Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[upbeat music]
My name is Adán Medrano. I'm a native of San Antonio, Texas and Nava Coahuila,
and I live in Houston. I'm a food writer.
I love to cook. I've been a cook for a long time in restaurants,
and I trained at The Culinary Institute of America sometime back.
That's how I started.
At The Culinary Institute of America, as good as a school it is,
and as well as they do with Argentina, Peru,
with their cuisine, Mexico, they weren't doing my food.
They were not doing the food of poor people who live
in Central and South Texas.
It just wasn't there. It was invisible, nothing.
I had some run-ins with some of the professors who wanted me
to cook a certain way, and I said, "That's not the way you do it."
And I would cook it my way and then they would say, "Oh."
I got my diploma, got certificate and realized that--
that I needed to tell the story that wasn't being told.
Oh. Gee, that's good.
The Texas-Mexican Cuisine gives you an opportunity to see
how differences are embraced.
But before their embraced, you have to understand them.
Ah, let me show you, let me show you, let me show you.
This. This is what the Texas-Mexican cuisine is about.
This is what the Mexican-American people are about, it's the molcajete.
This molcajete is the metaphor for our food and for our community.
If you take the molcajete...
This is volcanic rock by the way. You're going to put ingredients in there.
You're going to mash them.
You like the sound. Where out of many differences,
they come together, you crush them,
you paste them, you harmonize them
and then you have beauty out of differences.
That's the best way that I could tell you.
[gentle music]
This would be a celebration of the American roots.
I'm hoping that this will be a story that is understood.
I hope it's a story that bothers some people, that bothers most people
because I hope it's a story that is about becoming, what we can become.
[uplifting music]
[warm music]
So I'm often asked, "Do you like Tex-Mex food?"
There are two answers to that.
The first meeting I had for Tex-Mex is it's by Anglos for Anglos,
and it served in places like the tourist centers here in the San Antonio River...
...was created in the 1900s when Texas food
made by Mexicans, by Native American Mexicans
were so delicious that everyone was coming to San Antonio
because it was a tourist destination because of the food.
But the problem was that it was good and delicious, but...
...they didn't want to rub elbows with the Mexicans.
So you wanted Mexican food without the Mexicans.
We never ate Tex-Mex food at home, enough with the cheese.
The other meaning of Tex-Mex is owned by Mexican Americans who don't have another word
for the Mexican food of Texas.
It was not called Tex-Mex when the ladies, the chef restaurateurs,
now called Chili Queens, were cooking here at San Antonio,
those ladies who in the 1880s, 1900s,
began the first restaurants of San Antonio in Texas.
The San Antonio original chefs.
[upbeat Mexican themed music]
[Graciela] The Chili Queens of San Antonio were in all the plazas
in the center of the city. So Alamo Plaza was one of the main spaces
that the women congregated to sell their food.
This is where you could find the locals who needed to eat.
This is where tourists who were visiting wanted to eat as well.
We didn't have the restaurants that we know today that were indoors.
So the women just created their puestos,
their little stands, and prepared food.
I know my own great-grandmother, Teresita Cantú, she was a vendor, a chef,
my mother did tell the story of my great-grandmother being a Chili Queen,
and using the word Chili Queen.
The little baby is my mother, who's now 95 years old.
So my great-grandmother, she'd made tamales,
carne guisada, pollo guisado,
arroz con pollo, mole, chile relleno.
I was thinking about nopalitos and capirotada.
Um, so I think those are the foods that she must have made
because those are the ones that my mother made.
So yeah, everyone had a different style.
Everyone had their forte and what food they were going to prepare
and how they prepared it, the food that they had grown up with.
And so that allowed for the diversity
and the meals that were unique and distinct to each one of those stands.
These women have to be recognized for their smartness
and for their business-- for their business smarts.
[fire simmering]
[warm music]
[Maria] A lot of people tell me, "We come to downtown to go shopping,
and we have to stop, eat Maria's, it's just a tradition."
So, you know, everybody knows us, thank God.
I'm Maria Jilma Sanchez, and we're at Maria's restaurant in McAllen, Texas.
This is my mother.
She's the founder of Maria's restaurant.
-[Adán] You're the founder. -Yeah.
My grandpa said, " Mi hija, when you grow up,
you're going to be an excellent cook."
That's what my grandpa told me one time.
I'll never forget that. [laughs]
I knew I wanted to be in the restaurant business
since I guess my teenage years. My mom started and I said,
"My mom can do it, I can do it too." [laughs]
This is Lalo. He's my head waiter.
-Hi, Lalo, Adán, how are you? -Hi. Good.
We're very famous for carnitas, our enchiladas.
Our plato real, plato real, it's got a little bit of everything.
And that's very, very popular.
And then we have our bistec ranchero,
and, uh, we have, uh, de caldo de res.
Fideo, a lot of people don't know how to make fideo. [laughs]
Hey, we make it. [laughs]
-[Adán] Pico de gallo? -[Maria] Pico de gallo.
Pico de gallo. I've never tasted it.
[Maria] This is made with tomato, onion, cilantro, jalapeno.
-Jalapeno. -Jalapeno, yes.
[Adán speaking in Spanish] or is it fresh?
[Maria] It's fresh, it's all fresh.
And then we just put it in the blender. That's it.
Little bit of salt.
That's all, simple as that.
We get a lot of young customers, a lot of young customers, especially on Saturdays saying,
"Ma'am. We didn't know you all existed, my God.
This is food, pizza." Everybody, they get all excited
because it beats Taco Bell, and I go, "Well, hello."
-[laughs] -[Adán] I like your first cardboard--
-What do you call it? -Cardboard. Cardboard food.
We call it cardboard food. [laughing]
What do you think of the new ones in the fast food--
-Oh, mira, okay. My! -[both laughing]
-Look at that. -[Maria] And our homemade tortillas.
-[Adán] Homemade tortillas. -[Maria] Yes, sir.
[Adán] It's very-- it's very obvious these are--
[Maria] Yeah, they're homemade, we make them here.
[Adán] And this is the way we ate it.
