From Mofongo to Sancocho: Caribbean Food Stories in the Hispanic Caribbean with Dr. Mónica Ocasio Vega

The food on our plates tell stories of colonialism, cultural resistance, and resilience. Join Strictly Facts and guest Dr. Mónica Ocasio Vega, esteemed cultural scholar, cook, and assistant professor at Trinity University for a fascinating culinary journey through the Hispanic Caribbean. Drawing inspiration from her father's activism and her academic background, she unveils how food intersects with race, gender, and class to shape the unique national cuisines of Puerto Rico, Cuba, & the Dominican Republic.

The United States has long, complex relationship with the Caribbean, impacting its nutritional spheres. Dr. Ocasio Vega helps us unpack these issues by exploring the layers of U.S. intervention, often disguised as aid, and its repercussions on traditional foodways. Particularly poignant is her discussion on Puerto Rico's colonial status and its challenges achieving true food sovereignty, considering the impact of agricultural policies like the Jones Act that have altered the food landscape. We also discover the interconnected histories of Caribbean food, shining a light on the oft-overlooked Chinese Caribbean cuisine. From the legacy of Chinese Cuban entrepreneurs to Afro-Asian fusion dishes, we explore the culinary diversity that defines the region. This episode is sure to enrich your understanding of the vibrant, multifaceted world of Caribbean food traditions.

Mónica Ocasio Vega is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Her research focuses on the intersection of food, race, and gender in the Caribbean and its diasporas. She describes herself first and foremost as a Puerto Rican cook, daughter, granddaughter, sister, and nourisher from el campo in Cabo Rojo. Her work has been featured on Gastronomica, Small Axe, Intervenxions, and Remezcla, among others. Follow Monica on X &

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, alexandria Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello, hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture. I hope you've been having a great Caribbean American Heritage Month and that you're keeping up with us on social media. I've started a 30 Days of Strictly Facts read series on Instagram, facebook and Twitter or X rather through which I have been sharing some of you know what I think are really important reads on Caribbean history by Caribbean scholars, so be sure to stay up to date with that all month long. The texts are also posted on our Strictly Facts syllabus for you to grab a copy yourself.

Speaker 1: 1:09

So now jumping in today's episode. We had such great responses from the food episode and I had a really fun job actually recording that first episode, so I had to turn it naturally into a continued little mini series, and so this time for this episode today we are focusing on the Hispanic Caribbean, the Spanish Caribbean and the scenes that make up a different sect of our region, and so joining me is cultural scholar, cook, writer and assistant professor of modern languages and literatures at Trinity University, dr Monica Ocasio-Vega. Dr Ocasio-Vega, thank you so much for being here and for joining me for this series. Truly, why don't we begin with you telling our listeners a bit more about yourself, your connection to the Caribbean and what inspired your interest as a Caribbean food and cultural scholar?

Speaker 2: 2:03

Well, first of all, thank you so much, alexandria, for this wonderful and kind invitation. Any excuse to talk about food, I am there, so count me in. So a little bit about myself I am originally from Puerto Rico. I've been living in several parts of the US, mainly for grad school and now because of my full-time job, for about nine years now. I think it is and it's been a journey specifically kind of thinking about food. And that kind of takes me to how I got to my research topic.

Speaker 2: 2:40

So when I was an undergrad at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, I was majoring, and I majored that was my official degree in comparative literature, and simultaneously I was working. So my dad, he works in food, kind of a food sovereignty effort. He, what is it? He distributes produce from local farmers to local supermarkets. Like age of working, like I was a working age. I've been working with him and when the time came to do my undergraduate research thesis, I really wanted to bring these two parts of myself right together in dialogue. And so how I saw that happening was mainly through cookbooks, and that was what I did my research on, and at that time I only focused on Puerto Rican cookbooks because I was kind of interested also in the idea of a national cuisine really, of the idea of a Puerto Rican cuisine, and how we kind of create those notions of a national cuisine and what notions of gender came into that. Right after that I kind of expanded onto also notions of race and class and how those also came into play into the idea of the national cuisine. And because I really wanted to challenge the idea of a national cuisine in itself, I started establishing dialogues with other Caribbean geographies and that's how I expanded my research into Cuba, haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. So I wanted really to establish more of a dialogue and see right, thinking through, like Edward G Sun's concept of relation, seeing what relations came through food right, because a lot of the foods that make up this idea of Caribbean cuisine share the same histories but also have kind of their own unique specificities in their own context.

