 Good morning everyone. I hope you all have had a wonderful morning and enjoyed all of the conversation yesterday. Those of you that were here yesterday, for those of you that were not, we have some very engaging concurrent panels today. And we're glad to see so many young people here as well. Some young high schoolers here. Welcome. Welcome to this conversation about arts and culture. This morning I would like to introduce you to two chefs that are here. I think Nalak is really beginning to look at the culinary arts and including them in the disciplines that we support. And we're very fortunate to have a wonderful board member, Alan Medrano, the chef himself, on our board and really helping inform how we think about the culinary arts and what the contributions and the support that Nalak needs to provide to this field. So we want to start this morning with a cooking demonstration. We're really going to look at cooking as an aesthetic practice. And I would like to introduce our chefs this morning. I want to introduce Alan Medrano in Texas, but originally from here from San Antonio. And Alan actually was the founder of the Sina Festival here at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center many years ago. So thank you for that work. So Alan is a chef and a food writer who recognizes the importance of food in relation to identity and community. He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and has worked professionally in restaurant kitchens internationally. He has a recent book, Truly Texas Mexican A Native Culinary Heritage and Recipes, that was published by Texas Tech University and received the finalist Book of the Year Award from the Forward Reviews. Alan is also an award-winning filmmaker and like I said, founder of the Sina Festival here in San Antonio. Welcome, Alan. And I would also like to recognize Kevin Babbitt, chef Kevin Babbitt, who works in the fine dining arena here in San Antonio. And he is also a graduate of the Culinary Institute of the Americas. Welcome. Thank you very much. Good morning. When I start working with Anopales and Achilles, if you'd like to move closer and take a look, I'll show it to you. So feel free to move around. My presentation today is titled, Cooking as an Aesthetic Practice, Cooking is an Aesthetic Practice. And I would like to explore the question of how food is art. And the cooking demonstration that I'm going to do is from the book that Maria mentioned. It's called Truly Texas Mexican, A Native Culinary Heritage and Recipes. Because I felt that recipes really say who we are. They ground us to ourselves, to our families and to our ancestors, the recipes that are handed down. So that is our heritage. This is a new type of book. The book is a combination. It's a history book and a cookbook. It's a peer-reviewed book in history, archaeology and food anthropology. So in addition to having history about the Native Americans of Texas dating back to 10,000 years ago, my ancestors and the ancestors of most of the Mexican American community here in Texas, in addition to that type of history, it has 100 kitchen-tested recipes, which I tested in my kitchen, which I think are delicious. You'll be the judge of that. You're going to taste some gordita. I hear a yes back there. The book was written. It's a very personal book. And so this morning, the story that I want to share with you is a very personal story. This is my food that I grew up with. And I say that even though Kevin and I are good friends, we are both graduates of the Culinary Institute of America, which is a mind-dining preparation school. Still, my culinary compass is my mother's kitchen. La Cocina de mi Amar is where I find my grounding. So the book has three sources of knowledge. The first source of knowledge is written history. So as I said, it's a peer-reviewed book. So there's history about our ancestors 10,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, how they cooked, and how the recipes were handed down. It's also archaeology because most of the knowledge that we have about our cooking here in Texas comes from archaeology because in 1528, when the Europeans arrived, we had an oral culture, which is very rich because it gives you context, it gives you relationships. But we died off so fast with diseases and other reasons that we lost so much. But archaeology, especially Texas A&M and the University of Texas, have been really strong in being able to unearth knowledge. And the third is oral history from my mother, my sisters, my brothers, my aunts, my uncles, my father. These stories that I know are true because they were told to me and you can sense that they are true. This is an important knowledge that, although not written, is still very important to me. That's how I wrote the book. The question we're going to discover today, and please ask me any questions along the way. Food is survival. We know that. But in what sense can we say that food is art? And the questions that I'd like to explore this morning or discuss with you are In what way does food really affect our identity, both personally and as a community? In what way does food fix our memory, contain our memory, and enriches with memory so that we may move forward? And in what way does food call us to question our choices and our patterns and make those ethical choices? So these are the three types of functions that one finds in any type of art discipline. So I'd like to explore these this morning. But finally, we're going to eat it because you can talk about food. It's really about eating it, right? So we're going to eat. What I'd like to do before I start with the demonstration, which will be about masa for gorditas, chiles, how to work with dried chiles of various kinds to develop flavor and aroma. And thirdly, how to cook with nopales. And a couple of the students here were saying they've never cleaned a nopale. So I may call nopare if you're not too bothered