The Recipe of Us

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Gaby Roque: Hola, tengo 59 años.

Jaime Roque: That’s my mom, Gabriela. She’s from a very small town in Guerrero, Mexico, and we are recording this in the place we find ourselves the most when I visit: the kitchen.

She’s telling me about some of her first memories with food and being in the kitchen. She would help her mom make bread and tamales so they could sell.

Gaby: El rancho y mi niñez era muy bonita.

Roque: Here, in the kitchen with my mom, and our family’s favorite spot, we reminisce about her childhood in Guerrero. This kitchen has seen four generations of us laughing, crying, and sharing meals, making it a living snapshot of our family’s story. Everything, since as far back as I can remember, always started and ended here. Whenever friends or family dropped by, my mom would instantly whip up something tasty, and the catch-up session would kick off around a warm meal. This is where she taught me how to cook simple meals before I moved out because she didn’t want me to eat fast food all the time. Some of the most important conversations I have ever had were in this kitchen, and now some of my fondest memories are here.

As a kid I remember those moments when she was in the kitchen cooking our dinners. Those sounds, smells, the taste of her food, and the feeling that it gave me. It was a feeling of being safe and cozy, especially on Friday nights. Friday nights involved a special weekly tradition, a trip to the local Blockbuster Video store. My brother and I would usually run to the wrestling section and pick out a pay-per-view event that had just come out on VHS. My dad would find a classic from Mexican cinema—it varied each week but often it was a movie featuring La India Maria, a character made famous by the talented Maria Elena Velasco. It was on these nights where I learned the phrase, “Ni de aqui, ni de alla” (neither from here nor there), a movie title from one of her most famous films, and that phrase describes perfectly how life has been feeling lately.

[music introduction]

I’m Jaime Roque, a podcast producer at Getty, and welcome to ReCurrent, where we journey to understand and connect with our cultural heritage.

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Where do I start? This is it…I am numb. This isn’t like a, “hey Mom, I love you, see you in two weeks.”

This is what I was feeling as I was driving to be by my mom’s side for her final moments. She was the cornerstone of our family, the person you called when you were having a bad day, the person you called when you needed advice on tough life decisions, and that person that just made everything all right.

My beautiful mom passed away in May of 2023, about a month after I started working at Getty, and since then, life hasn’t looked the same. This new reality I am living in without her has changed the way I look at life. Small moments with my family are now big moments that I want to preserve, past memories are now my most treasured memories, and I am always looking for ways to stay connected to her and the traditions she left me with. Since starting at Getty, I’ve learned a lot of new concepts and things that have helped my new outlook on life. One that came up often is cultural heritage.

But what exactly is cultural heritage? Let’s google it. Okay, so Wikipedia says cultural heritage includes both tangible things, like buildings, monuments, landscapes, archives, books, artworks, and artifacts, and intangible elements like folklore traditions, language, and knowledge inherited from past generations. So if you think about it, almost anything can be your cultural heritage.

I’m thinking about those quirky songs our parents or grandparents used to sing, the ones we find ourselves singing now to keep their spirit alive. Or those unique family traditions that have been passed down through the generations, or that special meal that’s always made for big celebrations. This got me thinking back to those moments in the kitchen with Mom—are her tortillas considered cultural heritage?

Letty Abarca: No, but I, the only thing, the only thing I remember about Doña, is that every time she would make tortillas, that’s when Jimmy would come. That’s the only time, because let’s make them.

Roque: Because I was the only one that ate them.

Roque: This is a typical conversation in my family when we are trying to figure something out. We all have something to say. It’s my two brothers, Jonathan and Junior; my aunt Letty, who is my mom’s younger sister; and my niece Amanda, the oldest of the grandchildren. And we are gathered in the most used room in the house.

Roque: What are you making, Mandy?

Amanda Cortez: We’re making tortillas and we’re adding the warm water.

Junior Roque: She only used this, this, a little bit of this, and that’s it. She doesn’t use oil.

Jonathan Roque: But that’s fake. It’s fake. It’s…it’s not real.

Roque: We are trying our best to get these handmade flour tortillas just right, like mom used to make them.

Suzanne Joskow: Food is, it’s, it’s a piece of our past, often connected to family, that also is very important moment, right? It’s ephemeral. You eat it, and it’s gone.

Roque: This is Suzanne Joskow, an artist, curator, and archivist. Her work with Community Cookbook Archive: Los Angeles highlights how food serves as a bridge between generations, offering a tangible link to our heritage and community.