Speaker 2: 4:49

So, yeah, I looked into that and yeah, I guess when I came into the, into my PhD dissertation, I also had the space to kind of expand the idea of studying food just in literature, because that's what I was mainly doing previously and that's where I started working with like more cultural texts or visual texts, also digital texts such as food blogs, and started putting all of those into dialogues and also kind of like just expanding the idea of the classroom, because it was not only like writing my dissertation, it was also engaging in community initiatives.

Speaker 2: 5:29

So I started hosting like a free cooking online class throughout the pandemic. Like a free cooking online class throughout the pandemic, I started curating like an Instagram account in which I kind of shared a lot of the, I guess, worries that were coming up in my dissertation right, which can be a very lonely process, I need to say. Food gave me that, I guess, that possibility of establishing relations right beyond my own writing desk, and so I'm really grateful for that experience as well. So, yeah, that's a little like overview of how I came into my research and what I'm doing, what I'm doing now.

Speaker 1: 6:08

That was beautifully said and I think you touched on a lot of points, on a lot of points I definitely want us to get into, as we are, you know, dissecting more intuitively. Maybe you know Puerto Rican cuisine and things to that nature a little bit further down along the lines, but we'll go big scale and then go individual. First, just kicking off our discussion, I think you know, and have had this conversation on the podcast many times, that our region is so diverse. Right, the fact that, like I, have to have multiple food episodes because we are such a diverse place, right? Or, you know, region, part of the world, I would be doing us a disservice to have just one food episode, right. And so, when we're thinking of the Spanish Caribbean, what are some of the ways that you're really seeing foods from Puerto Rico, from Cuba, from the Dominican Republic, offering both, you know, similarities and differences that highlight what we are, as you know, a unified region, but also things that set them apart as part of the Hispanic part of the region.

Speaker 2: 7:19

I absolutely love that question because it's such a charged question itself, because we need to touch a little bit about on the historical, but also like the racial, the gender, the class, all of those little I'm not gonna say nuances, because they're not really nuances, but like, um, I want to say like differentiators that come up, um. So I want to, I want to make clear that I'm gonna touch a little bit about everything and some of it is gonna be like really pretty and some of it is gonna be like really um, what is it? I, I don't, it's not controversial but, yeah, difficult or it's going to be an unpleasant conversation to have for some folks. For some folks definitely, because, right, the idea that even within the Hispanic Caribbean there should be a sort of coherency between their cuisines. It's due to, right, the Spanish colonization. That's the idea, right Like, we share a lot of the same dishes because we were all colonized by Spain.

Speaker 2: 8:27

But another kind of narrative that often comes up, which is one of those like unpleasant conversations that I always find myself having, in Puerto Rico specifically, is anti-Blackness. Just because people tend to assume, right like, oh no, because these were like Spanish colonies. These are more like white spaces and that's not the case at all, and our cuisines are definitely Afro-diasporic and Taino, right, and we tend to forget a lot of that and a lot of people, when they're talking about either Dominican cuisine or Cuban cuisine or Puerto Rican cuisine, you'll see them try to highlight certain aspects of Iberian cuisine, to establish a sort of relation to that region rather than to Blackness or to indigeneity, which is the case, and whenever that relation to Blackness or indigeneity happens tends to be in relation to a past that is not necessarily involved in our present, which I always find very interesting. I but yeah, similarities, right, let's talk about that. You'll find that a lot of like the national dishes, as we call them, will be very similar and I guess the three spaces kind of have two national dishes.

