TAMALADA HOLIDAY WRAPPING

Over the weekend I was in a warm kitchen stuffed with Christmas décor and emerging matriarchs doing their first tamale-making session: a tamalada.  In artspeak, that is an Allan Kaprow “Happening” of participating performance artists sharing spontaneous spoken word narrative while practicing an assemblage of mixed organic materials that are a reference to ephemera Holiday folk traditions. In family-speak, it is gossip while prepping for dinner.

Helming the stove was my cousin, around my age, talking her daughters (and one high school age granddaughter) through the assembly line, a holiday wrapping tradition. It was their first attempt doing it as a team.

My Dad and my Tia (Aunt) supervised the passing  of “the leaves,” the family nickname for husks. The head chef/ curator cousin offering me a sample of the roasted pork that had a long simmer in a homemade sauce the day before. "Good? Yea?" She asked. I nodded. The chili bit me back a bit,  yet pulled out a deeply embedded flashback of a familiar flavor.

I asked my cousin if the sauce was her recipe. While sipping her beer during her ten second break from the heat, she gave a head nod toward my Aunt, her mom, my Dad's sister-in-law. Queen Tia was sitting down with a regal aura, and looked at me to say with a practiced casual authority, "It's your grandma's recipe."

"Is it written down?" I asked, hopefully.  The Tia looked around kitchen of noise and masa, her eyes counted the brood of daughters that came after her: "No, but the girls got it now."

Next year I plan to smuggle the family secret across the California-Nevada border.

Carmen Lomas Garza, Tamalada, 1990, color lithograph, Smithsonian American Art Museum, (c) 1990, Carmen Lomas Garza, Museum purchase made possible by John B. Turner, 1997.5  ​

José Guadalupe Posada, The Tamale, woodcut, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Jack Lord, 1971.439.7