“Europe is best remembered by those who were never there.”
The first time I watched Zama — Lucrecia Martel’s period piece where the nightmares of occupation slowly turn inward towards the colonizer — was in theaters back in 2017. It was after a long day and a warm meal and I fell asleep, wandering in and out of consciousness enough to dream alongside the beautiful nightmare she painted on the screen: bright green trees and leafy swamps, men plastered red from the clay earth that drenches the soil of the Northeast and a faint sensation of violence, tight and omnipresent, that slowly unravels and becomes louder until suddenly, boom, it explodes in the film’s final act. The land avenges itself and the people who live on it, briefly, because we all know how the story of South America, its land and its people would continue to unfold. Something told me, with insatiable urgency, to return to it.
That line has stuck to me, glued to my chest for the last four days, fluttering across my brain like an airplane banner. I thought of all the times I had heard Buenos Aires be called the ‘Paris of South America’, shallow code I’ve never understood beyond its reference to the architecture of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, which is coincidentally, the only neighborhoods people who use that term explore. I thought of a trip to Guatemala for a conference, where on the first night my host took me to eat pizza at a place that looked like an Olive Garden. Or a bus ride from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz in Bolivia months after Evo Morales became present and the woman sitting next to me that complained about all the fried food in Cochabamba and told me to stick to the East where there were ‘more Spaniards’.
The more and more I dive into this project, which I thought was about the politics of food in Argentina, the more I realize that this is a project about colonization and decolonization, which I guess is the same thing with another name, because to talk about the politics of the Americas is to talk about colonization and hope for a discussion around decolonization, whether those terms are dropped explicitly or otherwise. It is a conversation that feels more and more present and not just because I’m more actively asking the questions.
José Eizaga is a cook originally from Cojedes, Venezuela. Eizaga has passed around a number of kitchens in Buenos Aires whilst building out his restaurant — an arepa shop that brings back nixtamalized corn dough of his ancestors. The pandemic put his restaurant on pause, making him think quickly and open a pizza shop whilst studying up on maize and other Venezuelan food traditions at risk of being lost. We sat down to talk about changes in consciousness brought by the pandemic, rediscovering ancestral food traditions and understanding what it means to be an Americano.
We’ve known each other for a while now and I’ve been following your work around corn and Venezuelan cuisine. I was surprised that you opened a secret pizza shop. How did this get started?
I have had this place for a year now. I was working on opening an arepa shop but because of some bureaucratic stuff it was really hard to get open and when the pandemic and quarantine hit, they started paying me half my salary at my full time job and I just can’t live off that. I needed to open something quick that I knew people would like, so pizzas. I bought a pizza oven and got started. It wasn’t ever a part of my plan. It was more like a pandemic solution.
So what is your pizza like?
The pizza I would like to eat. It’s a very light dough with a lot of seasonal ingredients. I’m working on an asparagus pizza now. We use artisan cheese from Santa Fe. We have some spice, that was important to me, using chile and incorporating that flavor. But basically the spirit of the pizza is just all the things I like.
Is there any pizza culture in Venezuela?
Yes but it is very North American. There are a lot of chains that came to Venezuela, like Pizza Hut, and that idea sort of stuck in people’s minds. Pizza means a chain restaurant. So when you see Venezuelan pizza it’s really just a North American pizza, not a lot of crust, very flat. The toppings are maybe a bit different sometimes, some places throw whatever on top, a fried egg maybe, or sometimes you’ll find crust stuffed with cheese like a tequeño. When I got to Buenos Aires the pizza culture left a big impression on me. People are fanatical about pizza. But there is this new wave of people making pizza that is really interesting, really sincere, this new perspective, really high quality. I think that’s very cool, that shift in the point of view of such an established food. I’m a regular at a lot of old pizza shops but I love that this change is becoming more intense and people are really returning to neighborhood businesses.
That’s funny that you’re interested in a new pizza style but a lot of your work in Venezuelan food centers around rescuing traditions. Tell me more about this other project.