Speaker 2: 9:50

One would be like rice and beans and then another one would be a kind of soup or stew, which could be ajiaco in Cuba or sancocho in the Dominican Republic, in Puerto Rico also, another one that would come up it's definitely celebrated as an idea of the national, but not necessarily present in everyday life and that is mofongo, which you mentioned earlier, that you had in Puerto Rico, which is super tasty. I'm not throwing shit at mofongo by any means.

Speaker 1: 10:21

I agree.

Speaker 2: 10:21

But it's definitely not something that we eat in our homes, right. And so when we think about the idea of a Puerto Rican cuisine or a Dominican cuisine, we also need to think about what people eat on a daily basis, and so variants of that could be the mangu in the Dominican Republic and the fufu in Cuba, and so, even though, right, they're kind of variations of the same dish, you could see that they're very different because they respond to different realities and that I want to like step back a little bit now into more of a historical scope, because even though, right, the three of these spaces function within, kind of the afterlives of the plantation and the plantation economy specifically, they kind of develop economic systems slightly differently, just based on how those plantation economies looked on each context. So, for instance, haiti and Cuba had this like very well-established and well-studied plantocracy, slave model economy, whereas the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico had a more like subsidence economy, and subsidence farming specifically, and livestock economies which kind of cohabited with the plantation economy. So you see certain dishes kind of developing out of those relations to the land itself too. So, for instance, as I mentioned, the sancocho in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico is gonna be a dish that is born out of that relation to the land, because that substance farming allowed people in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic to cultivate root vegetables on a daily basis. So these two soups it's basically the same soup is made out of root vegetables mostly and then you can add certain meats to it, so you see kind of that coming into play as well, but you'll see rice and beans in every single country as well, right? Because that?

Speaker 2: 12:32

And now going back to the root of like the, I guess, afro-diasporic cuisine in the Caribbean and how it creates the whole idea of Caribbean cuisine, rice and beans was part and also root vegetables and salted fish, I need to add, was part officially of the diet of enslaved peoples in the Caribbean, right, and that is very well documented. And so we kind of see how these foods that were either granted because sometimes like enslaved people could cook them, but also that were fed to them at some point, right, it kind of creates the base for the Caribbean diet, right, rice, beans and something else. It was always and it still is very much rice and beans and something else. So the center of the dish would always be rice and beans, right, or it can be root vegetables in some cases. So that's kind of like what we have in common, differences, though I do want to say and I touched a little bit about the differences on the economic systems but in terms of eating Rico, that in the Hispanic Caribbean because this is also present in the Dominican Republic and Cuba there is a strong dislike and a strong attitude against hot foods, against like hot sauce, even though we do make our own hot sauce.

Speaker 2: 14:14

There is a kind of self-identifying attitude as being someone from puerto rico or cuba to say like no, we as a community do not eat hot foods. That is something for, like, either people who are in mexico or people from right. They'll say stuff like that no, that's a thing from Haiti. Only Haitians eat hot foods, not us. So you kind of see those little glimpses of like anti-Blackness coming here and there and also just like classism every once in a while. So you see a lot of those attitudes Quite interesting.

Speaker 1: 14:57

I think that's, you know, for me a very interesting point, especially as we're dissecting the fact that, as a region we all have are tremendously influenced, as you pointed to, by our indigenous ancestors, right, and we're all the ancestors of enslaved Africans who were forcibly brought here. Of course, you have the colonizing body, depending on where you're talking about, right, so British, french, spanish, dutch, even Portuguese, the list goes on. And then, as well as Asian influences from indentured laborers and, you know, migrants and et cetera. And so the fact that you know, in a lot of ways, when we dissect, you know, for instance, plantain or plantainos, right, are for one sense, right, a food based in African cuisine, right, and so, as we are dissecting what our foods are made out of, right, it's so easy to be like, yeah, you know, obviously, plantain is a part of mofongo or you know, whichever food, but then also, on the other hand, still have these controversial points about what is, you know, trying to distinguish or separate oneself from, for instance, that connection to Africa, self from, for instance, that connection to Africa.