We didn't use a spoon. We went like this.
[Maria] Yes, of course, that's much better. [laughs]
[Maria's mother] And it tastes better.
[Adán] Are there many women business restaurant owners like yourself?
[Maria] I would say like five that I know, they're close friends of mine.
And they all-- they all started here.
They all started as a waitress, and now they have their own business.
It means I-- we taught them good. [laughs]
My cooks are all women. My dishwashers are men.
We try and having that-- a male cook, but my ladies, they're too, you know, picky.
So we'd rather have ladies, they understand each other better.
It's the care they put into our food.
They are my kids, with them I'm-- I'm strong.
I'm strong. The women have to be on top now. [laughs]
I just love being here.
You know, I love my-- I love the business.
I always said, I always made homemade cookies.
And that's what people like.
-Mama knows best, Mama cooks better. -[laughing]
[Maria] When a customer tells me, "Golly, I just finished eating this plate."
And it reminds me of Grandma, like, you know, you make it good
like Grandma used to make it. I bring them memories.
And he goes, "That's why we like eating here because it's comida casera."
Just like home. [laughs] That's what it is. Yeah.
-[Adán] You bring them memories. -Mm-hmm. Exactly.
[mellow music]
[chimes ringing]
[distant chatter]
Mm! Mm!
Oh, that's nice. [chuckles]
That's very, very nice.
The flavor is so different. It's a lovely cinnamon taste.
-That's lovely. -[Leticia chuckles]
Thank you very much.
[chuckles]
[mellow music]
So, you want to take a look? [chuckles]
Okay.
My name is Celeste de Luna and we're here in Harlingen, Texas.
Recently I, um, bought a new press, it was expensive.
And I saved for three years out of art sales to buy it.
I never understood men and their cars and like how they love their cars
so much and gave it a name and all that, but I get it now.
I feel that way about my press. [laughs]
You would ink it up and then you'll pla-- you place your matrix right here.
So then you put your paper like this this. Put this down. And so then you put it
through like this. Then it would end up looking like the impression.
This is my Coatlicue print.
That's one that I've done just
'cause I've loved the idea of Coatlicue,
who is a Mexican goddess.
Most people refer to her as like the goddess of birth and death.
This is my one of my tamalada prints.
We would have a tamalada and we-- my par-- my family would kill a pig.
And so I can remember my mom, you know having a whole pig
on, you know, the mesa, on the countertop,
I mean, how horrifying is that. And then you know, "Why don't you like horror movies?
Right, like how--" [laughs]
Like and you come in and you're like, "Ah!" Like, and there's a pig
-and it's dead. -[Adán laughs] There's blood.
There's blood everywhere and your mom, "Good morning." You know.
-"No!" -[both laughing]
I give my life for your tamales.
And so this is my little honoring of the pig in general.
[Adán] So, we are going to make a Rio Grande Valley Specialty.
That's an original recipe by Celeste, which I am going to taste
-for the first time, and it's called grapefruit pie. -[chuckles]
-[Celeste] People who love grapefruit do love this pie. -[Adán] Do love it? Okay.
[Celeste] You know, I can remember my mom sort of
eating grapefruit at the kitchen table.
And I think, man, you know, if she were alive, she would have loved this pie.
And then you put a little bit of the gelatin,
you put it in the fridge for an hour, it'll gel.
Then we would take our grapefruit slices, arrange them, then pour the rest
of the gel in there. And then cover it and we can--
we can put it in the refrigerator, and then it's done.
[Adán] And the light is just right, it shimmers.
[chuckles] Oh, it's great.
-That's beautiful. -Doesn't it look great?
-Oh, yeah. -Okay.
We shall.
[laughing]
-Do you like it? -Mm!
-[laughing] -I love it.
-It's good? [laughing] -It's good. It's good.
And it's unique.
People don't know that you could make
a grapefruit pie.
It's, like, I had never heard of it.
[laughing]
-Oh my goodness. -It's really good.
[Celeste] I think I grew to love cooking because of my mom.
She cooked for-- she did the tortillas de mano.
She had her molcajete, which I have here.
This is my mother's molcajete. I have it here in a little place of honor.
These are her-- her kitchen towels, which she did, embroidered by hand
when she was younger. There you go.
You know, you have this idea of women being-- are supposed to be
in the kitchen, but the men, the people who get fame for being professional chefs are men.
I mean, the only way that you can really account for that is again, sexism.
Like we-- you have to call it for what it is.
-Salud. -Laughing.
People don't want to give women credit because women have traditionally not
been acknowledged as experts.
It's hard for people to accept women as experts.
I think there always have been women there, but just kind of relegated to those
shadow areas.
-Cheers. -[Adán] Cheers to your work too.
[Celeste] Cooking is in my own way
part of art activism, because it's part of our culture.
And I want to keep it up so that we can have the recipes
that my mom taught me. And also just to be healthy, be happy,
but it's connected to the land. We have to think-- I think
thinking about that, and also having a garden...
...maybe seeing some-- being a little closer to the traditions.
Food is so important.
[gentle music]
[Alston] We are in South Central North America.
It happens to be Bear County, Texas in San Antonio.
And if you look over here just on the other side of the trees
where the low trees are growing still down here in the bottom,
that's 10,000 years old. All through here,
we excavated 700 square meters from 20 different encampments,
and we found earth ovens, projectile points, knives, scrapers, mussel shells.
[cicadas chirping]
The south central part of the North American continent.
It's a very important place for inner--
literally international travel from Central America to Mexico,
along the highway that the Spanish call the Camino Real, which comes right through here.
We know that road literally in one level comes from Mexico City,
all the way through northern Mexico and the mountains,
all the way across the Rio Bravo and goes to St. Louis.
And that's where there were huge pyramids 2,000 years ago.
And the people who manage those pyramids in St. Louis, Cahokia Mounds,
new people who manage pyramids in Mexico City.
The Indian people who lived here, different from many other places
were always hunters and gatherers, 15,000 years ago,
they were hunting mammoths. 1,000 years ago,
they were hunting whitetail deer and through most of that time,
they were eating plant foods that are all around us today.