by that or not. And before I do that, let me just show you the map of the food that we will eat today. Take a closer look. Could you lower the lights a little bit? Can you see on? Yes. You can see. Okay. This is the map of the Mexican Republic of 1824. So you see here is Coahuile y Tejas, here San Antonio. This was part of Mexico. And the food that we're going to talk about is from this region. This is biologically, culturally, historically a cohesive region. It's called, I call it the Texas Mexican region. This is, the food today is not Tex-Mex. You see down there behind the, behind this little, don't you like this? This is like Midnight Theater, right with the little, so this is Oaxaca Mexican cuisine. I'm going to start making a little. There is not one Mexican cuisine, you know. There are many Mexican cuisines depending on the land, the sea, the practices of those culinary artists. So we have down here Oaxaca Mexican, which is known for mole. You have Jalisco Mexican. So Jalisco is Birria, Bozole. And you have Sinaloa Mexican, Chilorio. And you have Texas Mexican. Texas Mexican is another region of the larger Hispanic, I mean Mexican culinary history and practice. And you would say, but it's like south of the border. It has chiles, it has chocolate, it has, you know, stuff like that. And I would say that although we are tempted to say it is south of the border, the river that we see here became a border. But before it did, the food was here and the food was here. So it was north of the border before the river was a border. The reason that it resembles Oaxaca and others in terms of some of the styles is that before 1528, which is when the Europeans arrived, we had communication with Mesoamerica. So we exchanged recipes. And when Cabeza de Vaca, who was a Spaniard who first landed here, he landed with three of his Spaniard friends and one African black, who became actually who became the most traveled non-native explorer. But he's sort of lost in history. What I digress, you see this trail. That is the trail that Cabeza de Vaca took after three years of being in Galveston to go back to the seat of power, which was Mexico City. And he knew how to take this because of the natives. He just asked, these were pre-existing routes of navigation and of trade among us. So that's why there is some similarity. It resembles Puebla, it resembles because we did exchange recipes and ingredients, but each is distinctive. I just want to say that there are three basic regions, and then we're going to do the chiles. This is the central region of Texas Mexican cuisine, and this is the name of the many people who lived here and who have disappeared. Not entirely because I'm here. We are their descendants. The second region is the coastal region. I chose the dish today because of the Gulf shrimp, so we'll taste that. Everything we cook today is indigenous ingredients. And these are the names of the peoples who lived here, ate here, and from whom we get our culinary techniques. And finally, you know, Harlingen, Monterrey, Saltillo. This is also part of our region. And it's called the Coahuilteco region, and these are the names of the people who have disappeared. But you know, we may have lost our land and our language, but we're still cooking and deliciously so. When we cook, and when I demonstrate this, we will be talking about identity, because it is an art form, and community in the Americas. That's important. So you see up here, that's where we are. But when we cook, somos latinos. So there are many Latinidades, you know, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, many Latinidades, but the point of our cooking and the point of dealing with natural material culture is that it grounds us in this hemisphere. So we are, you know, americanos, latinos. And that's one of the ideas I'd like for us to discuss. I'm going to show you my food, which is here in Texas, but it's the same for all people who cook. Who cook in this way. That looks like gordita time, so let's do that. The first thing about gorditas is that you have to make sure that you're putting an emphasis on the masa. Many people think the masa is just, oh, I'm going to put salt in first. I'm going to use my hands, maybe not. We were taught, save it first. You're not actually going to eat this, but in case anyone is taking pictures. I'm going to use gloves. Actually that will make it better because then I don't have to wash my hands. La masa, corn was invented by a woman about 7,000 years ago. I'm going to make masa using maseca, corn flour. I say it was invented by a woman. I had a little bit of water, salt. I say it was invented by a woman because although we don't have a written record, we know from archeology that women were the ones who controlled the gardening and the production of agricultural products. So they were the ones who understood this. Corn is a man-made, woman-made product that comes from a grass cult. They'll think there was not corn. This lady, this culinary cook, she took that, did a hybrid and created corn. Corn does not exist in the wild. It is a woman-made product. And then about, you see how long, how a lot of water? I'm going to show you after I finish mixing it how it should feel when you finish it and it should feel very, very soft because you need to let it sit for 20 minutes so that the corn, which has been dried, can rehydrate. And you'll know when it rehydrates because you see, you sense the aroma. And then about 2,000 years ago, it wasn't the same lady, of course, but again, a woman realized that corn is not nutritious. The protein is not very digestible. It has no niacin. And so, she created ni-stamalization, which is you take the corn, you boil it with calyp, you know, calyp. It's calcium chloride. And it changes the molecular structure of the corn. The molecule is different. The protein is very digestible and the new molecule has niacin. And so niacin is necessary