Juan of Words

No Sólo De Pan Vive El Hombre

Not Only From Bread Does Man Live

On growing up bilingual, bicultural

Marching!  Huaraches instead of tennis shoes.  All white pants and a long-sleeved button down collar shirt of the same color.  A simple red bandana, wrapped around the neck, slightly twisted into a single knot.  No belt.  No socks.  Just a cream colored hat, not exactly vaquero style – a child’s hat made of straw – sitting at the top of my head.  Boys dressed just like me, little girls wearing small A-line skirts in different shades of red, most of them in deep vibrant reds, evocative of passions and emotions too profound for any of us to comprehend.  In waves of movement, all at the same time, we were marching, chanting the few words we did know of the Himno Nacional.

Mexicanos al grito de querra!…something, something, something…

Past the arroyos of drinkable water, the concrete-paved cancha of so many bailes, my grandfather’s house, my grandmother’s, those of mis tios y mis tias, past the tanque de agua, the remolino of early morning corn churning, all in unison, singing all the way, families at their doorsteps, watching us, singing along, celebrating the independence of a country foreign to us.  The dirt roads full of rocks, sandy and dusty, much more inconvenient than the sidewalks and manicured lawns we were used to.  We’d only arrived a few weeks earlier, enrolled in a school where attendance was optional even for kids as young as ourselves.  If we didn’t want to go we just didn’t go.  Choosing instead to roam up small hills, down trails of dirt, running from one side of the rancho to the other, carefree, and free, truly for the first time.

En el otro lado we had rules.  If we didn’t follow them we were paddled, written up, sent home on suspension, punished more at home, then sent back for more learning.

For the marching though everyone went to school.   It was an obligation, a privilege almost, for everyone to gaze upon us, their little soldiers.  A reason for pride in a place where so little was ever easy.  Lyrics surpassed us, escaped us, especially my brothers and I, the chicanillos, more americanos than anything else, a novelty really for the rest of the kids who marveled at any of our utterances in another language.  We were anchor babies, born to parents of illegal status, naturalized only by default of our birthplace, foreigners to our family in Mexico, burdens, outcasts, novelties…but we were unaware and in our ignorance reveled in the dualism of our existence, blissful at how lucky we were to experience true freedom for a few months every summer, afterwards always heading home to the luxuries of running water and electricity.  Mexicanos.  Americanos, even if only by default.

Those years were magical – way more important than I ever realized.

Juan of Words does Salsa Verde

After taking your votes on Twitter, everyone wanted salsa verde instead of salsa roja, which I guess makes sense because everyone prefers green salsa to red salsa on their tacos, well most people anyway.  The process is very simple.  All you need to get started are a few green tomatoes (tomatillos), the peppers of your choice – I chose chile piquin because it is a personal favorite – a skillet or flat iron, and of course a molcajete.

My goal is to make this recipe as simple as possible for anyone to make, or at least get an idea of how to make salsa verde.  For red salsa you would basically change the color of your tomatoes – and remember folks the more chiles you add to your salsa the spicier it will be.  If it comes out too spicy people might accuse you of having been angry when you made the salsa.

Your comments are always welcome – thanks for watching!

Our Gorditas: Real Women Have Curves – And We Like It?

¿Quien Dice Que Las Gorditas No Provocan?

Is it gorditas pero sabrosas?

Who says big girls can’t be sexy too?  I mean anything a thinner woman (also known as skinny b*****s to many gorditas) can wear, a thicker woman can probably find in her size as well, what with all the plus size clothing stores and sections now available almost everywhere.  But are we, Latino men, any more or less accepting of our gorditas?

The whole ‘Real Women Have Curves’ phenomenon comes to mind, as does the interpretation of PHAT as pretty hot and tempting as opposed to just F-A-T, which for whatever reason makes the word sound much less harsh.  Like saying ‘Large and in Charge!’ or ‘¡Gordita pero Sabrosa!‘, especially with a little attitude behind it, diminishes the negative stigma of being a few pounds overweight.

As Latino men we like the ‘extra junk in the trunk’, the love handles that give us a little more de donde agarrar, the larger ‘lady lumps’ that come with a few extra pounds, and we don’t mind the fact that you ‘full-figured’ ladies also know how to chow down better than most.  The preparation of our favorite platillos, minus any guilt or reluctance, is a definite plus tambien!  Who wants to be yelled at for eating what we like?  In all honesty, we understand no matter how JLO-esque your figure might be today, it won’t stay that way forever.  We’re okay with that.  It’s not a big deal.

Even if you’ve never had a statuesque figure, as long as you’re Llenas de Amor!

Pepitas: Semillas De Pumpkin

Fresh off a more than 18 hour drive from their origin in northern Mexico, San Luis Potosi to be exact, these pepeitas are the equivalent of sunflower seeds in the diets of millions of mexicanos around the world, yours truly included.  For me they are the snack I most look forward to receiving anytime anyone promises to bring me back something from Mexico.  These seeds in particular were brought back to me by my sister who just came back from her vacation in San Luis and Guanajuato.

