“I make ravioles,” says one person, probably young.
“She makes ravioles,” responds another.
If you walk down the street of any Argentine city, you will likely hear that joke from the 1985 film Esperando la carroza (Waiting for the Hearse). Elvira Romero de Musicardi (played by China Zorrilla) says to her daughter, "I make puchero, she makes puchero; I make ravioles, she makes ravioles," while complaining about her neighbor that is making stuffed pasta, too.
Imagine a Sunday afternoon. Outside it is a spring day. You can smell the aroma of tomato sauce. Elvira, her neighbor, and likely many others around the neighborhood are cooking pasta — spaghetti, ravioles, or ñoquis that are always kneaded fresh at home. That fragrance combines with the smell of grilled meat on the parrilla of some roof terrace or garden. On Sundays, the streets are perfumed by the neighborhood's cooks.
That line has been ingrained into generations of Argentines and says a lot about the social and cultural practices that gravitate around food, the dance of aromas in the air, and the legacies that subsist underneath the fallout of postmodernity, although these legacies may be more imaginary than real. Or maybe it's the desire to remake a familiar past out of the aromas of an unquestionable belonging and an identity anchored in ‘el barrio’ and tradition.
I saw the film that same year: 1985. Recently, Argentina, 1985, flashed back onto the screen. The film's title recounts the trial of the military men who led the bloodiest dictatorship that the country ever lived. It was a dictatorship that brought with it the word "desaparecido" [the disappeared] with a terrifyingly new meaning. That year, I was a film student, and I was able to see Esperando la carroza a few days before its premiere. Later, I saw it in a movie theater and have since watched it rerun on tv and sometimes in bits and pieces on the internet.
The comedy was well received upon its release, although it was neither celebrated by critics nor a smash hit at the box office and landed far from entering the zeitgeist of the time. But today, its dialogue has become a part of our slang. Three empanadas immediately tells you that someone is so broke that they can only afford a trio of empanadas to feed themselves; When someone tries to one-up another, you might proclaim, ‘I make ravioles, she makes ravioles.’ Both lines refer to food and I don't think it's pure coincidence. Food is how a large section of the country constructs affective, familial, and social ties.
These phrases are a part of popular speech and a code of belonging. Surprisingly, this didn't occur the year of its premiere, which was a year defined by films about the return to democracy. Almost one-third of all the movies released in 1985 were directly or indirectly about the civic-military dictatorship that ruled over Argentina between 1976 and 1983.
1985 was also the release year that the first Argentine film to win an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film: La historia oficial [An Official Story]. The film narrates the story of the boys and girls stolen at birth from mothers who had been illegally detained and sent to concentration camps and the rise of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo [the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo] who searched for them. This film, and not Esperando la carroza, was the critic and public favorite of the year. I point this out because it is interesting to think about why it took so long for Esperando la carroza to gain popularity.
In both films, food is central to pivotal moments. But the films aren’t concerned about the food itself more so than the family dining table with which Argentine cinema gravitates around. Family tensions are expressed by the plates served or those that never arrive at the table.
In The Official Story, the climaxes happen during the sobremesa, the meandering conversation that follows a meal. After a Sunday meal, Jose, played by Guillermo Battaglia, a Spanish exile living in Argentina and nearing the end of his life, clashes with his son Roberto, played by Héctor Alterio: "The whole country went under. Only the sons of bitches, the thieves, the accomplices, and my eldest son rose to the top."
Just like the discussion between father and son, an intimate and elegant dinner is followed by generous cups of wine between Ana and Alicia, played by Chunchuna Villafañe and lead Norma Aleandro, who never doubted the origin of her adopted daughter until Ana recounts being kidnapped, raped and tortured during the dictatorship. The moments shared over those tables are a part of us, and our stories reinforce its fundamental role in creating empathy.
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When Waiting for the Hearse became a cult classic, it wasn't the original spectators that were responsible, but young viewers that found it on video and DVD or rerun over and over again on television. The documentary, Carroceros, follows a large group of fans that organize annual walks through the neighborhood and surround the home where the film takes place. The group is young and they know the lines by heart and organize games to remake scenes and dialogues. It's an audience that not only didn't see the movie when it was released but also live in a Buenos Aires where the concepts of family structure are completely different.
Inevitably, several questions arise, but the main one is: why do food, family, the immigrant identity, and the middle-class neighborhood of a city like many others in Argentina attract a post-industrial generation?
This century is not a time for reconstructing a conservative family model, much less a time for large houses with space for long tables and kitchens where pasta is kneaded for more than ten people. Younger generations are unlikely to identify with those neighborhood homes like the ones owned by the Musicardis. Maybe it is an inexplicable longing for a familiar world, real or imagined, that tends to vanish between skyscrapers and frozen meals. Waiting for the Hearse is, despite being a parody, a world of familiar smells and voices, of intense identities and belongings despite so many personal differences. The aroma of the food, the voice that calls everyone to the table, and the family feuds repeated Sunday after Sunday are perhaps a space of certainties in the terra incognita of postmodernity.
This fanaticism that Carroceros depicts so clearly may be the result of the growth of fandoms – Waiting for the Hearse is filled with one-liners and scenes that make it ripe to become a cult film – or the fact that the movie hits at a longing of a form of belonging and identity in the face of the erasure of culturaltraditional traditions of the 20th century and connections to genealogy, professions, community, and political belonging.
But why the most remembered lines refer to food remains unanswered. Everything leads me to think that it is because food works as a key to building a universe and that, just by mentioning it, it appears in its entirety in the imagination of many people in Argentina.
Much of this country's urban popular culture, particularly through comedy in the cinema and theater, drew on what the first Romeros and Musicardis, Spaniards and Italianians, brought with them. In those constructions born in the conventillos [huge houses where families of different origins lived in rooms and shared common spaces] and, years later, in individual family homes an national identity was configured. With the rise of the working classes after the triumph of Peronism in 1945, the concept of a middle class family was exemplified by Waiting for the Hearse. In this context of the history of the development of popular culture in Argentina, food and cinema were two key devices for constructing the collective imagination of the working classes.
When the decay of the dream of the continuous rise of capitalism threatened the dream of a better life for the new generations (financialization and concentration of capital accompanied by a crisis that was felt strongly in the 1990s), it is possible that Waiting for the Hearse has become a sort of refuge.
A place where familiar voices and the aromas of maternal food came to wrap us up and return us to a time of certainties, neither better nor worse. A world where we would have the security of the family table that Sunday after Sunday promised pasta or barbecue and an after meal sobremesa with the same discussions as always.
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Daniel Cholakian. Sociologist and culture journalist. He comes and goes between journalism, university teaching, and working for the Minister of Culture. The never-changing dream is a Latin American homeland that talks about cultural politics. You can find him on Twitter sharing articles and activities.
La Delmas. Illustrator and NFT artist. She was born and raised in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. She is 100% inspired by her family origins and customs and a lover of homemade food and good meals. Find her on Instagram.
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