for the survival of any human being because it... Let me taste it, because it... Here's the way you taste in a restaurant. What I just did, you don't do. Think like this. That way, your saliva doesn't go back in there. But anyway, levanta sana. So you do. And so that's called ni-stamalization. And you can eat a tortilla. All tortillas that are sold are ni-stamalized corn. It's a different product. It's not the same. If you eat corn, just off the stove, it won't give you the nutrition that you get if you eat a tortilla because it's been ni-stamalized. Okay, we're going to send some of this your way. I'm going to do this properly. I'm sorry, it needs more salt. Oh, yeah. And I'm going to put a little bit of oil. Yeah, gracias. I don't normally put oil in gorditas because they taste delicious without. But for these, Chef Kevin is putting them on a griddle so that the exterior is very, very crispy. It gives you a nice texture between the exterior crispiness and the interior very, very smooth and moist. So that's why I put a little bit of oil. Well, that's a lot of oil, but... into the mixture. And I think the salt is just right. We're going to pass these around and explain to you how cuisine, if it is divorced from culture, has no legs. When the Europeans arrived in Mexico and in Texas, they started shipping corn all over Europe, Spain, Italy. And it grew so easily and so well that it became a substitute crop for wheat and others. And what happened was widespread nutrition. It was a huge problem because they took the product without the people. They took the product and they didn't take any cooks. They didn't take any recipes. They didn't pay attention to the culture. They didn't pay attention to the things, how you grow it and how you cook it. You grow it together with beans so that the beans put back the nitrogen and the corn takes out the soil. And then you cook it with calcium, hydroxychuncal, so that it becomes a really nutritious product. And so because you failed to be grounded in the cultural context of the cuisine of the product, it caused malnutrition. I would say that it also caused other problems, but it's more delicious. It has a better aroma and it mixes better. So aesthetically there are some nice things that they lost. So this is the masa that we use for the gorditas. When you finish doing this, you cover it with a damp cloth, which you will imagine we have here. So that's the first step in making the gorditas. That's going to sit for about 15 or 20 minutes and then we are going to grill them and stuff them. The second thing we want to do is how do you cook with chiles? Everyone here knows about chiles. Who's cooked with chiles? Okay, great. Where are my chiles? You have the chiles. We're going to pass around now samples of two chiles and they're dried. One is a chile ancho and the second one is a guajillo chile. Yes? How do you draw the chiles? They dry them in the sun. You can also dry them with a dehydrator if you wish. And if you taste the difference between a dried chile and a fresh chile, you will see that it's richer. It's like when you have a sun-dried tomato, how it's so much richer in taste and flavor, is it passing around? No. Now, do we have one that is not de-seeded? I'm going to ask you to give me one of those so I can show he doesn't want to stand up. When you get it, look at it. Look at it on the light. You see the color. I tell my students, when you first work with a chile, it has seeds in it. You make a slit, you open it up and you take all the seeds out. You take all the veins out because that's where the capsaicin is. You don't want that. You don't want the heat. You want the flavor and you want the aroma. When I told the students at the CIA when I do classes there when you have a restaurant and a man or a vendor or a woman comes to you to be your chile vendor and says, this chile is number five on the school field scale or this is hot. They talk to you about heat, fire them, get another vendor because they need to be talking to you about flavor, aroma, texture because it's the combination of these flavors that really makes your sauces and there are wonderful ways to work with it. The sauce you're going to the sauce you're going to eat today is made with equal parts of guajillo and chileancho. After you clean them the way that you saw and they've been deveined and boiled them for about 20 minutes, 15 minutes you let them sit and then you they look like this you all can see you're rehydrating them. There's two steps to this process this can be delicious and I urge you to try it. Here we go and for this particular recipe I'm going to use a very, very traditional blending of spices and chiles. So the spices are what's going to happen and then a little bit of comino and I put some water because it'll help with the blending. I'm going to go pretty fast on here so that you can taste these. Do you think I can turn this on? Okay great. If I do this right it will not go all over the place. Here's how you because you don't want grit silky silky smooth and if you have little particles take a cheese cloth or take a very fine mesh sieve and los colas. Because when you feel it it's got to be very, very delicate very velvety, a lush feel in your mouth. After you do that then you have to do the second step which is you fry it and you put a little bit of oil you heat it, a little bit of oil and when you pour it in it'll splash a lot of time so be careful and then when you cook it just keep looking if it's your first time the color will deepen. You'll get aroma, the color will deepen, deepen, deepen and all the rough edges of the chiles will disappear and you get a lovely, lovely sauce which is what we're doing now. While this cooks I would like to talk about the molcajete. You know molcajete, right? So molcajete is Mexican and Mexican American. It's not Venezolano, it's not Colombiano but we have similar techniques of see how it's