Speaker 1: 16:17

And I think, in a lot of ways that happens, not just for African foods, but it can happen in various ways, right, in our conversation on, you know, focusing on Jamaica, trinidad and Tobago, and in Guyana, we were talking about the fact that there is this sort of view that eating root vegetables right, so yam um, the list can go on, but the, the perspective that our root vegetables are somehow, you know, could be seen as unhealthy, or you know the this sort of notion that the foods that we eat are unhealthy, and of course everything in like a astronomical proportion, is not good for you from that basis, right, but at the core of it, you know, these are root vegetables that carry, you know, tremendous nutrients and the ways that, you know, I think our societal and not just societal but even the like imperialist notions have helped contribute and dictate to what stories we have been told about these foods.

Speaker 2: 17:21

Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's one of the other which people don't often talk about. I guess I mean Caribbean scholars do talk a lot about. Another commonality within the Caribbean political and economic experience is the presence of the US throughout the Caribbean and what you're pointing to now, right, that nutritional discourse is pretty much inserted throughout the Caribbean because of the US influence and the presence, the presence of actual US citizens, us soldiers, in the Caribbean, right, and we're still kind of seeing that throughout these spaces, like there's always, for instance, in Haiti. There's always, whenever something like a disaster, be it natural or man-made, right, happens, there's always the worry that the US will actually intervene. Right, because that intervention historically has looked as literally invasion, and not just like a military invasion in terms of boundaries, physical boundaries, but like they invade the food waste, the waste of doing of the people throughout the Caribbean. That has happened in the Dominican Republic, it's still happening in Puerto Rico, because we are a colony of the US, right, and that has happened in Cuba, right, when we must not forget, right, the Pratt Act.

Speaker 2: 18:44

So, yeah, I think the presence in Jamaica too, the presence of the US is quite interesting because it starts kind of dictating a lot of like the nutritional parameters associated also with an economic project that was kind of corrupted for the Caribbean. And so, yeah, I think that's quite interesting and even now, whenever I have seen a lot of articles throughout I believe the last three or four years, specifically after the hurricanes and earthquakes that have shaken the region, there is a more public awareness discussion about what root vegetables or other fruits that are that we relate to, the to root vegetables could do for the future of food sovereignty in the region. So I don't know if you've seen, but I think the atlantic circulated an article in the past months, um, about breadfruit and what breadfruit could do for the future of the sovereignty. But the interesting thing right and again it this is much like the us center narrative on nutrition in the caribbean, which is so problematic is not listening to the traditional food ways of the people that have been using breadfruit for centuries in the caribbean right.

Speaker 2: 20:05

Edward glissan even writes using breadfruit for centuries in the Caribbean right. Edward Glissant even writes about breadfruit, which I think is always amazing, and masala and all the beautiful stuff in the Caribbean. So I think it's quite interesting when we kind of see this most of relating to our own foods being taken out of context a little bit too, and and kind of repurpose and refit to us, because that's the whole purpose too, it's like, because this is the future of food sovereignty will somehow reorganize this that they're already using and sell it to them again, right, that's the whole. As you mentioned, the whole imperial system works like that. It's quite interesting.

Speaker 1: 20:53

And one that I I mean it feels like the cycle it's always turning in a sense. I did want to bring up an interesting point to something you just said. I mean, we're obviously talking about imperial relations and how they're impacting our foods, but is there a way that you see, given the history that Puerto Rico is still a US colony as opposed to DR and Cuba, the way that that difference in their sort of political statuses shifts or impacts? Statuses shifts or impacts? Um, I mean, obviously it impacts from we've had conversations about voting and you know several things, but in particular for food, is there a way there that you see the three islands differing particularly?

