A Tlayuda Is Not a Pizza, Oaxacan Cuisine in Salt Lake

“Mexican pizza,” she scribed. 

Pizza Hut in Mexico City danced before me. I dreamed them putting pickled jalapeños or even al pastor meat on a pie. Maybe she meant spreading the enchilada sauce on the bread before adding cheese, veggies, and meats. 

Bubble, Turn, Soak: Carnival and Cosmos in Cusco

David Knowlton

Couples dance around trees covered with gifts and planted for the occasion in Cusco’s neighborhoods these days. The pairs turn and spin and they chop with an axe.  Turn, turn, chop. Turn, turn, chop. A band, contracted for the occasion plays and a beat marks the way. Turn, turn, chop.

After a long time the tree falls, creaking and moaning. The couple striking the last blow gets a new task, one filled with responsibility and obligations. They sponsor next year's feast. They find and organize to put up the tree. They coordinate the people of the neighborhood who bring drink and ingredients for a meal boiled in a single, very large pot.  It is a feast in a pot and on many plates.

Contacts and Layers, Dinner at Cancun Cafe

           “Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression -- these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone. Miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning -- these are some of the perils of writing in the contact zone.”

                                                                      —Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”

Uxmal, I have never visited you. I have not seen first hand your stone pyramids and palaces, nor have I heard near you the whoosh of Yucatecan nor smelled the spicy depths of achiote, a seed that seasons the food of your people. It not only imparts flavor to the meals people eat near you, known also as annatto or bixa it once colored people to make them attractive, to make them social. 

Though you stand stolidly in Yucatan a monument to a once and maybe, your name escaped and I found it on a gray, smoggy, Salt Lake January in a brick building, near the city’s center, with federalist doors and windows. You were in a place called Cancun, as if the resort on the opposite side of Yucatan where blue waters and gleaming, tall hotels meet, where pyramids from Chichen Itza, not you, stand out on the wall.

Desert Sun

Fourth Grade, the old Zach White School, Upper Valley, El Paso, Texas. 

Bored and not happy, this tall and thin eight year old, turning nine, did not know what to do or how to do.  

The school work was easy.  It seldom grabbed my attention. P.E. or any period of recreation terrified. I did not fit. At least in class the terror subsided and I could lose myself in some book, all the while listening to the teacher, a very intense dark-haired man, Mr. Jacobs, who was thin as a Texas dawn. 

The Fat Drop

I just fell. 

Afterwards, I felt old and helpless. Especially when two twenty-something young men rushed to help me get up.

Food So Treacherous

“You won’t like that” insisted the fifty-ish woman in a heavy Chinese accent just after I had ordered the Tiger Skin Peppers.  

“Why won’t I like it?  What is it?”

“Green peppers fried with many vinegars.  You won’t like it.  Perhaps you like the Tofu with Mixed Vegetables.”

Like a little boy I found myself getting stubborn.  “No.  I want the Tiger Skin Peppers.”

The Licensing of Wind

July 2003

The wind started blowing, lifting grit and spinning it into odd shapes in the air before thrusting it against walls and skin. Normally August is the month of winds, but it started in July.  Everyone is talking about it.   The wind makes it feel cold, cold and gritty.