We're standing on a terrace surface, an this terrace is 50,000 years old.
So every person who ever walked through southern bear county,
walked on the same surface we're standing on.
And whatever they dropped, whatever they did, that evidence was left here.
There's a lot of stone here.
-How about this one? -Sure.
See how it has kind of a pointed end here,
that pointed end, that was mounted on a stick.
And that was used to groove bone or wood
and make a groove in it so then it could be snapped.
It's called a graver or an engraver.
Everybody thinks they're the first people here, even if they're Hispanic.
They think the Spanish were the first here. They don't look back into understanding
the depth of history. History is more than what we see in our lifetimes
or what our grandparents can tell us.
[Adán] Ah!
[Adán] Here.
Now, I'll--
I'll do it sideways
like I was cross country skiing.
[Alston] Here's what the Indians came for down here.
See, that's the flint.
That's-- that's what these guys are after.
That's what's-- see.
Cut yourself with it every time.
But-- but this is what-- what the river-- this river supplied,
this was probably the most important resource.
It's so refreshing.
[Adán] It makes me more grounded
of who I am and knowing that I belong here.
[Alston] And not only knowing that you belong here,
but part of the evidence is that the food's here, your body is sustained
on the same foods that the ancestors were thousands of years ago.
And right here where we are, we drove past all of the nopalito,
all of the new tunas that are coming in,
the onions are there, the fruits are all here, pecans,
you know, where did pecans come from?
You know, they're Northeastern Mexico and South Texas
are the-- where pecans come from.
Tomatoes are strictly Native American, squash, beans.
All of these foods are all Native American foods that sustain the whole world today.
And they were domesticated right here.
But if you think about where you're standing,
your ancestors have been standing here breathing this air
for 10,000 years, and that's got to be empowering.
[mellow music]
[Alston] It's an empowering story because it opens up the whole question of North America.
How did North America come to be what it is today?
And who are the immigrants, and who are the original inhabitants?
My name's Homero Vera, I'm from Premont, Texas,
and we're here at my ranch in Duval County.
-[Adán] So is this another one? -[Homero] Yes.
[Adán] So you just walk and...
[Homero] These are the berries from the Brazil bush.
They're very sour, not real sour,
more sweet than sour.
-Is it native to here? -Yeah. Yeah.
-[Adán] Did you grow up on these? -[Homero] Oh, yes.
-[Adán] Yeah? As a child? -[Homero] Yes.
[Homero] Another one here.
I mean, you could probably make some jelly out of it,
-you get-- you got to pick a lot of them. -Mm-hmm.
Very nice.
Okay, this is a Texas persimmon.
[speaking in Spanish]
And it's a little, round, miniature plum,
and it's just real sweet. And, uh--
and you can probably make some really good jam out of it.
It also will stain you, it'll leave a stain on your clothes,
you put it on your clothes. It could possibly be used as a dye also.
You can see up here, we have all these green ones here.
That's one of the few brush species that doesn't have any thorns.
[speaking in Spanish]
Yeah, these are perfect, perfect specimen, small.
Mm, it's delicious.
-It's so sweet. -Yeah.
There's seed-- Look at how it's stained me.
-Yeah. -Oh, yeah.
-[Adán] It's-- I want another one. -[both chuckling]
Thank you. This is an adventure. Real adventure.
This is great, and the big sky.
[Homero] This is your typical prickly pear cactus, here in South Texas.
This is what indigenous people from Central Texas along the coast,
they would make the trek down here just to come pick these prickly pears.
They would eat them then or they take them back and dry them out,
and then they would eat them later on.
Now, these tunas now, they're very popular to making margaritas out of them.
[Adán] And how do you pick them, you just grab them and twist them?
[Homero] Yeah.
-This is real-- you see how purple it is. -Very purple.
Yeah, you put them in Tequila, and it has that purple look.
And they're just really, really nice looking.
-[Adán] Do you eat these petals? -Nopalias, nopalitos, yes.
[Homero] After a good rain, you might get some new, young, tender pads that come out.
And those are really the only ones that you can eat.
-This and nopalitos, they have to be tender. -Right, yeah.
They have to be tender for nopalitos.
-[Adán] Maybe we can cook some. -[Homero] Yes.
Now... we can move from this to the-- to the mesquite.
[speaking in Spanish]
Mesquite is also a food, right?
Yes, and you can see on the ground here...
...the mesquite tree was maturing here like a week or so ago.
It was just covered with mesquite pods.
And his book, the Relación that Cabeza de Vaca wrote when he was
coming through here in the 1520's, he noticed that the Indians would pick
the mesquite beans and they would make a hole-- hole in the ground,
beat them up with a stick, put a bit of water and then they would--
they would eat the mush.
Um, but that's-- that's the account of Cabeza de Vaca on the mesquite beans.
-Mm. It's sweet. -Mm-hmm.
-We can make cookies with them. -Mm-hmm.
[Homero] History has always been my passion since I was a little kid.
I had just a god-given talent for remembering dates and times and places.
I already had this idea, this magazine about our culture,
the Next American culture of South Texas, Northern Mexico.
And I called it EL Mesteño, because mesteño means the wild--
natural wildlife that live in this habitated area.
And then I always had a section on food.
Because, you know, that's what we eat.
You know, just all these recipes that would be lost.
So I got quite a few recipes from my aunt's and my mom and I would publish them.
[Adán] This part of the country is not understood, people just don't know about it.
It's an unknown treasure, if you grew up with this, but when you leave this region,
I mean, you won't know anybody else who has grown up with this type of food.
No, it's called a desert here,
but there's so much that it produces that people don't realize.
This is one of the staple products that the indigenous people here would eat,
deer meat.
-I'll make a guisado out of it. -Your seasoning it very simply?
-Is that-- -[Homero] Yeah.
All right. I'm going to the frying pan.
And you can tell that the meat is very, very lean.
[Adán] And where did you learn how to do this carne guisada?
