Joe and I make refried beans on a Saturday morning while our four-month-old sits in a bouncer and gums his hands. We follow the recipe I\u2019ve learned by watching my mom for years: heat oil in a deep pan, fold each white corn tortilla into four triangles, and toast them in the oil until they are brown and crisp. Joe always reminds me to flip the tortillas and remove them just when they are crispy, not a second later. I\u2019ve burned dozens of tortillas in our two years of marriage, their pockmarked surfaces forming black bubbles. It\u2019s always because I\u2019m in a hurry, turning the heat up too high, or because I\u2019m trying to get something else done at the same time\u2014fry the rice, chop the cilantro. I return to smoking oil and charred chips. I\u2019ve learned that the secret to this meal of refried beans, as with most Mexican food, is taking your time and giving it your attention.<\/p>\n
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When my parents were dating, my dad told my mom he had always wanted to marry a woman who cooked as good as his mom. They were sharing a meal my mom had made for him after a long day of work.<\/p>\n
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\u201cYou better be careful,\u201d Mom said. \u201cSomeone might mistake that as a proposal.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Dad, the story goes, blushed. \u201cYou never know\u2014it might have been.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Returning the jest, Mom smiled casually. \u201cWell, you never know I might have said yes.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Later that evening, he proposed to her on the San Antonio River Walk. He had no ring, no plan, really. I believe it was the only spur-of-the-moment decision he ever made in his adult life\u2014my father the planner, the deliberator, the one I\u2019m said to take after in my notorious cynicism.<\/p>\n
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I try to imagine what it was that overpowered him that day he proposed to Mom: love that disregarded fear and obstacles, a love effusive and daring, the kind of emotion I\u2019ve rarely seen my practical, serious father express in words. A midwestern farm boy, he wasn\u2019t raised to express feelings that way. Sometimes, when I think of Dad as a young man falling in love over food, I think also of the little boy finding comfort\u2014love, safety, and home\u2014in his mother\u2019s cooking. I imagine meals were often my stoic grandmother\u2019s only means of showing tenderness to her children. To say he wanted to marry a woman who cooked as good as his mom was to say he wanted a woman to share a home with.<\/p>\n
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On a Sunday morning, when I was having brunch at my parents\u2019 house, Dad told me that beans and hot sauce have replaced mashed potatoes and gravy in his diet. I laughed, because I know how much Dad loves mashed potatoes and how much Mom hates them. She didn\u2019t grow up with them and finds their texture unappetizing. I think of how Dad\u2014born in Chicago, raised on a farm in Iowa\u2014never ate a breakfast taco until he met Mom, born in Guadalajara and raised in San Antonio. Now he eats chorizo, eggs, beans, and jalapenos every morning for breakfast.<\/p>\n
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After I remove the tortilla chips, we let the oil cool a few minutes. I learned the need for this the hard way, too, from the time I poured an entire can of beans into the bubbling oil and ended up with a sprinkle of burns across my arm. When I told Mom, she scolded me in that strange way we get mad at people we love for hurting themselves.<\/p>\n
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\u201cYou have to wait,\u201d she told me, a step I hadn\u2019t remembered ever seeing her take. I simply assumed she\u2019d learned the art of pouring beans into scalding oil without burning herself.<\/p>\n
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I\u2019ve since made it Joe\u2019s job to pour the beans into the pan, regardless of how cooled the oil is. This morning, we use a fifty-three-ounce can of Bush\u2019s Pinto Beans, with their liquid. Joe and I joke that we have a problem, making too much for only two people.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt was the smallest can I could find,\u201d I say, but Joe is happy we\u2019ll have leftovers for tacos later in the week.<\/p>\n
