In New York, I imagine it’s Christmastime. My uncle hunched over the counter making homemade pasta noodles for lasagna, my aunt stealing a few slices of salami of her freshly made antipasto, and the smell of penne alla vodka permeating throughout the air. I was nostalgic for my aunt’s famous rainbow cookies, and not just because they were better than any bakery, but because I had learned how to make them with her, side by side with my little cousin.

I am not Italian. But my family is.

In Honduras, I wake up slowly to lazy roosters singing their morning anthem. I spend a good part of the day cleaning and then I go across the street to have lunch. Suyapa is in her beachfront restaurant listening to the news on her radio. Her two girls are sharing a hammock. One is reading, the other is vigorously texting. I greet everyone and then I order my usual: pescado frito con tajadas. I sit at my favorite table where the sand meets the sea and wait for my order to be ready.

I am Honduran; they are not my family. But they look like they could be.

My earliest memory of food is eating oatmeal and drinking agua de sandía (watermelon water). With legs sprawled out on the hotel couch and curious eyes, I anxiously awaited each morning for room service to bring my breakfast. I ate a variation of this meal for the next 40 days. My mom and I were in Tegucigalpa waiting in a hotel across the park from where our lawyer was finalizing the adoption papers. At two and a half years old I didn’t know that my life was about to dramatically change, but I knew that this woman was taking care of me and I felt loved.

My second earliest memory of food is hiding it. When I got to my new home in the United States, I still hadn’t kicked the habit I’d picked up in the orphanage of hiding leftovers to make sure I had enough to eat. It didn’t take long to see that this behavior wasn’t necessary. I wasn’t afraid my mom wasn’t going to feed me.

As I grew up, my mom made sure I maintained a relationship to the food of my birth country. She learned how to make arroz con pollo, enchiladas, and other different kinds of Latin American food. I didn’t know that she wouldn’t always use the exact ingredients and would improvise. Later, when I traveled in Honduras, I could taste the difference from my mom’s arroz con pollo. But at the time, I didn’t remember what food from my country tasted like.

I grew up with homemade meals, meticulously customized birthday cakes (as per my request), and I learned how to cook early. I felt at home in the kitchen. Each recipe either came from the Joy of Cooking or my mom’s treasured wooden box of family recipes. Each night I would roll up my sleeves and stand side by side with my mom, making lasagna, stuffed mushrooms, and minestrone soup and meatballs (my mom put raisins in hers and marked them with X’s with a knife so I didn’t accidentally eat any. Raisins weren’t my favorite.) This was my food.

I didn’t remember what food from my country tasted like.
Click To Tweet

It wasn’t until I was told I was different from classmates (in less than nice words) that I felt different. How could I tell my mom that kids at school told me that she wasn’t my real mom and my family wasn’t my real family and my real family didn’t want me?

Instead, I spent the majority of my childhood feeling bad and embarrassed for being adopted.

Each time I looked at a family picture, I could see I looked different than everyone else. I hid them all. I even shoved the screen printed pillow cover of my three cousins and I in the back of my closet. I loved that pillowcase; I loved my cousins; we had gotten it done when we went to Storyland one summer. I only kept my yearbook photos and one of me and my mom hung up on the wall above my piano. At least when I was in a picture with just my mom, I could have a reason as to why I looked different. It would be a lot easier than explaining why all of my family members were white and I wasn’t.

Our family tradition was to go to New York for Christmas. I was always so excited to go to New York because I grew up in Maine and never had experienced seeing so many people of color. In grocery stores, I’d trail behind Spanish speaking families and wish they knew me somehow. I’d peer into their carts, searching for Latin American food, in hopes that would give me a clue as to who I was and where I came from.

In high school I asked my mom if we could eat food from Central America. I wasn’t expecting to find Honduran food where I grew up, but to our amazement we found an authentic El Salvadorian restaurant in downtown Portland, Maine. They welcomed me with warm eyes, but when they caught a glimpse of my mom trailing behind me they treated me less warmly and didn’t give my mom the time of day. I didn’t ask to go again.

Finally, I graduated high school early and left to study abroad. Despite my mom’s attempt to cook Latin American foods, and my attempts to find Latin American culture in my hometown, I had lost my birth culture’s identity. I wanted to reclaim it.

I did not travel to Honduras at first. I wasn’t ready. I spent time in Costa Rica through an exchange program but I wanted to experience more. My mom’s best friend hosted a Peruvian woman and asked if I could stay with her family once she returned to Peru. I didn’t end up staying with that host family, but instead found a girl in my class whose family hosted students regularly. They had two daughters around my age and a son who was a few years younger. Our connection was instantaneous. We enjoyed the same music, laughed at the same things and found joy in each other’s company. I grew up as an only child and I found something I had always wanted: Siblings and a family that looked like me. Well, kinda. And food that I would have eaten if I grew up in my own country. Well, kinda.