Joskow: A lot of my work deals with archive and how we represent and think about place, and one of my projects, the Community Cookbook Archive: Los Angeles, is a collection now of over 400 Los Angeles-based community cookbooks. And so community cookbooks specifically are cookbooks from, at least as I have defined them for this project, are cookbooks from a collective audience. They are usually not from professional chefs. They are compiled by organizations where home cooks from that group have contributed recipes. That’s actually a really important aspect of them for me because they are documents of the way we cook at home.

Roque: I met Suzanne at an event called Archives Bazaar at the University of Southern California. This year’s theme was, fittingly: food.

Joskow: And you can make it again, and it’s in some ways exactly the same, and in some ways completely related to the moment in which you make it the next time, and it’s very much of the present too. And so I think that’s kind of what cultural heritage is as well, is that it’s, it’s not just something from the past, it’s something from the past that we have in this moment now that informs our lives now and the way we live.

Roque: My first memory of food being more than just that was when I was 8 years old.

I was in Mexico and it was my first exposure to Dia de Muertos, Day of the Dead. I remember not knowing what was going on but really liking the experience. My cousin became my guide for the day as we wandered around my grandparents’ little town. He showed me around the cemetery, pointing out the bright marigold flowers on the tombs. We went into people’s houses to see the altars with photos of their loved ones. He explained the meaning of the pictures and, what really caught me off guard, the meaning behind the food and drinks placed on the altars.

That was the moment I first understood that my family’s traditional foods can be a powerful way to stay connected to our ancestors; that the traditions I grew up hearing about were a part of something way bigger, this huge concept I now know as cultural heritage.

Joskow: And that’s what cultural heritage ultimately is, right? It’s a gift from the past.

Roque: Here’s Suzanne again.

Joskow: It’s a conversation with the past. And I think food can do that. It can bring us back to a moment in time. You can learn something new about the past of trying to recreate food memories as well. I mean, I think it’s a multisensory cultural heritage. Food can transport you through time.

Roque: In addition to her ever-growing and multicultural archive of cookbooks, Suzanne thinks a lot about how cooking has become even more central to family life.

Joskow: Now I think, the kitchen in the home, you can see just, even in how people, how the kitchen has become so central in design of the home.

Roque: Back at work, one of the first people I met with to learn more about this topic was Mallory Furnier, the Special Collections and Archives librarian at Cal State Northridge. She also curated the Eating the Archives exhibition there about how food is related to cultural practice and community memory, and where we can see these links in Cal State Northridge’s archives.

Mallory Furnier: Certain cooking smells, certain tastes will take you back to a specific time and place. And so it’s like these very, using your other senses other than sight to just see, you know, and so sense memory in that way is, is very tied to food. I’ve been asking people as I was working on this exhibit, you know, like, what does nostalgia taste like for you?

Roque: Nostalgia. Lately, it has been hitting me hard. My mom and dad came to this country while still quite young, 18 and 20. So I’d like to think that every time my mom came to eat at El Sazon Guerrerense, her favorite street vendor, she was transported back home to her childhood years in Guerrero, even if for a moment.

I remember coming to eat here at El Sazon Guerrerense for the first time with my mom, just the two of us, after a day spent in the jewelry district. My parents were jewelers, so a lot of my childhood was spent in downtown LA, just roaming, exploring, and waiting for them to be done with business. But afterwards, we always went out to eat and those were some of my favorite times.

Ah, so good.

I got to talking with the owner the other day, and we quickly got into stuff about our shared heritage and all the memories tied to that. When I brought up how much my mom loved this spot, we found out we had even more in common. He told me his wife is from Guerrero, and it’s actually her mom who makes sure the food here tastes just like back home. That’s why my mom was so into this place; it was like a taste of her own childhood. And that’s why I like coming to this place. Eating here with my mom, we’d talk and laugh, and those memories, that simplicity, is why I keep coming back. It’s like for a little bit, life is just as easy as another great afternoon eating with Mom.

So, talking with the owner showed me how strong the connection is between our personal stories and our cultural background. The food here isn’t just about eating; it’s a story about where people come from, their memories, and staying connected to our roots. My mom’s love for this place wasn’t just about liking the food; it was about feeling close to where she came from, something she passed on to me. I’ve come many times since her passing. Most of the time, it’s just me alone. So this street place may be just another street place to someone else. But for me, it’s what nostalgia tastes like.

