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My grandma Tina’s house on Christmas Eve. I was always met with a billow of warmth as I walked through the front door. This heat, emanating from the kitchen, was filled with the aroma of rice, sweet onion, and tamales, and would cause my eyes to well up almost to the point of crying. It was an emotional bodily response I often had as a child whenever I was experiencing something I understood to be “Mexican.” I was so used to being whitewashed in my tiny Michigan city that the unapologetic moments of Mexicanidad overwhelmed me when they came—with joy, with subconscious reminders, with the presence of loved ones.

My grandma’s house was small, so as soon as you walked through the front door you were immediately standing in the middle of the living room. Upon entering, I’d see the chaos of my large extended family packed onto two couches, a rocking chair, and strewn across the entire floor, stepping over one another to get to the kitchen or the bathroom. The laughter of my primos was explosive. We would catch up on our lives, talk about children, school and sports. But so much of the laughter came from constant jokes that were told about what white people must think about us. I was much younger than most of them, so I would mostly listen as they cracked jokes about some white person they saw confusedly trying to open a tamale (we were mostly English-speaking so we used “tamale” as the singular instead of “tamal”).

Eventually my grandpa Domingo would seek me out among the sea of Michicano niños squirming around on the floor. I’d get butterflies in my stomach when I’d hear him call out my name, Santos, as “Chaaaaaaaaantoooooooooo…!” He would reach down to hand me a plate with a tamale on it, crack some joke about how I stunk or how my head was too big for my body, and then walk away chuckling.

These Mexicanos didn’t care about originality, man. They’d say the same jokes every Christmas. They’d steal jokes from each other and re-tell them at the same party. Originality wasn’t the point. The re-telling is actually what made them special. They were a way to teach lessons and to re-affirm one’s belong to both the family and to Mexicanidad more broadly. And niños like me were the primary target for jokes, not only because we were easy targets, but also because we need those lessons and we needed that affirmation as Xicano children growing up in Michigan. These jokes—essentially comedic shit-talking—were a form of love and attention.

Unwrapping the tamale was a trip for me. I only ate them on special occasions and could never remember which parts I was supposed to eat and which parts I was supposed to throw away. Sensing my confusion, my tios would come by, point to the maza, and say something like, “you didn’t eat this part, did you? We’ll have to take you to the hospital! Otherwise you’ll have corn growing out of your ears!” Then they’d burst into laughter and walk away.

Again, my eyes would well up, but not from embarrassment. I understood that I was participating in something much bigger and older than me. I understood that these tamales, these jokes, this type of setting in my grandma Tina’s house was helping me to remember something about myself and about my family. For many Xicanos and other colonized people, the act of remembering cultural practices is one of decolonization. Cherríe Moraga (Xicana) explains why looking to the past is important in order to survive in the future: "I am in daily search of these acts of remembering of who we once were, because I believe they will save our pueblos from extinction. Our preconquest imaginations offer strategies for building self-sustaining societies today, societies that can disrupt the mass suicide of global consumption, engineered by the empire of the United States. I believe the United States intends to disappear its indigenous inhabitants and our non-Western ways of knowing. So, I write" (Moraga 81). While tamales in and of themselves will not “disrupt the mass suicide of global consumption” that Moraga refers to, for me and others they do serve as an important strand connecting Xicanos and Michicanos to our preconquest imaginations. This food, which can be traced back thousands of years, has become a way for me to think about the relationship between Xicano people, our ancestral lands, and our migration to Anishinaabe land—what I have also been calling "The Great Lakes Region."

In order to understand why tamales serve such an important purpose for Great Lakes Xicanos in particular, one must have a sense of the unique, often isolating, position we are in so far away from our homelands. In talking to one of my elders about his experience growing up primarily around white people in Michigan before deciding to move to Los Angeles in his 20s, he mentioned that "assimilation really has no boundaries." To me this speaks to the importance of food culture for Chicanxs, as it is one of the ways in which we have been able to retain a connection to our heritage.

Yet, at the same time, foods have also often been used as a method of exclusion and marginalization. Throughout history, corn-based foods such as tamales have been used as a way for European settlers to derogatorily mark people as “Indian." As food historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher has pointed out, “[f]ood had served as an important status marker in the colonial period, dividing the Native American "people of corn" from the European wheat-eating elite…[t]he Diccionario de cocina (Dictionary of Cooking), published in 1845, pointedly questioned the morals of any family that ate tamales-the food of "the lower orders'" (Pilcher 194 & 204).

Going even further back in time, depictions of tamales appear in classic Mayan iconography, often as integral parts of Mayan ceremony. Some of these ancient practices, such as Yucatec ceremonial practice, continue to be carried out today on the same lands that they have been for thousands of years (Taube 45-46, above image retrieved from this scholarly essay). Chicanxs, as descendants of Indigenous Mesoamericans, and as a people who have continually been forced to emigrate from our lands due to the economic exploitation of the ruling class, have created a culture that is simultaneously connected to its past in Mesoamerica yet is distinct from both historical and contemporary Indigenous practices of the region.

Works Cited

Moraga, C. L. (2011). A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000–2010. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.

Pilcher, J. M. (1998). Que vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (1st edition). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.