By Daniel Alvarenga
A pupusa in its natural habitat. Suchitoto, El Salv.
The first time I saw white people in a pupusería was on my first trip to San Francisco's Mission district in the mid-2000s. Growing up in inland Southern California I had never in my life seen a nuclear White family venture into the hood to have the fried, flat delicacy of my people. As they walked in, my Salvadoran-American guides to The City scoffed something about “displacement and invasion” under their breaths – this wasn’t a scene of first contact.
At the time I had no idea what they were on about, I took away from that encounter thinking that San Francisco had some fairly open-minded white folks. If you fast forward more than half a decade later you can catch me in a pupusería in that same neighborhood and I may be the only Salvadoran there besides the staff. It’s not just white folks but other people of color as well, in their majority eating pupusas with cutlery, something verboten in Latin America’s smallest country. Sometimes not even the staff is Salvadoran, which gives me negative flashbacks to another encounter in San Francisco: pupusas with a choice of ketchup or Mexican salsa roja. These shake-my-head worthy experiences as a SoCal transplant to the Bay Area has lead me to what on-the-surface seems like a positive conclusion: pupusas are more popular than ever.
Salvadorans, for whom pupusas are almost solely attributed to, are the fourth largest Latino group in the United States. However, assigning pupusas to the whole of El Salvador is somewhat of a contemporary stretch too. They were invented by the indigenous peoples on land now considered the western part of El Salvador, and it's disputed that parts of Honduras & Guatemala lay claim to them as well. For example, my mother is from the fringes of eastern El Salvador in La Union off of Gulf of Fonseca that we share with Nicaragua and Honduras. Growing up in those parts in the 1950s and 60s, pupusas where not a frequent staple in her life as she came to know them later when she moved to the capital of San Salvador in the 1970s. Therefore, pupusas more or less went viral in the mid 20th century and the momentum is still going.
Salvadorans, for whom pupusas are almost solely attributed to, are the fourth largest Latino group in the United States. However, assigning pupusas to the whole of El Salvador is somewhat of a contemporary stretch too. They were invented by the indigenous peoples on land now considered the western part of El Salvador, and it's disputed that parts of Honduras & Guatemala lay claim to them as well. For example, my mother is from the fringes of eastern El Salvador in La Union off of Gulf of Fonseca that we share with Nicaragua and Honduras. Growing up in those parts in the 1950s and 60s, pupusas where not a frequent staple in her life as she came to know them later when she moved to the capital of San Salvador in the 1970s. Therefore, pupusas more or less went viral in the mid 20th century and the momentum is still going.
Crimes Against Pupusas
People may not even know a single Salvadoran, but they are “discovering” pupusas every day, lost and rebranding things in the grand tradition of Christopher Columbus. From frozen gluten-free pupusas made by a not-so-Salvadoran sounding Cindy English that retails at Whole Foods to round (as in, not flat) plantain paleo pupusas that satisfy a white girl named Kaitlin's "Puerto Rican food cravings.” I’ve heard of the fabled plantain-based pupusas de banano from Alegría, Usulután, but I doubt they look like that or can satiate anyone’s craving for an island 1,500 miles away from El Salvador.
There are even times when people get pupusas almost right but not quite. In April 2015 the Los Angeles Times ran a piece titled “Where to get pupusas in Los Angeles” by foodie writer Cecilia Hae Jin-Lee, a seemingly innocuous article that profiles five places you can support Salvadoran businesses and grub on this fine delicacy of the Central American isthmus. That is until you come up on this line, “We have the Salvadoran civil war in the '80s to thank for the wide availability of the dish.” Twitter discovered this recently, almost a year later but a swift backlash ensued:
There are even times when people get pupusas almost right but not quite. In April 2015 the Los Angeles Times ran a piece titled “Where to get pupusas in Los Angeles” by foodie writer Cecilia Hae Jin-Lee, a seemingly innocuous article that profiles five places you can support Salvadoran businesses and grub on this fine delicacy of the Central American isthmus. That is until you come up on this line, “We have the Salvadoran civil war in the '80s to thank for the wide availability of the dish.” Twitter discovered this recently, almost a year later but a swift backlash ensued:
This article has a line that really pissed me off: Where to get pupusas in Los Angeles https://t.co/Ej6FZeYiEf
— Polemicist (@PalmTreesnGz) February 23, 2016
"We have the Salvadoran civil war in the '80s to thank for the wide availability of the dish."
— Aura Bogado (@aurabogado) February 24, 2016
What. The. Fuck. https://t.co/3CKuCeeIR5
While it is factually true that the dissemination of pupusas world-wide is the product of the barbarous US-sponsored 12-year civil war, it is nary something to be thankful for. While we are at it here are some things we can thank the Salvadoran Civil War for: 80,000 deceased or missing people, permanent familial separation, and generational trauma. It was a genocide that my parents, siblings, and friends fled from and thus shouldn’t be thrown around lightly. I can assure anyone that fulfilling the voyeuristic gastronomic interests of hipsters was not first on our agenda. At the very least though the Los Angeles Times removed the reference to the war and the author apologized on Twitter. This further revealed to me that when it comes to our own traditions in this country, Salvadorans are talked about but never consulted. Our cuisine, which is our labor, is seen and embraced but somehow we aren’t.
#Pupusasgate in context
We are living in a time when our cuisine is more popular than ever, but there are greater efforts than ever to keep Central Americans physically out the of the picture. Historically Central American neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Mission and Los Angeles’s Echo Park have been divested of our people through gentrification. On the immigration front, we have a Central American refugee crisis where this nation is debating sending children back to violence or putting them in detention. And this country has the gall to do that after the U.S. funded military dictatorships and armed conflicts in Central America in decades prior, installed economically devastating free trade policies (DR-CAFTA), and whose criminal justice system churned out the MS-13 international gang composed of deported child refugees from the 1980s Salvadoran Civil War. It’s a cycle of imperialist violence that sees no end in sight, and it’s that brutality that brought pupusas to your plate, food trucks, foodie blogs, hispandering Buzzfeed listicles, and half-hearted Yelp reviews.
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