumstances, a mother’s cooking, the frequent repeating of various dishes and meals, and the “principles of taste.”⁷ This bond speaks to and evokes memories and emotions (good and bad), fixations on flavors and tastes, and—at times— sensations of estrangement. Put another way, societies and the inhabitants of particular regions also eat “what they have been,” that is, their own history . As Montanari reminds us, “man is what he eats . . . but the opposite is no less true, man eats what he is: his own values, choices, and culture.”⁸ Focusing less on examining the important and complex symbolic dimension of food, cooking, and eating—which constitutes the first constellation of meanings revealed by the interviewees’ responses—this book in- [3.142.53.68] Project MUSE (2024-04...