I learned how to cook la comida de la selva side by side with my Mamita, a woman I met through a girl I went to school with, whose family would become my family. I remember one morning waking up to the smell of juane de arroz. The kitchen was joyfully flooded with rows and rows of hojas de bijao (banana leaves), waiting to be filled with rice and tied with string. I tied for hours with my brothers and sisters. I had never been so happy to do such a monotonous task.

I am not Peruvian. But they are more than my host family. They are my family.

After graduating from college I traveled to Asia. I learned how to order food in each country I lived in. I devoured the sizzling street food of Bangkok. I eagerly awaited to have Pad Thai in On Nut Market and finished my meal with mango sticky rice. In Seoul, I shared Korean BBQ with coworkers and filled up on pork buns at least three times a week. On visa runs I would go to Vietnam and eat fresh Bánh mì in a trance and have the same expression on my face when I had my daily serving of Bai Sach Chrouk in Cambodia.

I didn’t grow up with any of these foods. I am not Thai. I am not Korean. I am not Vietnamese or Cambodian, but I saw how food brought people together. I felt how I was welcomed into their culture, and into their homes. I was gracefully cocooned within a culture of food and with people who shared the love of food and people.

Despite my mom’s attempt to cook Latin American foods, and my attempts to find Latin American culture in my hometown, I had lost my birth culture’s identity. I wanted to reclaim it.
Click To Tweet

Eventually I made it back to Honduras. I wanted to remember the food of my motherland. I wanted to smell baleadas from blocks away and instinctively know that that was the food of my homeland; that it was mine. That I belonged to Honduras and Honduras belonged to me. I had seen first hand how food seamlessly brought a culture together—I wanted to be woven back into my own culture.

But unfortunately, I didn’t have a magical moment. I didn’t taste something that flooded my brain with memories of my birth family and culture.

Nothing tasted familiar.

My taste buds didn’t invite me to dance or throw a homecoming party for me.

I didn’t even like baleadas.

That was until I saw on the menu that they served agua de sandia and arroz con pollo.

In that moment I was not Honduran or Italian. In that moment I was me. A collection of my lived experiences.

My feeling of home comes from the people I surround myself with and the food that unites us. Home is not a place on a map, where I grew up, or even where I was born. Home is a feeling.

And food, was another language of love.

By Malú Huacuja del Toro

October 12 is known in all the American continent, except the United States, as the “Day of the Race,” meaning an encounter of different races and worlds, not “Columbus Day.” The U.S. is the only country that celebrates the discovery of one continent by people from another one, as if the native peoples didn’t exist before being seen by the people coming inside three ships. It also celebrates the cult of personality. For all these reasons, the diverse people of the United States are considering renaming Columbus Day under different terms and a different understanding of history.

Words have meaning and history, usually from the conquerors’ point of view. Latin American countries speak Spanish because our native peoples were conquered by the Spanish Crown, while native peoples in the North were conquered by the British Crown. Ever since, our languages divide us. We need translations to build bridges between us.

---

The U.S. is the only country that celebrates the discovery of one continent by people from another one.
Click To Tweet

---

For good or bad, translators can change history. They are the anonymous ghostwriters of it. They can also create myths, or else, destroy them. Mexico City was built on top of, and because of many myths, but also, one translator — Malinche. Four-hundred ninety-eight years before the latest deadly earthquake, when Spaniard Conqueror Hernán Cortés took over the majestic city, Aztec mythology was certainly on his side, but a translator on the other one. Aztecs mistook him indeed for their Serpent God Quetzalcóatl who, according to prophecies, was supposed to return.

As written by the conquerors themselves, King Moctezuma welcomed Cortés most warmly inside the sacred city that was built over another myth (the eagle and serpent’s myth over the lake). He opened the doors of his palace and temple for him. He hosted him. He allowed him to scold the Indigenous people for having such horrible non-Christian gods. He gave Cortés access and time enough to figure out how he was going to steal Axayácatl’s treasure, but one always wonders if all that non-violent first part of the Conquest would have been possible without the Indigenous woman Malinche translating the summit.

When Moctezuma addressed to Cortés, he called him, Hernán Cortés, “Malinche,” because that was the person who spoke on behalf of the Spaniard Crown. She was the voice that the Indigenous invaded people heard in their heads. We will never know if she modified or suppressed some parts of the conversation that made history.