For a while now I’ve begun thinking about things that I never imagined I would think about with food, culture and the communities throughout America. When I say America, I mean everything from Canada to Patagonia. I don’t want to impose anything on anyone, but I would really like for people to want to find their roots, their food, which is funny to be saying as I’m making you a pizza. So I have joined this project called El maíz nos une. There are four of us doing research: me, Mercedes Golip, Francisco Briceño and José Ripol. We’re all spread out in different places. It’s a virtual organization. We are collecting information that we will publish online and make available for free. It’ll be information about recipes and their origins with a lot of emphasis on the producers and storytellers. People can download, duplicate and recreate them however they want. My role is that I’m from the countryside, I never lived in the city, and so I know a lot of farmers in my region. I’m from Cojedes which is cattle country. And so I am in contact with producers over there and they are telling me all about what they are growing, information about seeds, crops that they are bringing from other areas of the country. That’s how this is growing and will continue to grow. It’s like, I know this person with this product and they know someone with this process and they know someone and more people keep popping up, and it’s the same for all four of us. I’ve put together information from sixteen contacts and it is already a ton of information. We are learning a lot of things that we had no idea about and that we only know because we are investigating and seeking out this information and the idea is to make the access to that information easy for everyone.
What are some of those things you’re rediscovering?
We are motivated by constantly asking why. Why is Venezuelan food this way? What happened? Everything is so industrialized. Arepas in Venezuela were once reserved for special occasions, it was a festive food, and when the product was industrialized it became a daily thing. That’s great but there was very little care in protecting its origins. So our research began asking those questions about what happened to that culture, to our society. Why does all of our food come out of a plastic bag? How come in Venezuela we lost a food culture whereas in Mexico, for example, they continue to nixtamalize corn to make tortillas? Venezuelans used to nixtamalize too. We had lots of recipes with nixtamalized corn but people don’t know that. Something strange happens there. I made tortillas out of a nixtamalized corn dough and put it up on instagram and all these Venezuelans responded like amazing, tortillas are so delicious! But if I make an arepa with that same dough, they are all like that’s not an arepa and who knows what else. I was really interested in understanding that reaction. What changed? I feel like in Venezuela we really identify with brands, packaged foods became a part of our cuisine, it’s a part of our nationality, our identity. Those foods have become a part of the culture but something has been lost.
When you are referring to original recipes or loss of knowledge, are you referring to something that is mostly the consequence of the Venezuelan diaspora or is this a loss of knowledge that has been a long time coming with the industrialization of food?
No, this is something that has been happening for a long time. Pre-cooked corn flour started appearing around the 1960s and as corn became more industrialized everything changed. They started switching to hybrid corns that could produce more and that changed the entire production process. When it was produced, how it was produced, who produced it, and so this culture around corn began disappearing. The same with the arepa. Obviously no one is going to go through the whole process of turning corn into dough if you can buy a bag of pre-cooked corn flour. That product made it so the variety of corn we had disappeared. If you go to Colombia and enter a market, there are so many kinds of corn. White corn, yellow corn, blue corn, grey corn, every shade. How could we have lost so much of our history? It doesn’t make sense to me. We don’t know our recipes. And that has happened with corn and so many other products. So what are we left with now? That knowledge today is lost. If our Venezuelan traditions haven’t completely disappeared already, then they are right there ready to vanish. And, yes of course, the diaspora exasperates everything. We developed an economy that became more and more dependent on petroleum at the expense of other industries, and that obviously can be seen in our agriculture and our ag industry. We didn’t invest in the resources we had, in the culture that we had, and now look at where the country went when the value of the barrel went down.
There is this construct around the immigrant cook or the cook who doesn’t belong to the dominant culture of a country and a lot of times they are obligated to cook ‘their food’ but in a version that is really limited to what is understandable to the majority. Here that is really apparent in what are referred to as ethnic cuisines. Chinese food [sic] nearly every Chinese restaurant has an identical menu. And with Venezuelan food the menu is usually arepas and tequeños. Something very casual. Do you feel you’ll be given space to do what you want? It’s so fascinating to me what you are doing with recovering ancestral recipes, and especially given the unique context of the Venezuelan diaspora, and just how different your work is compared to most other Venezuelan projects.