Speaker 2: 22:56

at a very evident level. It is different. Right, it is different. But I also want to get at the similarities also because one would think, because there's not like legitimate or lawful us presence within either the dominican republic or cuba, it's not going to affect their food waste, but it has. And I'm going to tell you why. First, differences right within puerto rico, um, thinking about law specifically, right, we still have, um, there is a jones act which became really like popular after hurricane maria, because it is a law that establishes that anything that's coming into puerto rico has to come first through a us based um port, and so any food that is coming, imported into Puerto Rico, even if it comes from the Dominican Republic, it has to travel first to any port in the US it can be Jacksonville or something in Texas, right, and then travels down to Puerto Rico, which obviously affects the access in terms of time, but also in terms of money, because everything becomes more expensive when food has to travel that far. Right, and that's what we have discussed throughout years in Puerto Rico and that's the most evident way. Also, we need to pay a lot of attention at the fact that Puerto Rico for a long time has been the lands of Puerto Rico have been used as a laboratory for seed developing for the US right, specifically the crops of corn and soybeans. Those, a lot of the seeds that are developed for those crops that are later grown in the US, are developed in Puerto Rico because they can plant them and cultivate them throughout the year, right, because of how stations or like seasons work in Puerto Rico. So because of that right, we have two things happening. One thing is that prime land for agriculture is prioritized for US quote unquote farmers because they're really just developing seeds, so local farmers don't get access to prime land like other big corporations might. And the second thing is, like the environmental repercussions of that. So a lot of Puerto Ricans that live within the parameters of those farms develop a lot of health conditions that are directly tied to whatever pesticides they're testing or whatever they're kind of working on in terms of chemicals within those spaces. So those are two very real repercussions of the US presence in Puerto Rico in our relation to food on a daily basis.

Speaker 2: 25:48

Now, not just as I mentioned, not just because the US is not literally present in the Dominican Republic or Cuba, it doesn't mean that there are no historical repercussions from when they were there. So, for instance, one thing that happened and this is both for the Dominican Republic and Haiti was that during the occupation so in Haiti, the occupation was from 1915 to 1934. And this is the context also within Latin America and other parts of the Caribbean, like Jamaica, that this is where we call the 10 banana republics, because they were focused on the development of monocrops, specifically focusing on imposed monopolies on bananas, sugar, tobacco and also cement in Haiti, tobacco and also cement in Haiti, right. So the repercussions of this is the reality that a lot of these lands, one they lost water and literally like just sucked out all the water from those lands. And then the other thing is that it just perpetuated this monocrop economy that a lot of these countries still participate. So one thing right in Cuba, even within the revolution, one of the projects of the revolution was like an agrarian reform, which was also part of the Trujillato. So a lot of parallel projects, agricultural projects happening at the same time.

Speaker 2: 27:13

During the Cuban revolution I believe it was like 10 years after the victory of the revolution the regime kind of came up with this idea of I believe it was like a hundred something of sugar games.

Speaker 2: 27:30

So again, kind of perpetuating this cycle of monoculture economy just to be able to participate in a global economy, because that was supposed to be like the good for exchange within the Soviet Union right, so they could get other foods, which actually right, kind of determined a lot of the foodways that would develop after the revolution.

Speaker 2: 27:51

So the presence of soy, for instance, right.

Speaker 2: 27:55

Or the inability to access meats, for instance, because people were not permitted to grow their own cattle or their own, basically their own foods right.

Speaker 2: 28:10

So you see a lot of that still today which is still related to the US and people don't really think about it that much. And then a similar thing happening in the Dominican Republic still today a lot of like, not a lot of monocrop. I think the Dominican Republic agriculture is a little bit more diverse and definitely the strongest one of the three, because they've also been able to learn from their neighbors in a big way, specifically right after the Trujillado, now thinking a little bit more about the political, specifically right after the Trujillo, now thinking a little bit more about the political um roots for this. So after the Trujillo um, intellectuals from the Dominican Republic were traveling to and back and forth from Puerto Rico. So there were definitely conversations about what the US presence meant for Puerto Rico at a point where also Puerto Rico was kind of redefining themselves as a nation right, because it was also the time when Puerto Rico became officially like a commonwealth a lot of redefining happening.

Speaker 1: 29:13

I mean, we started at food, right, we were at mango and plantarose have turned the conversation much broader, which I love, right.

Speaker 1: 29:22

I think there are ways to much of your points that you were making, right, we might think of a food, or you know, and that was really the impetus for me to have these discussions on food.

