In February 2011, my companera and I went to a workshop called "Remembering Our Ancestors Comidas & Ways of Healing the Brown Body" at the South Central Farm Community Center, an event of Mujeres de Maiz.
My family has been in Los Angeles for 100 years by way of Mexico & Ireland. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather migrated here, separately, during the Mexican Revolution. They say my great-grandma was a soldadera alongside Pancho Villa (even as he was opposed to the presence of soldaderas), before she and her children (my grandma) earned wages as brown Extras in Hollywood films of the 1930's. My bisabuelo left behind his family in southern Vera Cruz, and my bisabuela, left relatives in Torreon, a railroad town in the northern state of Coahuila. My father's Irish ancestors re-located to LA from the Southwest and Virginia after fleeing Ireland.
I am mixed-race, my dad is Irish, my mama Mexican-Chicana-Irish-American, and both of them raised three children with a little bit of arroz con pollo, Christmas tamales, fruit salad, steamed veggies, pb&j sandwiches, with occasional macrobiotic binges. We never had sugar cereal or "junk food" - both of my parents preferred brown rice. But for the most part we were just as estranged and lost from food as most 2nd or 3rd generation North Americans today are.
Flash forward to the kitchen of my college years in the redwood-garden-sustainable norcal beachtown of Santa Cruz. This is where I got an "education" of food, of what real food was, but it was from mostly hippies, who didn't feel the need to shower much. It was bright and surprising news to me, and also somewhat patronizing.
It wasn't until the Spring of 2011 at the South Central Farm, back home in LA, that I listened to ancestral knowledge pour like glittering wet beads out of the mouths of beautiful, indigenous, wombyn like myself (Claudia Serrato & Vegan a la Mexicana), with an entirely different framework situated in indigineity and the ways our ancestors ate (meat only in ceremony, pasteurized anything no way, fasts regularly as physical/spiritual practice). Food in that night became my ancestral language that was lost and taken from my family through colonization, and thanks to the amazing wombyn in that room, partially recovered and remembered.
And that, my friends, blew the roof off my house.
To talk about de-colonizing our bodies from foods that weren't consumed by our indigenous relatives, to talk about eating plants as a way to stop the world from killing us with diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and cancer, and dialoguing about this with fellow brown folks & indigenas, well THAT was revolutionary.
So, we started out small, my sweets and me.
We got a second-hand juicer (more on juicing later). We tried out some new recipes. We re-integrated plants into our bodies in a more intentional way (like, choosing plants over the easiness of meat).
But we're still figuring it out. With lots of knowledge that we already have, about what to eat, what to put in our kitchen, we are putting in the extra effort to heal and restore our bodies by releasing/decreasing cheeses and meats and processed foods from our lives, as they are comidas/foods our bodies had to learn how to consume, mostly as a result of colonization. And frankly, our bodies are sick from the consumption.
Follow us on our journey, and use this page as a resource guide for recipes if you find yourself interested in new ways to live by connecting the multiplicity of identities we all hold, as activists, archivists, artists, plant-lovers, anti-racist feministas, queers, de-colonialists, and COOKS.Sofia Rose Smith
Spring 2011
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