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Mom has used Bush\u2019s for as long as I can remember, though she talks of a time she used to wash and boil her own beans.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt takes too long,\u201d she says now, \u201cand Bush\u2019s taste just as good.\u201d On the rare occasions she makes frijoles borrachos, I\u2019ve seen just how long it takes to prepare beans from scratch. She lays them out on a towel, their speckly, wiggly forms smooth as she runs her fingers over each one, feeling for bumps and sprouts. She throws out the misshapen ones, rearranges the remaining ones. Then she lets the beans soak in a cold-water bath overnight before boiling them until they\u2019re soft, like butter, then adds tomatoes, cilantro, bacon, and a bottle of Corona beer to the broth. I asked her once if the bumpy beans are bad to eat.<\/p>\n
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\u201cNo,\u201d she said. \u201cI just want the pretty ones.\u201d<\/p>\n
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She told me once that her dad, my Tito, used to carry out this bean ritual weekly, often recruiting her from backyard play or homework to help. She says there was always a pot of beans on the stove in her childhood home. Her family ate beans and rice almost every day.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe were poor,\u201d Mom says, which is a statement I realize I can\u2019t understand, not the way she does. Beans and rice have never been the main dish at a family dinner I can remember. My grandparents both owned their own businesses, trades brought over from Mexico. My Tito was, and is, a shoe repairman; my Tita, a seamstress and a sculptor. But with five children, a language barrier, and dying trades, there were times when their hard work barely paid the bills. If they came to this country with the usual hopes of immigrants, their grandchildren even more than their children are the ones who have seen those hopes to fruition.<\/p>\n
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I think of the disparity between their lives and mine, of how much of who I am I\u2019ve inherited from them and the world they came from. Some of those things are simple: the shape of my eyes, my ability to roll my \u201cr\u2019s,\u201d my love for their simple, delicious food. Some of those things are more complex, specific to Mom\u2019s family: a history of brokenness, abuse, and betrayal; a propensity for the dramatic, for storytelling. And yet, though I claim my Latina heritage, I only really know that world through Mom\u2019s stories and recipes.<\/p>\n
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As Joe fries onions and corn tortillas for migas, another dish I\u2019ve learned from Mom, I wait for the beans to heat back up. I watch as they turn frothy and bubbling, then take a potato masher and smash them into their broth. Once, Joe tried to mash them before they started to boil, and the masher made awkward chunks of the still too-hard beans. We learned that you have to wait until they\u2019re soft, so that when you\u2019re done smashing, the beans look almost like gravy.<\/p>\n
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I heat flour tortillas as I wait for the beans to cook. Joe laughs when I insist that the first tortilla, hot off the pan, go to testing the beans. It\u2019s Mom\u2019s tradition: standing in front of the hot stove, tortillas on a cast iron skillet, she\u2019d rip the edge of one\u2014her fingers moving quickly\u2014and scoop the beans in their broth and hand it to me to taste. If it was too hot in my mouth, we knew they were ready. I do the same for Joe now, and he fits the whole piece of tortilla in his mouth in one bite.<\/p>\n
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\u201cSo good,\u201d he says, and I smile, because he never ate refried beans for breakfast until he met me.<\/p>\n
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Mom tells me that, when I was born, she and Dad couldn\u2019t afford to take pictures of me. With two children and Dad in grad school, film was an expense they couldn\u2019t spare. Meanwhile, I scroll through the hundreds of pictures I\u2019ve taken of my son on my iPhone, every snap as effortless and cheap as a can of beans.<\/p>\n
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I don\u2019t remember those seasons of hardship, the years of hand-me-downs and one family car, when dinner at the Kentucky Fried Chicken counted as my parents\u2019 date night. But I know their toll. I remember, even when we could afford new cars and a custom-built home, the nights when family dinners were disrupted by arguments so bitter they turned the food cold on our plates. Dad\u2019s anger that Mom couldn\u2019t keep to a budget. The stress of a job that kept him away on nights and weekends. The time his anger was so violent that he sent his fist into the drywall, and my brothers and I cried as a pot of Mexican rice sat untouched on the kitchen table. The time I asked Mom why they didn\u2019t think their fighting hurt my brothers and me. If only I knew then how much she already knew that it did.<\/p>\n
