Title: Mofongo With Maddy and Urszulka

Medium: iMovie Video

Author(s): Maddy Wald, Urszulka Hunter SPAN 139 S23

Date: June 11, 2023

Location: spanish final project small.m4v

Overview:

For our project we will be making a cooking tutorial of how to make a vegetarian Dominican dish – mofongo. We are focusing on Dominican dishes because of the central role it takes in Junot Diaz’s story “Fiesta, 1980” from his short story collection Drown (1996). During a family gathering, the main character, Yunior recounts how “About two hours later the women laid out the food and like always nobody but the kids thanked them. It must be some Dominican tradition or something. There was everything I liked – chicharrones, fried chicken, tostones, sancocho, rice, fried cheese, yuca, avocado, potato salad, a meteor-sized hunk of pernil, even a tossed salad which I could do without …” (p. 36-37). We researched these items and others that are very common in the Dominican Republic, but took a focus on finding dishes that are vegetarian or could be adapted into a meatless dish, as we are both vegetarian. Further, in our cooking show we will discuss each dish’s cultural importance and how vegetarian dishes work to maintain authenticity of a dish while adapting to personal preferences. In many cases it may be easier for vegetarians to abandon their cultural ties to make easier dishes, but we think the effort to create these vegetarian adaptations of classic dishes display the strong tie to cultural food that many people maintain.

These two pieces are categorized with the “Community and Pride” section of the Smithsonian archive. This theme of community and pride is tied to cooking and cuisine because food is such a large component of cultural identity. I feel that cuisine is a component of cultural identity that we have not put a lot of emphasis on throughout this course thus far. The painting “Camas para Sueños” depicts two young women sitting on the roof of their home, dreaming of becoming artists, while their mother is seen through the window maintaining a traditional Mexican American home. The younger generation integrating themselves into American culture and having aspirations that are unrelated to their cultural and ethnic identities juxtaposes with the ways in which the parents and grandparents maintain their ties to their culture of origin- we see this theme in many of the works we have read in class. A component of this tie to one's culture of origin is to continue making the traditional foods, and while the younger generations continue to integrate themselves into American culture, it is likely that they continue to eat these traditional foods at home, which maintains their link to their ethnic and cultural identity.

This project aligns with the goals of the digital archive because we will be educating ourselves and others about traditional Dominican cuisine. In sharing these foods, we will be celebrating Dominican culture and possibly inspiring others to learn more about it. We will also be entertaining the audience.