That is a big issue with Venezuelan food here. It has to do with what you are pointing out but it isn’t just one thing. Partly, our food culture there, I remember as a kid when we went out to eat it was this special occasion. We got dressed up to go eat Italian food. We didn’t go out to eat regional dishes [sic] food from our country. So that education around food wasn’t a big part of our restaurant culture. It also has to do with who the immigrant is here. In Buenos Aires, the Venezuelans that came here are professionals. They aren’t cooks. They are educated or had other careers. So a lot of people come and they open a Venezuelan restaurant to have a business, and they do what is safe. Being an immigrant, leaving your country with a suitcase and nothing else and going somewhere that you have never been before is indescribably difficult. I don’t hold anything against anyone that is cooking that way. That built businesses. They are surviving just like me. But there are businesses with Venezuelan pizza or Venezuelan hamburgers. Sure, in the food world over there, there is a street food culture with hamburgers, but it isn’t ours. I’ve spoken with so many of those business owners and I tell them, that is your perception of what Venezuelan food is. But it’s just that, a perception. Venezuelan food is not that. The same thing happens with typical foods, the arepas and the tequeños, that is a simplification of the richness we have. If we are going to make arepas, awesome, but let’s learn where it came from, how you really make it, what it’s process is from scratch, what those original recipes are. There are people here doing really good things. La Grulla Amarilla, they are making cachapas that are amazing. They are made from real corn. Everything is handmade. I have absolutely no idea how they do what they do with the corn you find here. Intuition. Some ancestral knowledge that she feels with her hands. Or Gloria from Trashumantes. Her pasteles look great and she is also seeking out answers about her origins. I was invited to give a class a while back about Venezuelan food and they wanted me to teach arepas. And I was just like, no, I don’t do that. If we are going to do that, we are going to do that right and make the dough. You can’t do that in an hour long class. So I told them about this region called the Peninsula of Paria. It is 25 minutes by boat to Trinidad and Tobago which was an English colony. The English brought people from India and now there is a big Indian influence in the food in that area. Everyone has their garam masala. All of the food is heavily spiced. It’s this very specific cooking that belongs to that place and those people. So I wanted to do a version of a recipe called mucuro, which is named after the fish it uses, and it’s a sudado with fish made with coconut milk. They had no idea that anything like that existed in Venezuelan cuisine. Yeah, I said, this is why. There are so many stories and recipes and people have no idea about them.
That loss of knowledge is something that has a lot to do with colonization too. These attitudes are things I have seen in different trips around South America, obviously it manifests itself in different ways in different places. But that aspiration to be another place or turn South America into something else is there and it's everywhere.
That is exactly why we want to focus so much of our studying on corn. Corn is what unites America. And that is what this project is about. We want to form a community and expand this network beyond Venezuela to investigate food and American culture, and when I say American, I mean the entire American continent. I’m not interested in this idea of Latin America that starts in Mexico and everything below as if it’s something separate. That is a total falsehood and anyone who argues the contrary should pick up a history book. Everyone that lives in America lives on land where there were once native communities, from Canada to here. Some countries have preserved that culture more than others, like in Bolivia or Peru. The United States or Venezuela are examples of places where something else happened and that culture isn’t present. I thought about that a lot when I watched the Street Food episode in Buenos Aires. What that woman said about everyone being Italian, about there not being any indigenous people, like she was born in London or something. This is a South American country. What a sad perspective. And it comes from a place of pride, right? Like look at me, my parents are Italian, as if having European blood is better than having American ancestry. How sad. How sad that that is the way they look at South America. It is just so strange to me. They tricked us into believing that being indigenous was something to be ashamed of when really they are the ones who know the most. They are the ones that contain all the knowledge about our land and our traditions. And with food, that knowledge is incredible. That understanding of seeds, how to plant and harvest, that entire process. There are so many people that think that culture of returning to the land and forming a relationship with her is like a step back. On the other hand, I do feel a change happening that we are living through right now. This pandemic is forcing us to reflect on a lot of things. That’s what I’m doing. I took a class about corn with the Fundación Tortilla that Rafael Mier runs and it changed everything for me. My idea is to open this arepa shop with nixtamalized corn and other dishes rooted in corn like tamales, pozole, gorditas. It will be difficult because there is such little variety of maize left here. But I don’t feel alone. I feel like I am part of a change. I feel like we are returning to something.