[Homero] From my mom. As a little kid I watched her,
and I always like to cook.
Why don't you introduce your wife who's going to be cooking with us?
-This is my wife, Leti. -Leticia Vera.
[Adán] So we'll be tasting Leti's guacamole tonight.
[unintelligible]
[Leticia] We're going to add some onion to it.
[Adán] But that's a sweet onion. So that will be very nice.
[Homero] My great-grandmother, her name was Victoriana Martinez de Vera,
and this is her molcajete, so...
...I know it's at least over 100 years old, or probably more than that.
[Adán] So do you remember your mother or your grandmother actually using this?
-[Leticia] Oh, yeah. -Oh, yeah. Yes.
My mother used it every day.
Got a nice little paste here.
And that's going to go into our meat.
[unintelligible chatter]
So this is now the powder from the mesquite bean.
And then this is agave, agave nectar,
and I just put a little bit until I can form it into balls.
You drop it into...
So this is a sweet candy, a delicious treat for the kids,
and it's totally natural. And it's an ancient, ancient
ingredient from this part of the world.
Candy balls.
Mm!
-The nice thing is that it belongs to all this land. -Mm-hmm.
-This is good. -This is good. I'm glad you like it.
[mellow music]
-[Christine] Actually, there are drinks. -[laughing]
-Okay, I'm drinking two now. -Yes, you're...
I'm Christine Ortega and you're in my home. [chuckles]
So, my brothers and I started the idea of cooking a cabeza de pozo.
Because nobody in our family really had done it since my grandparents had done it.
It was actually my idea to try to figure out how to do this again.
-I just cheated, I put it in my washer. -[women laughing]
I put it on the rinse cycle.
[Adán] It's a very special night for me because my niece
was starting the tradition up again,
as she had remembered doing it when she was very young.
I didn't know that this memory I had about making a cabeza de pozo
would actually continue in my family.
-How are you doing, sir? -[speaking in Spanish]
-We're gonna have a barbacoa de pozo.
-Oh, sí? -At this family's, and they told me...
[speaking in Spanish] ...we need a cows head.
-Sí, we've got it. -You have it.
Let's see what we got.
-[man] So here's a-- here's a nice beef head. -[Adán] Oh my goodness.
It's got the tongue, it's got the eyes, got the cachete.
It's got everything. This is ready to go.
And it's a USDA inspected beef head.
-Listo! -[Adán] Okay, is it heavy?
Oh, a little bit, weighs about 28 pounds.
[Christine] You know, there's something very graphic about dealing
with a raw piece of meat
and a head, right?
Even my friends freak out. I think one of them threw up once.
So I season it with salt and pepper, we do-- I do use the garlic cloves.
My grandmother would always use a white linen, just a plain white linen.
The process is you really have to immerse the fabric in water.
The burlap is secondary wrap.
And that too should be soaked in water, actually longer than 24 hours.
Oh my God, trial and error.
Everybody says, "Get on Google and figure out how to do it."
And I'm like, "No, I refuse to do that.
I'll just keep asking all the elders that I know until I get it."
And so, that's-- that was my process.
I sort of just wanted to make things more genuine
in a way that we can experience how to regain knowledge.
[Christine] Exactly.
Learning in the traditional, ancient way. It's kind of fun.
[unintelligible chatter]
Today we started to prep the pozo, the hole,
which is about maybe three to four feet deep.
And we fill it with brasas and we fill it with hot rocks.
We typically need a minimum of like, I would say four to five hours
to actually heat the hole and then also to make sure that the Earth is cured
with the heat.
I will recruit my co-starter, fire starters.
My brothers are the best at that.
My brother Adrian is here today,
and he's the one that, you know, I lassoed him into it,
so he's-- he's great.
Been here all day and just drinking water, sweating, drinking water.
[chuckles] My time is done.
I'll probably lose about five pounds. [chuckling]
As a little boy, uh, my grandfather would do that.
He would do the hole and tend the fire.
My uncle's cuisine that he talks about,
it originated from-- from ancestors,
past-- past tribes that used to be here that are no longer here, things like that.
You know, it's just, you can't forget that.
These are pieces of fire crack rock, pieces of sandstone.
This sandstone is the bedrock that outcrops all around us.
And that's what became the heating element of an earth oven.
We know in general that all of that was used to cook.
They cooked all kinds of foods in earth ovens, it's like barbacoa pits.
In fact, the first history book written of South Texas in Northeastern Mexico
is full of information, and it's written in 1650.
And that history book tells you how important barbacoa pits were
and how all of the Indian people from Austin to Monterrey all cooked in earth ovens.
Tell me how you want it quickly.
-[Christine] It goes in the middle. -[Adrian] Yes. How?
-Just straight down? -[Christine] Straight down, brother.
-[Adán speaking in Spanish] -[Christine] The big part on the very bottom. That's it.
Yep.
[Christine] You drop the cabeza in the coals, you put more coals around it, right.
-[Adán] On top of the burnout? -[Christine] On-- on the sides.
I also use, um, lava rocks.
-I use Mexican lava rocks. -Like that?
-Yep. Do you have any more? Put it in if you have it. -I have lots.
Yeah, put it in. Yeah.
See these rocks? Put some-- yeah, on the rocks.
-Exactly. Okay, we're good. -[Adán] Oh, you want it on top of the rocks.
-[Christine] Yep. -[Adán] Got it.
[Christine] Then we'll put tin on top.
-Sorry. -[Christine laughing]
-This is fun. -[Adrian] Just like that.
-My father used to do this. -Yes, you don't ask him much.
-That smoke is hot. -[Christine] Isn't that crazy, Ella?
-Okay. -[Christine] It's like flipping crazy.
Yeah, did you ever see it done before?
Yeah, just, you want to cover the edges to seal it.
[Alston] What we do know is that everywhere on Earth
where earth oven technology was important,
women are the dominant role.
Yes, put it. Yes. Yes, put it, tío. Absolutely.
Men were not even allowed on site when these big earth ovens were being cooked
over root foods. That was women's job.
Men could come and haul the wood, maybe men could dig the hole.