The Other Wall

Before Trump’s wall idea, another kind of wall has already been built between Mexico and the United States — the wall of disinformation. It is the wall that led to NAFTA, signed without the consensus of both U.S. and Mexican ordinary people, compromising our future for generations, and increasing immigration. It is not in the best interest of Mexican oligarchs, Mexican drug lords, U.S. plutocrats and U.S. politicians that a majority of ordinary people start communicating between each other. They would end up making a better deal for both countries. So, this is a wall that was built for a reason.

One would expect that Google translators and communication apps in the digital era can break language barriers among ordinary people, but a closer look to any election campaign in any country, and particularly last year’s presidential election in the U.S., would correct this interpretation. With the help of Facebook and Twitter farms of trolls, more U.S. people ended up insulting more Mexican people than ever, probably, and not wanting to learn any foreign language.

Better communication with the help of automatic translators might be certainly the case in private exchanges, but not in open forums where social and public interest issues are discussed, and definitely not with the interference of paid trolls with political purposes. They are trained to end any conversation before it starts.

It’s a hard wall to break without professional journalism informing the public about real issues across the continent, and the language barrier doesn’t help.

It was not until recently that one U.S. progressive network, Democracy Now!, started considering the need to “go South” and communicate not only to Mexico but also to all of Latin America and immigrants in the U.S., offering not just the leftovers made with “the guy who speaks Spanish at the office” but high quality translation services of their news. Their web page in Spanish made a tremendous difference. Not too long ago, the only TV channels available to Spanish speakers in the U.S. broadcasted old soap operas mostly produced by the Televisa network and talk shows publicizing Televisa stars, hosted by conservative people at an elementary-school level, and no interest in social issues, economy, and politics.

The rest of the press, radio, and TV news in Spanish was mostly a replica of Fox and Friends in English. Strangely enough, progressive media and leftist organizations in the U.S., led by people who acknowledged the existence of a very diverse working class in U.S. America — including immigrant workers as part of that workforce — didn’t think that such a massive attack on the immigrant workers’ mentality needed to be countered by a very professional, objective, smart radio, press or TV.

For years, conservative news shows in Spanish had no other relevant competition but the least qualified hosts who seemed to be picked by the policy of “the guy who speaks Spanish at the office.” No offense to the intern who is in the process of learning Spanish or the “guy next door” whose mother speaks Spanish because she was born in Latin America, but there is a double standard in the progressive U.S. media that needs to be addressed to break that wall.

If you were the CEO of a radio or TV network in English, would you hire a host with no experience and/or no grassroots representation whatsoever in his or her community, no traction, no leadership, not enough vocabulary to speak fluently on the microphone, no information, and no background in communications, not even in theory?

That’s exactly what an iconic progressive radio station in NYC has been doing over the last decades when it comes to most of their shows in Spanish. They apply a double standard to their hiring policies because they are progressive, but only in English. Judging by the results of their productions in the last decades, they don’t think their Spanish audience deserves the same level of information and professionalism, let alone grassroots representation.

With very little audience, in certain cases, their hosts are precisely some of the most isolated persons of their communities, be it because they have no social skills, charisma or any background in communications. You can see them trying to socialize in our public political events. They don’t even introduce themselves as reporters of this station (no one taught them to do so). I know at least one host who believes that the Illuminati are taking over the planet and OVNIS will rapture us. It doesn’t make his radio chain very different than InfoWars.

---

This two-tier system for English and Spanish media produced so many bad shows that turned to be reason enough for the National Public Radio to eliminate its Spanish Division in the ’90s.
Click To Tweet

---

This two-tier system for English and Spanish media produced so many bad shows that turned to be reason enough for the National Public Radio to eliminate its Spanish Division in the ’90s. The low-quality level was documented.

Such reduction of funding only hurt the smaller, truly grassroots and less-fancy (but with larger audiences) networks directed by and for immigrant workers like Radio Bilingüe, broadcasting in Spanish, Indian Mixteco, and English languages. Founded by Indigenous agricultural worker from the Mixteca Zone in Oaxaca and Harvard-graduate Hugo Morales, this listener-supported network produces the only daily national Spanish-language news and public affairs programs in the U.S. public broadcasting.

Even though most of their audience is made by workers living in low-income communities, Radio Bilingüe doesn’t treat them like second-class citizens who don’t deserve high-quality standards in information, vocabulary and fluency, only because they speak Spanish. Needless to say, they were directly benefited by Democracy Now! being professionally translated into Spanish, which Radio Bilingüe features on its home page as their top recommendation.

Spanish Versions Go South

It is a hard and tall wall to break between North and South, because it is made of several layers of cultural indifference.