Speaker 1: 29:34

Anyways, right, as much as we love our food, they are coded in these very serious, oftentimes you know, traumatic global histories and the ways that they continue to shape us, right, that in some ways, we may not even be aware. One thing that I definitely did want to talk about we talked a little bit earlier about national foods, right, and the awareness or presence of national foods, which we can definitely still talk about if you have more to share. But I also want to talk about the Afro-Asian influences that you're seeing in the Spanish Caribbean. I think they're less so thought of, right, I think, especially given the tremendous numbers of particularly Indian indentured servants, but also from China, et cetera. The list goes on. That came particularly to the Anglophone Caribbean. So we see the roti, we see the curries, et cetera, but we don't always think about that presence being in the Spanish Caribbean as well.

Speaker 2: 30:37

So could you share one or the other, but definitely about the Afro-asian presence of foods within the spanish caribbean yeah, and that's definitely a topic that surprised me was not discussed more in the hispanic caribbean, because it's always, I feel like there's always this tension when, uh, with food scholars, like, on the one hand, people are very passionate about food and they, they really want to claim a relation to anything that is mentioned right and a specific way of doing, and so that happens with, specifically, chinese um cuban, chinese dominican and chinese puerto rican cuisine. We have an everyday relation, at least in Puerto Rico, to Chinese Puerto Rican cuisine or Chino Criolla, but it's quite interesting because the presence of Chinese people in Puerto Rico could have not been possible without Cuba, which in itself couldn't have been possible without Jamaica, right, because it was also like the movement, the migration of these indentured workers throughout other parts of the Caribbean, minus in the Dominican Republic. That has to do with other migration patterns, right, not necessarily indentured labor, but it's quite interesting because, as I said, right, in Puerto Rico and you visited, but there's At least three or two, depending on the size of the municipality, three or two Chinese Puerto Rican restaurants per town. So they're very, very present and what always surprised me is the fact that they're so community grounded. These restaurants are very based. Even their economics are based on an idea of community, are based on an idea of community, to tell you a little bit more, right, even when hurricanes pass or anything kind of disaster-y passes. Those are the restaurants that are always open, right, which on the one hand kind of tells you about their work ethic and people will always point to that, but it also says a lot about the idea of community and how they function as that point of like nurture in um context of disaster too. That says a lot.

Speaker 2: 32:58

And a similar thing happens with big apoyos in the dominican republic, which are the chinese dominican um food establishments. Obviously there's more, because the migrations of the of the Chinese population in the Dominican Republic, some of them can be traced like, more recently you find other fusions which are absolutely amazing, but in Puerto Rico it's like older, it's an older migration. So you see a more traditional kind of Chinese Puerto Rican food establishment, of more traditional kind of Chinese Puerto Rican food establishment. But, again, not a lot of people like to talk about the fact, right, that these people, these communities, have been living in Puerto Rico for as long as they have, right, people who consider themselves like Puerto Ricans, with the little mancha de plátano and everything. They don't like to think of other people, of other racialized folks, as sharing that space with them, right, it's always like we don't really see them, right, it's kind of crazy.

Speaker 2: 33:59

Another thing that is very, very central to Puerto Rican, like eating out culture, is one specific type of business that was possible because of the Chinese QAnon community after the QAnon revolution, and that is ice cream barlers. There's specifically, like there's two kind of I don't know if they're franchise, but family business. One is Rex Cream and the other one is King's Cream, and those two families migrated after the Cuban Revolution. Those are Chinese Cuban families, entrepreneurs, right, that had to leave Cuba because of the revolution and they got to keep their businesses and open them in Puerto Rico, to keep their businesses and open them in Puerto Rico. And, yeah, again, people talk about the fact, right, that in a way, in a very specific way, this kind of resembles the experience of the Caribbean in itself, right, the fact that we have these ice cream parlors that are operated by Chinese Cuban, now Chinese Puerto Rican families in these spaces.