But when the real processing start, women did it, and with some tribes
men couldn't be there when you open the oven.
On this side of the rock.
So it's predominantly women's work
and it gets left out of all of history.
So women have a key role.
Adrian.
That's not the center, tío. The center is over there.
[Adán] You need to just tell me where to put it.
-[Christine] Okay. -[Adán] Here?
[Christine] No. Reach further.
There, right there. Yep.
-[Adán] Okay. -[Christine] All of that.
Guys, you know, they just don't
pay attention to details, right?
-Tsk, tsk. -I know! Exactly.
[Adán] And then we drink a beer, or at least I drink a beer.
[unintelligible chatter]
[Christine] So keep an eye on the center because that's where we need to put the fire.
So we can't lose sight of that because that's where the heat will go down.
[Adrian] We're going to make coals and we're going to put these coals on top
and just, you know, nurse that all night long,
I think about 12 hours. So probably 6:00 a.m....
...yeah, about that time, I guess.
Well, I've had some briskets over there.
You want to look at the briskets?
It's just something for me to do
the rest of the day this is going on.
-Woo! -Hooray!
-[all applauding] -[man] Bravo! Bravo!
It's wonderful.
-Hi, Mom. -Hi, mi hija.
This is my mother, Nieves Ortega.
This-- I already know what I will look like when I am 88.
She is the person who obviously taught me a lot about cooking,
and along with Grandma Dominga Medrano.
Okay. So this is what's on the menu for today.
We don't have to be serving people.
Everybody just jumps in and gets what they want.
All right, here, Ma, hold this.
-Oh, yeah. -[chuckles]
[Nieves] My dad who's been gone for years and years and years,
and mom, used to do this.
They would do the hole, they would do the fire,
they would do the seasoning, and then they would take care of it
during the night until in the morning.
I like this because it keeps me going, first of all, and then to see
other people enjoy the day and the love for each other and the care,
which is the main thing, and look at all the food that we have had, you know.
-I ate too much already. -You did, Mama?
-Yes. [chuckles] -Oh, good. Oh, they're delicious, Mom.
-They're like-- wait, you're going to be on TV? -Yes!
-[woman] Yeah? -[Christine] God willing, fingers crossed. Yes.
[Nieves] I'm very happy that my children have kept that tradition
'cause it is an old tradition to do that.
Not very many people do it anymore.
[gentle music]
[Alston] 15,000 years of Native Americans living here.
Term we often use is "Co will take it,"
where the native people of South Texas in northeastern Mexico
comes from the state of Coahuila.
And that word, by the way, was originally used
to simply describe people from a big piece of real estate,
in the same way if we describe people and we call them Texans.
Today, we don't really say what whether they're people of color
or their Anglo or how long they've been in Texas.
It's just the idea that they lived here.
So that's what "Co will take it" meant,
there are all of these diverse people
who lived in a big region.
And so the Rio Bravo, the Rio Grande was no more important
for dividing countries than the Colorado River is or the Medina River.
[Adán] I'm at Rio Grande, called Rio Bravo.
When I was a child, we lived in San Antonio
and we also lived in Nava Coahuila.
We had land in both sides, because our people,
the Coahuiltecan people and other Native American people's
Comanches, Apaches, Carancahuas lived on the north side
of the Rio Grande and also on the south side of the Rio Grande, and it was a river.
We have the Mexican side and we have the US side, but that's new.
When the river changed, the border crossed part of my family,
we did never cross the border. The border crossed us.
[light dramatic music]
I always say that our food is not south of the border.
Our food is from the Texas-Mexican region,
Central Texas, South Texas and Northeastern Mexico.
What our food does is it reminds us that the Mexican side
and the Texas side in this region of the country are one.
They're one culturally, they're one culinary, and they're one with the families
because families are on both sides as mine are.
So I continue to see it as one.
[light dramatic music]
[Celeste] I suppose it's-- it makes me sad.
I think I can remember when it wasn't here and when it went up,
and, uh, it's sad to kind of see
the-- the valley change in a way that
maybe not-- might not necessarily be positive.
Uh, to see the landscape change that way and how it affects people.
I think as a child growing up here,
I had this sense of the Rio Grande Valley as being a very inferior place,
and not know-- understanding really why.
We're sort of geographically isolated.
We're at the bottom of Texas, we're butted up against Mexico.
And also we have the gulf, can't go north without going through a checkpoint.
And if you go south, if you want to go to Mexico, you still have
to go through checkpoints.
[Adán] Checkpoint. Oh my goodness.
[Celeste] Yeah, that's our lady of the checkpoint. [laughs]
This is the check, the Sarita Checkpoint.
-So have you all gone through. -We will go through it this time.
Right, so when you go back, you'll see how kind of how it is.
And it was kind of like an image about the idea of sort of feeling anxiety
when you go through a checkpoint. For some of us, maybe who grew up around here,
you kind of like, when you're going through,
-like, the bridge with your parents... -Yes.
...you know, how they would-- I don't know how your experience was
but my parents were kind of like, you know...
You know, like, what am I gonna do?
Like, I'm not gonna like tell off the border patrol,
you know, like, kind of like the idea that we had to perform
our citizenship a little bit, like, "Act like an American."
[laughing]
And when I was growing up, we never-- we never said, "Oh, I'm going to Mexico."
Or you know, you might say Matamoros, but most people said...
Right? And then when you were on that side...
So it's always like, we're going to one side, we're going to another side.
It seemed like more connected, and now it's not like that.
One of the first times I ever saw mole de pozo
was at a wedding I went to in Mexico, in the Rancho.
It was like a Rancho wedding, you know, it was great.
We were little kids, you know, my-- they were family, you know, related to us,
um, but because people have such a hard time with crossing now,
you lose that cultural connection to people on the other side.
We're losing connections to food.
We're losing connections to language.
All of those things are things that are valuable.
So to me the fence, it's a symbol of division.
A lot of people think, oh, it just keeps people out.
But the fence doesn't just do that.
