Food

How do you become friends with someone? This is a question I have asked myself over and over these past few months, as I've tried to carve a place for myself within the rarámuri community of Oasis. I spent my first weeks helping the women to wash hundreds of dishes in the school cafeteria, scrubbing in silence as they talked and laughed in their language, which I am barely becoming conversant in. After two weeks of that, I knew I had to find a more aggressive tactic to become friends with the women. It was clear that no one was going to start taking to me about their lives after having just seen me around the settlement and exchanging a few pleasantries with me. So I became more aggressive, walking right up to women as they were sitting outside their houses sewing or washing clothes, and simply started talking to them.

I was surprised when many women responded with friendliness and even addressed some of the questions I asked back at me. I had learned it was important not to launch directly into formal interview questions after having just met them, so I tried to talk to them as if they were potential friends I had just met in a Northwestern classroom or a gym class. I think this was a good approach, but then I found myself struggling to find common ground with the women.

The easiest things to talk about when you are first getting to know someone are the most obvious: what you do for a living, where you are from, where you live, and about your family. I quickly found that the only one of these topics I felt completely comfortable talking about was my family; everything else lends too many hints about my economic status, and I am uncomfortable revealing this kind of information to the rarámuri women who struggle so much just to feed their families each day. It makes me feel guilty, I guess, that I have so much more, so I avoid those topics.

Talking about my mom, brothers, and sister-in-law is easy enough, but that conversation can only last a few minutes before everything basic about them is shared. The same on the womens' side. So, naturally, the women ask me if I have a husband and kids. I don't, so that closes another potential door in my face, since the women find it strange and funny that I am 24 years old and don't have my own family yet. "Se te está pasando el tren," one of them told me jokingly. The train is passing me by. The rarámuri tend to settle down with a husband very young, sometimes as early as 14 years old, so even when I am talking to a girl of 17 or 18 years old, she more likely than not has a baby in her arms. I think this reality creates distance between myself and the women, because motherhood is a very, very important part of the rarámuri womens' identity and it is not yet an important part of mine. I find it very hard to relate to a teenager who has a baby, and they find it hard to understand a female in her mid-twenties who isn't a mother yet.

Racking my brain for something else to talk about, it occurred to me one day to ask what they most like to cook. My questions about cooking and food were initially aimed to discover how well the rarámuri eat, what their money can buy them, and what they traditionally cook. But the topic also proved to be an excellent conversation starter and bonding point. Happily, I found food to be a topic which helped me relate to all rarámuri women. Even more joyfully, I found food to be a topic which the rarámuri women could discuss enthusiastically for a long time. "What do you like to eat?" has become a standard question I ask a rarámuri woman when I am getting to know her. Usually she smiles and goes off into a list: beans, tortillas, soup, ham, meat, eggs, potatoes...and the list goes on. Then they ask me the same question, and I respond with my own list, which contains many of the items they like. For a while I thought it was strange that food was such a fun topic to discuss with the rarámuri, since I have never in my life talked at such great lengths about what I like to eat with anyone. But I was just grateful that I found a way to bond with them.

Then, one day, I understood something new. I always ask the women why they left their mountain homeland and migrated to the city, and the answer is always the same: there is no food in the mountains. I got to asking them what their diet was like in the best of times in the mountains, and they usually respond with another list: beans, tortilla, potatoes, squash. No meat? I'd ask. Most would shake their heads no, others would say "sometimes."

In the settlement, I often see women going to the store around the corner and coming back with 3 L bottles of coca cola. Living in isolation in the mountains, the rarámuri who still dwell there only drink soda on the rare occassions they travel to a town and have some money to buy it. The Oasis rarámuri are enthusiastic consumers of potato chips, corn on the cob, popsicles, gum, chocolate, etc. Thinking about the lack of food in the Sierra, I realized that many of the adult women who had been raised in the mountains had never experienced having a wide variety of food at their reach until they migrated to the city and lived in Oasis. For the first time in their lives, they don't have to grow or kill everything they eat, and they have the luxury of trying new foods or having cravings. "Antojos," in Spanish.

No wonder we bond over food. It is one of the few things we have in common, our frequent trips to the supermarket and the privilege of choosing what we want to eat that day. Oftentimes, proponents of traditional rarámuri lifestyle lament over the loss of farming traditions. Doctors despair about increasing diabetes and obesity in the urban rarámuri population. I, too, feel a strong desire to see traditional rarámuri farming preserved, and I hate to see Oasis children consuming potato chips on a daily basis. But it was an amazing thing to discover, this excitement about food that I have never encountered in anyone else, let alone an entire population. If you ever get the chance to converse with a rarámuri, ask them what they like to eat. They will probably respond enthusiastically and ask you the same thing.