boiling. I wish that actually I may walk down there and show it to you when it gets ready. This never leaves your family. This belongs to my mother when I pass away it'll be with my niece or my family. This is a molcajete and I'm going to do it here so that you can the molcajete is volcanic rock from Mesoamerica. They're all handmade, every single one of them and it arrived here around the 16th century most of the molcajetes that we use here in Texas Native Americans were granite because granite is the stone we have here but we adopted this and it was used every day in my mother's kitchen I'm going to pass this around so you can sense it and when you sense it, I want to know lift your hand and see if there is any memory but before I do that, I would like to say also that this is the metaphor for our community and for our food in our crucible molcajete where various disparate elements Tengo Ajo, Black Pepper and Comino but they're all coming together and creating harmonious flavor this is how you cook and this is really a metaphor for our community Colombians, Venezuelans Germans, how we create unity and a table for all and lastly when you do the grating the grinding in here you will have a very fine powder so this is the great grandmother of this would you pass this around just randomly and if you smell it and it reminds you of anything let me know as you go into if you want to scrape it some more, you certainly can it's going to say a few more ideas about this cooking when I cook here I'm very very aware that I did not invent any of these things cooking with chiles blending everything I have received from previous cooks and I'd like to go over some of the techniques that I find really helpful this is Enchanted Rock Texas and the rock back here that you see is actually a very large five part molcajete this these indentations that you see they would sit round together and make purees and prepare the dishes and you can see it's granite this is thousands of years old so every technique we use today even in fine dining restaurants our great ancestors culinary artists invented them in order to make delicious food stone cooking in earth ovens is a precursor of our 350 degree oven 250 degree oven in almost damn here in San Antonio if you get a chance to go there there is an earth oven that dates 4,000 to 4,500 years ago and it's there my father, when I was a little boy about eight miles from where we lived on the west side so these traditions are in our memory but the technique we owe to culinary artists before an earth oven is not a very recent phenomenon because to do these functions you have to understand which rocks hold the heat for how long they will hold them and so forth where you have stew, calditos and guisados and heat them up and put them into the bowl and then you'd have beautiful, beautiful stew oyster this is a mitten that was found near Corpus Christi lots of oysters so we used to eat oysters on the half shell we used to steam them as well and now we go to the cactus that will show us that when we deal with cooking we're dealing with material culture material culture is not just survival it's how we choose to survive on the planet it connects us to each other and to the earth and that's when it is at its best as a form before I start cooking the chila do you have any questions? yes and also the blender has really digested the blender has made it into a puree so that that's why I said I don't want little specks for that reason I think it's true in the sense that other ingredients have been on there and you never wash it with soap so it does give it an earthiness I think it's very minor in the grander scheme of things but it does something I didn't know so the molcajete the molcajete made of volcanic rock was brought here in the 16th century was it something that was indigenous? correct what was indigenous to us is the use of a molcajete but it was made out of granite because that was the rock those indigenous ones they used ones out of granite and then the other a lot of new ones that they make seem pretty cheap have you looked at the new ones okay if you buy it's very yes please I don't know how to say this except to be very blunt say you will go to culinary hell there's no other way to say don't do it it's it's a beautiful thing actually it's the art of it so it's worth looking for them really and you'll get a better grind you are now tasting the gorditas we're passing them out now so that you can have a sense of where we're going and the shrimp has been bathed in this red chili that I'm going to show you I'm going to move on to the this is how you who's ever peeled a nomada oh great you can do it first you start I see all around my mother used to use a newspaper to catch the sometimes I use plastic rubber gloves because although my mother would never ever use a rubber glove for demo it's really better because if I am talking too much I might get a piece of spine on mine look what they're eating any comments the ones in the back say enjoy see that's why you should sit up front and notice how there's no heat just a slight slight tang so what I'm doing is the rest of the peeling you do the sides and then you'll notice that the skin it bumps up and so you can just with a potato peeler peel it and you will take the little bumps away and that's where the where the spines are I learned this from my mother she used to do this with a knife though is there another way that you've done it anyone else here just a knife well my mom would meticulously do each individual thing with a knife but then at the HEB in Monterey I watched them because they have to do it really fast they would just take a really sharp knife and go one way against it and then turn it around and go against the other grate and then cut the edges really fast but that's how I do it that's a good way to do it too now after of course you have to throw the debris away and the nopalitos