It funnels people, kind of like a trap,
the fence as innocuous as it looks,
um, is really kind of a death symbol.
And so that's how it sort of functions in my work.
The land which is supposed to give life.
It's supposed to be a place where we live,
and instead they're turning the land against us,
right, by funneling people through the most dangerous,
inhospitable parts. And I think of the body
and relationship to the landscape a lot.
Like, how do our bodies negotiate landscape?
Who are we in relation to the land?
And I think it has a lot to do with our conflicted nature
to the land, like you don't belong here,
you know, and then you know, but is that really true? You know.
[light dramatic music]
[Alston] Hundreds, probably thousands of people, if they traced their records back,
could trace their records back to the native inhabitants
of South Texas in Northeastern Mexico.
So when we tell stories of the past, you don't have to be very old
to know if you took a class in Texas about Texas history,
how much did you learn about Indians?
How many paragraphs did you read about the Indian people
who lived here for 15,000 years
before your immediate ancestors, and you don't read very much.
It's an inconvenient truth.
[Homero] We're here on our path to the grand Sal Del Rey,
located in South Texas here in the upper Grande Valley.
And the Sal Del Rey, it's a natural phenomenon
consisting of this huge Salt Lake that's like a--
it's like a five mile circumference and a mile long.
The salt has been here, well, since the beginning of time.
And the Indians from Central Mexico
trek all the way over here for salt.
They would come here from diff-- all over the area, it was known for its salt.
If you were to cut out a chunk. Say like a one foot by one foot square
of solid, uh, salt
and maybe a foot deep,
you come back in about three days,
and it will replenish itself, it will come back.
So it's always, uh, producing the salt.
[Adán] And of course salt is a part of our food story that we've been talking about.
[Homero] Right. Yeah, you need salt
to preserve your food, back then they didn't have refrigerators,
so everything-- all the meats were salted to preserve them.
As well as fish, I guess meat and fish also.
[Adán] Look at that, just the purest salt.
You know, they would cut the strips of meat and then just cover it up completely,
and then let it dry out in the sun, and that would preserve the meat.
-[Adán] And it all starts here with the salt. -All starts with the salt, yeah.
And back then of course, the land was free and it didn't belong to anybody.
Just come over here and take your share of salt and take it.
And when the Spanish came, the mineral rights belonged to the king,
so they had to pay a tariff to taking the salt out,
pay the taxes on it to the Royal Treasury.
-Younger Native Americans -Native, they lost out.
-Yeah. -I'm sure they still had-- still can get salt
for their own personal uses.
As long as they were friendly.
You know, if they were hostile, uh, then there was going to be war.
More like you were going to be killed.
Did they ever try to take it back?
Since they knew it was theirs, and these people come in
and all of a sudden they say that it's theirs,
did they ever try to take it back, is there any record of that?
Not that I know of, no.
So in a way the indigenous peoples lost a big...
...engine of economic stability in a way.
Yeah, with the...
...arrival of the Spaniards and the civilization in this area, yes.
[Adán] Imagine, imagine all the people who have stood here where you and I are standing.
-Okay, that's thousands of years. -Yes. Oh, yes.
-[Adán] They stood where you and I are. -Yeah.
[solemn flute music]
My name is Isaac Alvarez Cardenas.
I'm the son of Tap Pilam Coahiltecan father named Dan,
who's a World War Two veteran, liberator of Italy.
We were stationed in Rapid City, South Dakota.
And we left the monks [unintelligible].
When we finally came back to [unintelligible]
Yanaguana, commonly known as San Antonio,
we lived in this neighborhood.
And my father, historically,
their people have lived here, you know, for centuries.
Of course, we have that Spanish influence, but it was native women
and a lot of Native American Indian women are not given that credit.
They were the ones that really birthed us as this indigenous people,
but also an influence from Europe.
Our food, or what you call Tex-Mex
or Tejano food is different than anybody else's.
Our food is very unique, very unique.
While the barbacoa is one of our delicacies, because you cook it underground.
And the reason I love them is because my wife has those recipes,
that's one of our favorite foods.
Her family makes to me the best tamales.
Then it's like a two-day thing that they make, I love the tamales.
A little powdered sugar.
Wait a minute. We got to pray first. Right?
So Kylie you say the prayer.
The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Mm-hmm. Thank you. Thank you, Kylie.
What everybody has learned about the American Indian, the Alaskan Native, the Native American,
the Pacific Islander, was taught to them by non-Indians, non Pacific Islanders.
Because as soon as you learn who you are, it brings up a lot of anger of your history,
what was done to the people. First time I read
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee By Dee Brown, I got angry.
I was a young teenager, I was upset.
I didn't know that this is what happened to our people.
And it was a formula.
The missions system, Carlisle Indian School System.
First the policy was a good Indian is a dead Indian.
The second policy was kill the Indian inside, save the man, save the child.
And now what you're seeing with the immigrants is the same situation,
taking the children, separating the parent, all over again.
But we have to-- we have to stand up and say what's right
and what's wrong, and that's why I believe that words are powerful.
Now we've arrived, we're telling our story.
[Native Indian themed music]
[Larry] It happens to be the second largest burial ground
in-- in the-- in the state of Texas.
It is known as 41NU2 by archaeology terms.
-Was it-- -It was known after a hurricane in 1933.
It unearthed 150 bodies.
And so we decided to build a monument to commemorate this beautiful site here
that everybody has so wrongly desecrated by building their buildings,
and not a care in the world about these sacred lands.
The Karankawa people occupied these lands
the most and the longest of anybody ever recorded,
because these were their lands.
[Alston] We really know a lot about Karankawa archaeology,
about the archaeology being done along the coast
of Corpus in vicinity in particular.
They were big-time fisher folks, fish were their predominant food.
We know from the studies and from the artifacts, that they spent,
and Cabeza de Vaca tells us this, they spend part of the year on the coast,
and then they move inland far enough to become deer hunters,
but all along the coast there were Karankawa.
In fact, Karankawa was either the second or largest Indian
population brought to Mission Valero to be missionised.