Speaker 1: 35:10

I think we have talked so much about the histories that I'm also interested in the foods, right, and so you mentioned Afro-Criolla. Did I say that right? I don't think I said that right, criollo, yeah, afro-criollo. What are some of the foods you know that one must try if they're interested in? You know the Afro Asian fusion that is happening in Puerto Rico, for instance, or you know this could be even a broader question to talk about beyond. You know the Afro Asian foods, but what are some foods that one must definitely have if they have not tried Spanish food?

Speaker 2: 35:49

yet, oh, I love this because and I laugh because I'm just thinking about all of the relations I have with friends and this is going to be a super honest answer, just because this is the answer I give anyone who travels to Puerto Rico for the first time, not just thinking about Afro-Asian relations, but literally this will be my answer. You have to go to a Chino Grioja restaurant because they make mofongo with a lot of garlic and it's a super soft and steamy mofongo, and they also make tostones with garlic, but their tostones with garlic is a delicacy. It's perfection of tostones with garlic, but their tostones with garlic is a delicacy. It's perfection of tostones. Like somehow, and I know why and I can tell you a little bit about the history of those tostones, con ajo, they reach a perfection of of the frying and the coming together with the garlic, which obviously is super present throughout the caribbean.

Speaker 2: 36:47

Um, but oftentimes so people don't really get like interested enough to ask the people who are cooking these dishes like what do you put in this? But obviously I make that question and that's just my life work. And so, uh, my husband and I once like asked them like hey, we know you put garlic, we know it's an armadillo stone. What else is in there? Because it's a little bit sweet and they're like it's sugar and we're like it's sugar, of course it's sugar.

Speaker 2: 37:14

And then right to think about that relation of the plantain with the garlic and the sugar. Right is to think again about the caribbean experience, right, food waste and how literally these bodies were also right in dialogue, in dialogue in exchange, like cultural, economic, any sort of exchange was happening in these fields. Right, which always kind of goes back to the land, like people kind of develop their own relations to the land. But that toston with garlic, which I adore, kind of embodies those for me, those conversations, and that for me is such a beautiful gift to Caribbean cuisine, just because it takes into account all the histories that come together in the Caribbean. For me that's just so beautiful. So tostones, con ajo.

Speaker 1: 38:11

I will make that. No, I did not go to an Afro-Asian restaurant when I was there in March. It was a very, very short time, so I will have to definitely check it out on my next trip. There are so many, I think, different foods right, in different presentations of the food, as you're um sharing, right, we have ropa vieja, um in Cuba, mangu, as we talked about, arroz con gandules, like, I think, the. The list can really go on um. In your estimation, how do you see some of those particularly national foods really defining each individual island's culture?

Speaker 2: 38:52

I think that is for me when I try to define it and when people try to define it. That's when you see like, oh, we're not different at all. We're not different at all. Because you will see, like a lot of people will use mofongo, like filled with something as that representation of Puerto Rico as a nation, because, like the African planting that was domesticated in the Canary Islands, that came to Puerto Rico, that actually came to the Dominican Republic first, right to Hispaniola, haiti and the Dominican Republic first, and people always tend to forget that right, and then you mix it with the pork which is Spanish, and then you like the, the daino technique of putting together blah, blah, blah, blah, but then you get like very similar stories throughout.

Speaker 2: 39:42

Right, the rest of the Caribbean is always the mixture of these three races, these three cultures. But that's super problematic because that's not the reality of how we relate to one another in the Caribbean, right, it's not at all. I mean, in the Hispanic Caribbean it's not how we relate to one another. So I always find that really problematic. So, if I were to use a dish as an identifier that could still reflect the nuances of each space, I would use the, either the ajíaco or the sancocho, because even though it has the the same kind of history as a stew because all of them kind of developed from which is a Spanish stew, it's a kind of dish that allows for the individual experiences of who's cooking to come into the pot and that, for me, reflects the idea of a national Caribbean cuisine in air quotation, without kind of erasing the histories of everyone who contributed to them.