Cortez: Maybe we need an actual roller.

Abarca: That is a roller.

Cortez: No, I know. But like with the handles.

Roque: Here we are again, still trying to make flour tortillas like Mom would make them, when we realized that the old rolling pin she has had for as long as I can remember is older than my younger brother.

So that roller is probably…that’s older than Jonathan, over 30 years old.

I asked myself why I felt so many feelings when I saw this rolling pin. Then I realized, the stuff in my mom’s kitchen isn’t just stuff anymore.

Furnier: There’s information infused in, like, your mom’s kitchen items. What did she choose to use and how did she learn how to use those things?

Roque: Here’s Mallory again...

Furnier: One of the things in the exhibit over here, what I was thinking about is, you know, how do we learn about food? Both as a sense of, like, our identity, and also how do you cook, like, who taught you that and how is that information passed down through generations?

And a lot of it has to do with oral traditions. And those are things, if you don’t write down the recipe, if you don’t record, someone making your favorite dish, it’s, it’s hard to capture that without having the foresight and thinking ahead of like, what will be valuable to my family, and you don’t even have to think of like, a greater cultural context. It’s just like, what do you need to pass down?

Roque: As we struggled to figure out exactly how my mom made the flour tortillas taste so good, we all wished she was here to tell us. It saddens me that despite all the tech we have, we never thought to record her process or even jot down her recipe. Yet, somehow, I feel like this moment with my family is exactly how she’d want us to remember her: together, laughing, reminiscing with “remember when” stories, all of us sharing stories about her life.

There’s this saying from my culture that’s more meaningful to me now than ever: El recordar es volver a vivir. To remember is to live again. And that’s precisely what we’re doing.

Roque: Okay. So I set everything up and now. Selah and I are going to try to make them. I don’t know how this is going to go but, but here we go. Selah, do you want to help Daddy make tortillas?

Selah Roque: Yes! I know!

Roque: That sweet voice is my one year-and-a-half daughter, Selah. Selah’s heritage is American, Mexican, Iranian, and Armenian. Her life is going to be filled with a smorgasbord of flavors, food, music, art, and media, and she’s lucky to call LA home where all aspects of her are celebrated. This city is so good at blending cultures like hers into exciting new creations.

Roque: I know Selah isn’t going to remember this moment, but I will. It’s now a core memory for me, a memory that I will hold in my heart forever. Selah’s time with my mom was really short, less than a year. And when I think about it, it does make me sad. But my mom lives through me, through the customs and traditions she taught me that I am now teaching my daughter. So, Selah may not physically get to know my mom, but she will definitely know and learn about her in every way possible. She’ll hear stories about her grandma and grandpa, and how they came to this country, worked hard in the fruit fields of the Central Valley, and eventually opened up a jewelry business that is still open and thriving today. She’ll listen to the songs that her grandma sang and listened to, and eat her favorite foods. This is how Selah will have her connection to the past, and how it will become present in her life.

Roque: Okay, let’s try it.

Selah: Hooray!

Roque: Hooray, we did it!

In a way, this is the perfect way to end. Me and Selah in the kitchen, bonding and talking, just how Mom and I would do. Everything always started and ended in the kitchen, and it’s fitting that this new beginning is in my kitchen.

[music introduction]

Exploring our cultural heritage is all about being curious. Wondering where we come from and what kind of legacy we’re a part of. Sometimes something as simple as a family recipe can open up doors to this wider picture of our culture. And now, leaving my mom’s kitchen behind, I’m setting off on this adventure to discover the amazing cultural heritage stories all around us that we often don’t notice, yet make an impact. We’ll check out everything, from murals that tell our history in the middle of Los Angeles, to ancient sacred sites echoing with the voices of indigenous peoples, to the local barber shops buzzing with stories from generations of folks in the community.

We’ll dive deep into the stories, the struggles, and the triumphs that are all wrapped up in the places and traditions that define our cultural identity. This is just the start. So let’s explore together and see what we can gain by keeping the past, present.

ReCurrent was written and produced by Jaime Roque; audio production by Jaime Roque, with creative support from Zoe Goldman and Caitlin Shamberg. Our executive producer is Christopher Sprinkle.

Special thanks to Vicente and Gabriela Roque, for their sacrifices and unconditional love while on this earth. Mom, Dad, you continue to live through me, Los amo!

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