They write about them that they were cannibals, you know,
and what's-- what's confusing to me is that
in today's time, there's an abundance of fish
and resources down here to sustain people.
Can you imagine 2,000 years ago? Why would they want to eat one another?
You understand, it just doesn't make any-- doesn't make any sense.
They see us and categorize us as savage people, people that had no knowledge,
people that had no wisdom.
When the Europeans first see the Indians,
they don't think they're quite human.
And if you read the history, Stephen F. Austin
and the first Texans had a campaign, purposeful campaign
to exterminate the Karankawa Indians.
And they purposely set out and did it, they massacred many different places.
We know the last Karankawa massacres were co-- were occurring in the 1840s,
now, that's after the Alamo.
But what happens to a lot of the Karankawa on the coast,
those Karankawa, particularly the women, end up coming into the houses of Anglos
and Hispanics as well, and they're sometimes adopted,
sometimes they're called servants, but that's how that--
those Karankawa genes and the Karankawa traditions,
I think stay through the women's side of the family.
And they took on a Hispanic survival name,
in my case it's Salazar, we learned the religion, the culture and the language,
and we became Mexicanos in our own land,
in order to stay among the bones of our people,
to guard them and help them and get their teachings from them.
We're all the forgotten people, Native people in the state of Texas
are the forgotten people, period.
[light dramatic music]
[Larry] All we have in Corpus is the name of streets.
The streets that Indian people lived here one time,
Comanche Road, Lipan Apache Road,
Carancahua Road.
And now with DNA, there's a lot of people finding out,
"Hey, we areIndian. I didn't even know that!"
But what now? What do I do now?
So every morning I wake up and I pray to my people
that were still here.
All we can do is just pray on it.
[Larry praying]
It's a hard walk to walk.
[continues praying]
These are my prayers to my ancestors.
[Adán] I'm in Corpus Christi, Texas, and I've just found
a Texas historical commission plaque.
And these have to be approved by the state of Texas and have to be researched and verified.
And it tells the story of Texas. This is about the Karankawa Indians.
The first thing it says is, they were primitive, nomadic tribe.
They weren't nomadic, they lived in this area.
You move from place to place, they just had a big ranch,
they just moved around their property.
They were very advanced, they knew how to fish,
they had a society that was well organized.
It also says at first friendly to the Europeans,
they became savages and tried to kill the Europeans.
So the Europeans arrived on their homeland, took it away, were violent at first,
when they arrived they were friendly. Well wouldn't you be upset
and fight back if someone tried to take your land and try to kill you?
So that's another mistake. And "1858 marked the disappearance
of Karankawa Indians." Hello, they didn't disappear, they're here.
The entire Texas historical commission plaque is repulsive and repugnant
to me and to every Native American who lives in Corpus Christi.
I've talked to them, and I call upon the historians who live in Texas
to come up and stand up and say take this down. This is a lie.
[light dramatic music]
[Graciela] As a community, we have lost our history,
our culture, our traditions,
because we live in a racist society sadly.
And it hasn't changed, and if we look to the books, we're not there.
We have been erased, if we look to the media to see a documentary about our lives,
they don't exist.
The world that we live in teaches us to hate ourselves,
teaches us to hate our long names,
teaches us to despise our language and culture
and music and foods. Food is about healing your body,
but it's also for healing and feeding your soul.
[Adán] You and your home, you ate Mexican food, what we call Mexican food.
Sure. That's what you call Mexican food.
Yeah. [laughs]
-Yeah. -People call it Mexican food, but it's--
-Indigenous food. -Do you call it Mexican food?
It's indigenous food.
Yeah, you're putting a label on it. [laughs]
It's indigenous. It's-- you're indigenous, I'm indigenous.
You know, Mexican is the word that was given to you all,
you know, the Mezclan people, right, uh,
indigenous was a word that was given to us as well, to categorize us.
If you look at the history, the label started first as, uh, pet Americans.
That was one of the first labels, later on it was Latin Americans.
And later on they took, well, okay, Mexican-Americans.
And watched and decides, "Okay, we'll make a name...
...uh, that's related to Hispaniola, Hispanic."
You know, and to me it's like well who's panic are you,
Herpanic or Hispanic? And these are just labels.
I describe myself as Tejana.
Even in the census, always write in Tejana,
and because it's more-- to me it's more nuanced
than just saying Mexican-American,
and it's more nuanced than just saying indigenous, right?
It's about movement.
-Some people say, "Are you Mexican-American?" -Yes.
-"Are you indigenous?" -Yes.
-"Are you American?" -Yeah, absolutely.
So for me it's just-- Because it's tied to the ground.
It's tied to the Earth, it's tied to this region of the country.
Um... it's more permanent to me.
-[Adán] It's more... -Permanent. It's more permanent.
I like Tejana, I feel myself like I'm a Tejana.
And I'm kind of like connected to-- to Texas,
the world of women and feminism and intersectional feminism,
Brown women, being, you know, there's-- there's a lot, there's a lot of layers to it.
And so, it's a lot more complex.
And because my artwork is very connected to Texas landscape,
that's why, also another reason I like Tejana.
So the labels really don't give identity to the person,
my children know themselves as Tap Pilam,
and we're constantly reminding them.
Tap Pilam meaning people of the earth.
I think it's interesting how you carry within yourself both the indigenous...
...and the Spaniard, which is...
...the people who took over.
[Homero] These were our ancestors
and the Spanish came, you know, they intermingle and had families
with the Native Americans and now we became Mestizos.
I think some people define more with the Spaniards
because I guess because of the education,
uh, the books and religion.
And the Indians, of course, mostly they live off the land
and their education was the land, the animals, the plants.
And they did also teach the Spaniards, the Spanish didn't know what plants
were good to eat, which ones were good for remedies, and all that.
They learned all that from the natives.
[Larry] We wake up in the morning and we do our blessings in the morning
and we give blessings to everything that is alive,
the two-legged, the four-legged,
the ones that creepy crawlers,
the plant people, the rock people.
[speaking foreign language] This is our-- our relations.
I am with my-- my relatives right now.