Speaker 1: 40:58

One of my favorite questions of all our true, strictly Facts family knows this that I asked this question of all our guests over here is that I asked this question of all our guests over here. I'm always so interested, not just in our histories and cultures, but in the ways that they are reflected through popular culture, right Through song, through dance, through film, and the list goes on. And so what are some of your favorite examples of how you've seen Hispanic Caribbean food histories showing up in popular culture?

Speaker 2: 41:33

I have a lot and I actually this is so funny because I made a playlist for my when. I was writing my dissertation. I love a playlist.

Speaker 2: 41:42

Yeah, right, I love that, and so, yeah, when I was writing my, my dissertation, I just made a playlist of one songs that would come up in readings that I was doing so in literature songs that were coming up, and then songs that I associated with anything that I was working on, and so I guess the first one would be both of them are from Puerto Rico. One is, I guess my favorite dish is salted fish with bacalao bacalao or viandas, depending on right.

Speaker 2: 42:15

Viandas con bacalao is my go-to dish whenever I'm homesick and whenever I'm home, that's the first thing I try to eat too. Yeah, it just gives me a sense of of home whenever I eat it or even cook it. And so there's this song by, like a folk artist, andres Jimenez. That's called cafe con pan, but the chorus goes like so the diet of the Puerto Rican peasants will be coffee and bread and then salted fish with root vegetables. Cafe con pan. That's one that I really like, and it's a song that I kind of associate with Sundays, the day of the week Sundays too, because, yeah, it just reminds me of, like, the countryside where I'm from. I'm actually from El Campo in Cabo Rojo. Yeah, it grounds me in a very specific time space. And then the other one I'm thinking about.

Speaker 2: 43:10

So salsa music is the one that kind of references food the most. So you see a lot of like references to food in salsa, and one that is very, very popular as a food reference specifically is um arroz con Habichuela by El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico. Arroz con Habichuela, rice and beans. But also you get something. You get a lot of these tropes in the Dominican Republic and Cuba too. You have Sancocho Prieto, which is a merengue song. You have Patacón Pisao, which is a song interpreted by Johnny Ventura, but it was actually written by a I want to say Venezuelan it's probably Colombian composer. So you see a lot of, like that, culinary imaginaries, kind of traveling throughout the Caribbean, right, and you have similar things happening in Cuba. So you get a lot of the strokes. But those are my two examples in Cuba.

Speaker 1: 44:10

So you get a lot of the strokes. But those are my two examples. I will definitely be sure to link those and listen to them myself, but I always link them on our Strictly Facts syllabus and so for our listeners who definitely want to have a listen, I also do need to update our Strictly Facts sounds playlist. So those will definitely make the next iteration. And as my final question for today's episode, we've talked wide and far about Hispanic Caribbean food and food cultures and the histories that have obviously impacted them. Right, as a food lover and expert, what is I say? One thing, it can be a few, but what's something that you hope all people recognize about Hispanic Caribbean food and you know Caribbean cuisine at large, for the culture and just how it shapes who we?

Speaker 2: 45:01

are would be that we are more alike than we like to think, right, that we are in way more relation than we like to think. We are not isolated. We're a very, very big archipelago. That's the one thing.

Speaker 1: 45:22

I mean, this has been a great conversation In my view. I think there are so many things that we could continue to really talk about for sure and I may have to continue this series a little much longer for the summer so many things, so many different aspects to talk about. But a big thank you to you, dr Ocasio-Vega, for joining me. This was again a great great. It was fun for me to even just be here right and learn from and alongside you. So I thank you for your time and for our Strictly Facts family tuning in.

Speaker 1: 45:56

I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. You know, as always, links to everything will be up on the website and social media, as well as links to Dr Ocasio-Vega's work, so you can follow her and the work that she's doing across the academy and on social media, as well as links to Dr Ocasio-Vegas' work so you can follow her and the work that she's doing across the academy and on social media as well. And till next time, everyone look more. Thanks for tuning in to Strictly Facts. Visit strictlyfactspodcastcom for more information from each episode. Follow us at Strictly Facts Pod on Instagram and Facebook and at Strictly Facts Pod on Instagram and Facebook and at Strictly Facts PD on Twitter.