“Democracy Now! has been really helpful by translating their key article of the week into Spanish and making some interviews to immigrant rights activists, for instance,” Rebelión Collective says.

“[Democracy Now! host] Amy Goodman is an excellent interviewer, allowing her guests to go deeper in their subject. Both her and Juan González and all their team are outstanding, in comparison to the rest of the U.S. media, because they give voice to grassroots, African American, Latin-American organizations, and people from across the world who have been affected by the US government policies. They give perspectives that have been systematically excluded from commercial media.”

With about 10,000 readers every day — half of them living in Latin America — Rebelión is one of the most diverse and professional online publications across Latin America and Spain. It is made by a group of editors, translators and writers from all Latin American countries, covering all the continents. They respond collectively to this interview, explaining that they cannot trust commercial U.S. media because “they don’t give an idea to the rest of the world of what is really happening in the U.S., since they are just broadcasting propaganda in favor of the 1% protected by a police state investing astronomical numbers of money in wars while denying health care and education to their people, in a country with the highest per-capita rate of prisoners in the world.”

“Our main sources of information are independent journalists,” Rebelión Collective continues.

“We voice Hispanic immigrants living in the U.S., including undocumented workers who are suffering in flesh the system’s discrimination and oppression. We publish texts by community groups fighting for a more just society, like Unión del Barrio, as well as thinkers and activists like Noam Chomsky and James Petras. It is basically from all of them, and other alternative media, that we present to our readers another view of reality in the United States.”

Rebelión is one of the few online publications that pays special attention to the work of translation from different languages, with specialized translators for various subjects or sections. “Why are they still interested in using human translators instead of Google robots?” I asked.

“Since its foundation, Rebelión has been lucky enough to count on a translators’ team who are militant and aware of the importance of making accessible into Spanish information that was written in other languages. Information needs to be really understandable so that the reader gets access to it. Automatic translation apps rarely get the context. A writer-author-thinker-human being deserves to be translated by an equally human, thinking translator. A ‘human translator’ will always strive to make an article’s content both most understandable to the reader and accurate to the original version. This is something that members of our team pay special attention to.”

‘U.S. Fights That Are Close to Our Heart’

Ke Huelga Radio in Mexico City reproduces Democracy Now! every day in Spanish. Created during the long but successful 1999 students’ strike opposing the privatization of public college — which gave the people of México two more decades of free public education at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM, by its acronym in Spanish) — Ke Huelga Radio has become one of the most trusted alternative radio stations for grassroots movements in Mexico. They respond to my questionnaire for AlterNet after the quake, while running from one “Centro de Acopio Autónomo” (“Autonomous Rescue Collective Center”) to another one. They too don’t want to be quoted individually but as a collective.

Ke Huelga Radio find it “most important” that critical media in the U.S. is heard by Mexican people, and that’s why they broadcast Democracy Now! for the “Ciudad Monstruo” (a city of a monstrous size). “This news show reports about many fights that are close to our collective hearts, like Standing Rock and the fight of immigrant workers against xenophobic measures proposed by president Donald Trump.”

Ke Huelga talks very seriously against disinformation, especially after the earthquake. This collective of reporters and grassroots radio hosts considers that it is the duty of alternative media to keep people well informed about the autonomous rescue teams working right now in Mexico, the police attacks, the government’s hoarding of international donations and, last but not least, sorting out the information on social media to dismiss fake news.

“In contrast, Mexican commercial media has turned the quake into a circus of morbid curiosity, even making up nonexistent victims like Frida Sofía, while portraying the Mexican Army and Marines like heroes,” they say. However, the Army prevented independent organizations of professional rescue workers from doing their work.

Subversiones: Cracking the Media Siege

Founded in 2010, Subversiones is a non-commercial, online publication “seeking to champion the people’s collective memory and critical understanding of the context we live on.” To them, the context is as important as the event itself, so they rely on good translations as well. “We communicate in honesty and earnest from our recognized subjectivities, in order to crack the media siege and create a counterbalance to the commercial media and its massive manipulation.”

During the earthquake, they became a community service to connect people in need of help with people who want to help, not only in Mexico City but Oaxaca and Chiapas. They have been reporting the movement against the Mexican government’s corruption that caused so many new buildings collapsing. Their publication is mostly made by voluntary work and fundraising events, selling photographs and printed publications, as well as readers’ donations.

These are just a few examples of the many bridges that progressive media can build across the United States and Latin America while commercial media keeps echoing president Donald Trump’s tweets. Incidentally, it is the same mainstream media that helped to put him in the White House by publicizing everything he did and said during the primaries, while ignoring the fight for life that was taking place in Standing Rock.

This article originally appeared on AlterNet. Republished here with permission.