Semillas de Calabaza

Granted one does not have to actually leave the country to find these tasty pumpkin seeds, toasted and salted to perfection, since they can also be found at most Mexican markets, but as with anything else hecho in Mexico, they just seem to taste better when they’ve traveled such a long road to get to us.  There is no wrong or right way to eat a pepita.  You either # 1 utilize your hands to crack them open, then introduce their salty crunchiness into your mouth, one or many pumpkin seeds at a time…

Option #1: Use Your Hands

Or # 2, my personal favorite, just grab a handful of pepitas, place them in your mouth, one at a time, use your teeth to open them up, and enjoy.  An added bonus of eating them this way is that you get to taste the outer shell of the pepitas, which is the saltiest and most toasted part of the seed.

Option #2: Just Bite In

Asi es que ya saben, if you’re going to Mexico anytime soon…or just your local marqueta…pick me up a few bags of pepitas.  My current supply is  running low.

El Que Busca, Encuentra

He Who Seeks, Finds

No feelings were harmed in the writing of this blog.

Or so I am hoping…after months of agonizing over my personal battle of the bulge, embarrassing side effects and all, including increasingly larger love handles (a.k.a. lonjas or lonjitas) and diminishing levels of energy, I’ve decided to get off my butt and do something about it!  More accurately, after having the youngest of my four sisters bet me that I would not be able to lose weight again.

Again because six years ago this same battle was fought and won by me, hands down…Back then my weight was just five pounds more than what it is today, although the distribution of fat was not as proportional as it is today, thank God for that, and I was in much worse overall shape.  Still, through a self-paced regimen of better eating and constant exercise I managed to lose exactly 100 pounds in 12 months, which I kept off for roughly three years, until I began gaining again for some reason.

I think it was too much for too long – running five miles a day everyday of the week but Sunday – and in the end I couldn’t keep it up, I became too comfortable, trusting that the weight would just stay off because I had lost it.  As I began giving myself more leeway to eat what I wanted when I wanted the pounds just started packing back on.

Today, for the most part, aside from my bad habit of smoking, I feel pretty healthy, capable of doing just as much as the next guy, roughly my age and strength, yet I realize doing nothing means only one of two things: keep gaining weight or eventually hear the bad news from my doctor that I’ve got Diabetes, high cholesterol, or something worse.  So even though I’m now in my early thirties, not in my twenties, and my body cannot party or take as much as it used to, try as I may to prove otherwise, one way or another the 20 pounds at stake will be shed over the course of the next 90 days.

But never fear.  I am not giving up on my tortillas, carnitas, pan dulce, and other favorite platillos just yet – only figuring out how to cut back in order to have my cake and eat it too…no pun intended.

Deséenme suerte – ando buscando la manera.

Dime Con Quien Andas Y Te Dire Quien Eres

Tell Me Who You’re With And I’ll Tell You Who You Are

To this day my mother still tells the story of how each Sunday in that modest church in the Valley, where so few people lived in town that everyone came to the same mass, regardless of whether we were white or brown, spoke English or Spanish, cleaned houses or owned the land, I’d leave my family in the last row of pews, all six of them in their nicest clothes, which many weeks were pretty much the same pair of jeans, buttoned down shirts, and dresses for my sisters, to join my always sharply-dressed, impeccably golden-haired classmates from elementary school at the front and center of our church.

From there I’d turn and look at my family all those pews away to the bashful hand signaling of my mother telling me to come back to her while trying even harder not to be noticed.  Blatantly refusing I’d simply turn my head and look forward, glancing back only every other few seconds.

Up there I felt important – like I was a part of something bigger than myself.  No golden locks on my head, no pale colorless skin on my arms with a few freckles here and there, no blue or green penetrating eyes staring out at the world, regardless of how much I may have wanted any or all of that back then.  My clothes were simple, in no way fancy, not in comparison to ruffled dresses, colorful ribbons, and khaki slacks, polished shoes and matching dress socks.  Everything seemed so perfectly coordinated.  A far cry away from the hanging clothes in our back yard, fading away with every sunset.

I liked it…better than the view from where we were anyway.

A trip to church at our house meant rummaging through piles of blue jeans searching for a pair with no holes in them, or at the very least with a very few amount, sitting through at least ten minutes of my mother trying to tame our stubborn hair into submission, cloths full of soap and water to the face, scrubbing every last bit of sweat from the tiniest of crevices, even after we’d taken a bath.  If we tried to be sneaky and walk out of the house with our favorite pair of blue jeans, inevitably with many holes in them, we were marched right back inside to change.  It was never a matter of choice.  It was an obligation, for families, all families, to gather in our Southern church and listen to the word of God.

Years later I was the bashful one.  Feeling less significant than my Caucasian-gringo friends, the carefree child in me gone, no longer in the Valley of our beginnings, now in the slums of our new city of opportunity, my skin and accent my most embarrassing flaw, cause for anger, justification for stupidity in thought and action, parents who spoke no English, Que Desgracia! But they were mine, and I was theirs, more then, than ever before.

It wasn’t the gavachos, or the gangbangers after them, the wannabe cholillos of my youth, the dorky friends I’d skip with, or the neighbors’ kids who would get in trouble with me that ever defined me.  It was me and the personal journey of self-acceptance that we all have to go through…I hope.

Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres – me no think so!