that we're eating after you have cleaned the nopal then we're going to slice it into diced well that's first you need a sharp knife everyone loves a sharp knife you know what I'm going to do I'm going to show you what a finished chili should look like so when you put it and cook it I'm just going to go down here the streaming viewers hello to all of you you won't be able to see this but I'm just going to make a quick quick tour you see how there's a ribbon una huella a trail see it's got to go there because that's when you know that the flavors have been developed you see the trail there it's about 15-20 minutes but it depends on how much water you put in because if you put too much water then it's going to take longer but it's got to look like that you see it's got to do that it's got to do a huella I'm going to do this fast see a huella when it gets to that texture then then that's not great then you know that you've cooked it long enough and it's gone back did you see there you go and most of these techniques are taken for granted in many Texanx restaurants because they think you see la huella because they think it's oh they think it's throwing together chiles to make them hot I wish I could eat that and so what I hope that we can begin to understand and practice is that it is an art it's got nuance it's got technique and you develop flavor with technique not just with the greens we're just about finished good we're just about finished with the tasting I think everybody finished tasting okay before I do the nopalitos are there any questions about the taste in your mouth any comments any memories no no I like hot spicy yes but it isn't it isn't a one note cuisine Mexican food hot no it's not one note which is hot hot is part of it it's very important yes I made a mistake I was six years old I was used to guacamole but they had put green chili so there was serrano in it which I did not know this is my first taste of chili and it was pain and then I loved it so yes the heat is a necessary component of the overall flavor but it is not a one note dish you need to have the complex blending of the chilis so that's why we have so many chilis and each of them has a different flavor a different color now here is how you do the nopalitos 360 degrees or more take a little bit of oil and after you dice them I'm going to do this really fast after you dice them one two three four five oh excuse me there were some more questions I'm sorry I had a question what's the difference between the ancho and the guajillo very good thank you chili ancho is a poblano chili that has been dried and it's used in I would say 80% of the recipes because it's a base it just gives you a very earthy well balanced base of flavor the guajillo doesn't have so much flavor doesn't have a lot of heat it has a beautiful red color so you add the guajillo for color it has a beautiful red color you use a lot of pozole there's another one called pasilla which tastes a little bit like a pasa like a raisin and there are many others so the trick to cooking Texas Mexican food is to blend the chilis the flavor in a different proportion so that you get a really beautiful sauce the one that you had any other questions or comments about the gorditas they were too small and very flaky cook this for I'd say 17 minutes just in a little bit of oil you don't want them to get brown or to get color most people will say that they don't like nopalitos porque they're not slimy if you cook them this way nopalitos happen to be a super food we've been eating this for thousands of years high in antioxidants and on the planet of all the food stuff that you can eat this has the fewer calories and the most nutrients which is really strong and many of the old recipes use cactus immersed in water and then drink the water because it's so good for your system so after you do that you throw in the onions and then the shrimp after the onions have been sauteed to the point where they're clear transparent then you add that chili it's very nice well you've tasted it already I hope that you end up making this recipe in my book the book is available on amazon.com and Barnes & Noble this is for the video streaming but if you can't then go to my blog and I'll post it there so that you can have the recipe this lovely sauce that you saw aromatic and you throw it in calicia you're going to cook that a little bit so that about 5 minutes 10 minutes what you want is for that chili that is in paper the cactus ok so you're not boiling the nopales you're frying them the babas come out and then they disappear when the nopales are frying yes I've never ever done nopales like that before this is so new to me I would boil them with onion and onion and then you fry them and then I will fry them I don't know are they hard? no they're not you ate them so that's the question that normally we're trying to boil them I think that works well too if you boil them you can put them in salad immediately thereafter that's fine too add the onion so that it becomes translucent very flavorful and I'm going to just do this now because it really should have 10 more minutes when it's already 10 minutes then you add some water because it will dry out see this smells so nice you add the water and then when it comes back to the boiling point you add the shrimp you have the shrimp cut out this is you know I'm going to have to taste one I didn't get one and I'm getting hungry with this when it's really boiling really really hard we throw the shrimp in put the heat back up so that it goes back to the boil then you time it 2 and a half minutes why? if you over cook it it will be rubbery when you bite into it this way if you saw it it's nice it has a nice bite and it's not rubbery and it also maintains the flavor so that if you wait 2 and a half minutes depending on the temperature of the shrimp it might go 3 minutes but you can see as soon as it turns pink and it's