These are all my relatives, you cut down my relatives,
you're cutting down a part of my soul, a part of my heart.
I went to go see-- my kids wanted me to go see Avatarwhen it came out.
When I saw that film and I saw them put their hair into the animal and fly it,
and I saw them put their hair and their body into the ground
and connect it to the tree, I understood that.
Because that's-- we are connected,
we are connected to the stones, the roots and all of that.
[Native Indian flute music]
[Larry] You know, when we talk...
...as soon as I'm quiet, you think that the-- that's it.
There's-- I'm telling you, "I love you."
Stops. But it doesn't.
My voice carries, when the wind comes in,
it takes out that word, "I love you."
How many times have you been in a canyon,
how many times have you been in a place,
and you say, "I think I hear drumming"?
"I thought I heard voices." And yet there was nobody around.
They're voices in the wind.
So our voices that we speak, the songs that I sing,
the-- the music that I play,
it just doesn't stop when I stop, it carries through the winds.
I hear the voices of my people.
Because I'm trained to.
You hear? She's talking to us.
She's sending us a message.
There are sounds in this Earth that we no longer hear,
there are whispers and teaches in the silence of the wind,
only we forgotten how to listen to them.
[light dramatic music]
-[woman] Did you put him to work? -I did.
-[all laughing] -I did. Well, he's so sweet.
-He's like, "What can I do?" -[woman laughing]
-Yeah? -Yeah.
[Adrian] Okay. Excellent. Okay, ready?
-Okay, very good. -[Adán] It's steaming.
Uh-huh. Exactly.
Look at the grass. See...
Ready?
[grunts] There we go.
All right, and here we go.
All right.
Mm-hmm.
-[Christine] And then throw it out from underneath. -[Adrian] Okay.
[Adrian] There you go. Very good. Okay.
Ta-da!
-Okay. Well, maybe it is. -Oh my goodness!
-Okay, so-- -Okay, that's cooked.
-Let me grab this. -[Adán] Do you know how steamy it is?
This is perfect.
This is delicious. Oh, it smells wonderful.
-[Adán] Oh, this is great. -[Christine] Turn it around, let me see it.
When I'm working with it,
it's an unusual experience, because this was a living thing.
And so to me, it's about a transformation that's happening.
Like, I do think about this is changing, the process that I go through,
I'm aware that I'm going through change.
[Adán] This is wonderful.
[Christine] For me, the reason that it's important
is that it was a way for me to reach back...
...and bring something, like, tangible from things that are gone.
And so this is a way for me to do that.
[speaking in Spanish]
-[Christine] Yes. -[Adán laughing]
My mother always put garlic,
she used to come out of the kitchen, open the door,
just as the head was going into the pozo.
She would come out and throw a bowl of spices that she had made in the molcajete.
The door would open and she would appear then she would throw it into the pit.
-[laughing] -The men were all standing around,
and she was putting in the final magic touch.
This is the only texture that can be called barbacoa, nothing else.
Everything else, well, yes, they call it barbacoa, it's rump roast and everything.
-But this... -[Christine] This is it. So we can leave this here,
it'll just continue to cool and we take this inside.
-[Adrian] I am going to stay here peeling this. -Okay.
-Let's go. -[Adrian] Yep. We got it.
Come on, we got some barbacoa.
[humming]
[butcher] Some of the delicacies that are today,
were survival food for our families growing up.
So my dad would cook a cabeza because we couldn't afford anything more than
what was left over, which is the old faux meats.
And so we would get a cabeza, you put it in the ground
or put it in the oven, and it'd feed the whole family
for all-- all day Sunday church day.
We couldn't afford a T-Bones and the rib eyes
and the porterhouse steaks and some of your better stuff.
Here we grew up on what we had on the ranches...
We could stretch that further and just put a lot of salt,
pepper, garlic and it tasted good.
And now these Mexican chefs, these Mexican restaurants are coming in,
"Oh, this-- this is-- this is a delicacy. This is--"
This is survival food for us.
-Ready to eat almost? -Yes, we are.
[Adán] Grab some and let's eat.
I mean it was a big feast barbacoa. Oh!
And then I like aguacate, a little bit.
And then the main thing is I like salsa.
-That's the taco. -That's the taco.
Good picture for your book.
Yeah, it is.
[Adán] Now you can eat it.
[Christine] Yes, now we can eat it.
[Adán] The magic of food is community and family.
And so when you have barbacoa in a Mexican-American community,
they will immediately conjure up images of the extended family,
of working. Barbacoa is more than just a dish,
it's the entire tradition of the culture.
And I've always said, "Cuisine divorced from culture
has no legs."
So, but let me just eat my taco. [chuckles]
[warm music]
This is so good.
[Christine] You cannot buy the love that goes into cooking.
You just can't
You can't buy the-- the--
the interchange that happens with your brothers,
with your sisters, with your mom, you know, those are not for sale.
So it's not easy to get that.
Nacho! Yeah, we're taking a group picture of everybody who's here.
-Oh, good. -Just a quick picture.
[Christine] It's about the exchange
of family and the bonding that takes place.
[Adán] What we're trying to say with our food
and celebrating the food is there is a way
that we can all share and we can really cook
and serve a table where all are welcome.
That's the new encounter that food gives us.
[Alston] To be Americans, we have to understand our past.
And if we understand our past, it helps us to better understand our present.
[Graciela] We have to know who we are. We have to love ourselves.
We have to respect ourselves.
If we want to work for peace and justice,
we have to start with ourselves.
We are that bridge between the past and the present,
we're the ones that have to tell the stories.
[Adán] The act of cooking is the act of facing differences
in a way that will make you grow in understanding.
And when you do that, you create a dish
that is new, uh, and that will be delicious because of how you accepted the other.
I think that's a formula for a society that lives in peace.
[uplifting music]
[unintelligible chatter]
Anyway, bye.
[woman] Thank you so much for everything.
Of course. Yeah, the food was delicious.
Thank you for having me.
Have safe travels.
[Native American singing]
[upbeat Mexican themed music]