all white then it's done and when it is done can I have the gordita which is the sample it's a plate to present to your guests this is a great buffet cocktail party dish for your next entertaining event I'm going to take 3 of those and then I'm going to stuff the reason I want to show you how to stuff them is that you'll know when you're stuffing them whether your pieces are too big or too small how big your gordita is so you know how small or how big you want the items to be this looks great parenthetically did anyone have any memories of the gordita smell what was it? grandma's kitchen she was present people want to grind into the garlic so that's the memories of my cooking with my parents I had a question about the gordita I wouldn't test the latin order and you mentioned it before were there other materials that would come in well yes there are if you go throughout the latin americas there are different latinidades so yes I don't know about I think the metatic goals goes all the way down to the Mayan region beyond that I haven't checked completely any other memories so there's a question for my next book your grandma was it the similar smell your grandmother was it similar so this tamales that combination of the three for the tamales your mother when you smelled it was there a reaction in your body? every morning when I was a kid I was going to get ready to go to elementary school and the sound of the cajet the grinding, the gentle it was all chipped in all the time and just bent it in a little bit of water and at the end the matias that were roasted over the over the flame so she would turn those roast them and then let's etch out of them a little bit and that was with homemade flour cooking this morning alright that's great this is another technique this is another this is another technique where you do the chiles sometimes you roast them sometimes you don't depending on the flavor that you want I'm very acutely aware of the time so I'm going to assemble one for you unless there's a pressing memory that you want to share while I'm doing this and they put a little copper coin in the water and then my mother she discovered that she could get the same result oh my goodness the pressure my mother made this a house coin she kept it for years and she used it just to boil pedophiles so the memory is of your mother and other using a copper coin a penny to throw in the water boil it so that the eucas would disappear and then another iteration of that is to boil them with onion I think that's very interesting as the others are interesting because if we really were to spend time discussing these memories we would see the strength of oral history we would see the strength of our community that has been excluded from publication centers from communication centers but the art of cooking continues because it's handed on women 2,000 years ago invented mixtamalization by doing these things that they understood would be beneficial so you take your your beautiful plate I have filled these with the green and lighter color nopalitos and then after you do that you take queso fresco finely finely powdered and you open it put a little bit inside but it'll show on the outside as well you're working with visual as well as with taste and after you finish that then you take cilantro chopped finely if the gorditas are bigger the cilantro can be bigger you might even use leaves and you put the cilantro which goes on top of the white cheese so you're really working with color as well as texture flavor and aroma this is what you serve to your guests I would like to finish with the reading we have 5 minutes I would like to finish with the reading from the book to give you a flavor of the philosophy that's in the book in addition to the cooking there is a reason we cook and it binds us to read from the section that begins with cuisine as a strategy for community how food played a key role in our ongoing identity is a fascinating part of our history having lost our land and language along with economic and political standing we continue to adapt stepping into a new time and inventing strategies that would prove effective in the continuation and celebration of a people between 1492 and 1900 90% of the native peoples of Texas died the indigenous peoples who remained married with other tribes with European settlers and with Mexicans coming up from southern Mexico they sometimes lived in Catholic church missions and eventually came to be known as the Mexican people of Texas it was a process of continuous change and adaptation anthropologists call this ability to survive cultural and ethnic shifts and form new cohesive identities ethnogenesis food was the cultural activity that held us together cooking nurtured our remembering and through it we invented new identities rooted in that remembering preparing food was a day by day regeneration and the last paragraph from the book in order to recognize the many many cooks both home cooks and restaurant cooks who are doing this and when they're doing it they're putting us forward they're advancing our community they're advancing our art conscious of the horrors of our violent history I think that ours must be an aesthetic a culinary aesthetic and economic justice the true context for peace most of us the Mexican market working class are still economically poor the vestiges of our previous devastations we have limited access to formal education and healthcare we dream of a society better than the one from which we have come from this position many of us wish to be artful Chicano chefs hopefully we will continue and not just Chicano Kevin other friends of mine they are advancing this culinary art hopefully we will continue to develop a loving finesse in our cooking techniques an appreciation of the humanity of all who come to our table after all our native culinary heritage prompts us to comfort, to heal and to enjoy that's the main thing