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Years later, at my wedding, Dad whispered to me, \u201cI pray Joseph is a better husband to you than I\u2019ve been to your mom.\u201d He was crying, that rare expressiveness surfacing, a vulnerability that told me that he knew, too, that my brothers and I felt the weight of his spousal mistakes, that we would carry them into our own marriages and families.<\/p>\n
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Joe asks if I want anything else with breakfast, and I add a handful of strawberries to the table of fried, Mexican food.<\/p>\n
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\u201cAre you really going to eat those?\u201d he asks, not because there\u2019s anything wrong with the strawberries, but because I\u2019m notorious for taking out strawberries and not eating them, leaving them to turn crusty and brown in a ceramic bowl all day.<\/p>\n
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\u201cYes,\u201d I say, which will become a lie. The strawberries are there to make me feel healthy, though I will feel guilty later when I throw them away. Joe, who was not raised to calculate the cost of every item of wasted food, accepts my habit with patience.<\/p>\n
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Some weeks later, when he leaves a pot roast out overnight, forgetting to cover it and put it in the fridge, I\u2019m the one who can\u2019t contain her anger, refusing to speak to him for half the day. Because the roast was expensive, time consuming, the time and the money we don\u2019t have now with a baby. It\u2019s only the sight of him bouncing our son, making him laugh, that reminds me of all the times I wished my parents had weighed their marriage against their anger. A pot roast is pretty light in the scale.<\/p>\n
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When Mom got breast cancer six years ago, Dad blamed it on food, on the milk from cows treated with hormones, on the grill her parents didn\u2019t scrape clean of charcoal carcinogens. He began to research with all the zeal of the academic he had been before three kids. Diet, he decided, was at the heart of health. He told Mom to buy organic, unprocessed food. He decided to turn the hobby farm he\u2019d had since we were kids into a business, even though raising pigs and cows and chickens is exhausting in any climate, but especially in the heat of Texas summers.<\/p>\n
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Now, he sells farm-raised beef, pastured pork, and free-range eggs in an effort to teach people about sustainable farming and healthy living. But I know the deeper reason, even if he won\u2019t say it, even if his fear for Mom turns into scolding when she doesn\u2019t drink bone broth or cook with the right oils. I know there is love, duty, vigilance, even in his anger.<\/p>\n
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When I was pregnant, he told me I shouldn\u2019t eat corn flakes because they might be tainted with Roundup. I started crying. Hormones aside, my tears were the realization of how deep his fear went. Food has become protection from cancer, from diseases without known cause. Food is how he can protect his family. When he and Mom tell us to read ingredients, to make baby food from scratch, Joe and I complain that they\u2019re being paranoid. We remind them that we can\u2019t afford to buy all organic food. But we also know that food has become their shelter against things beyond their control. We can\u2019t blame them for wanting to build it over us.<\/p>\n
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Joe and I eat the entire pan of migas and nearly half of the beans; we serve them with a side of Herdez green salsa. I like to remind Joe that I know something about Mexican cuisine, especially when we go to his family\u2019s house for dinners and they serve things like pre-packaged guacamole and cold tortillas. But there is always the part of me that feels like an imposter, like I\u2019m trying to claim something that barely is mine. I use canned beans and store-bought tortillas. If Mom does the same, it\u2019s because she\u2019s trying to save time, and not because she doesn\u2019t know how to make them from scratch. Still, there are dishes she won\u2019t make because she says my Tito makes them better.<\/p>\n
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\u201cPlus, they take way too long,\u201d she says, and I can\u2019t tell if that\u2019s the real reason or the excuse for why I\u2019ve never had her tamales or her menudo. I\u2019ve never made salsa, or chile relleno, or mole from her recipes for the same reasons, and because of the part of me that feels those recipes aren\u2019t mine to make. It is the same feeling that washes over me when I hear someone speaking in Spanish, those sounds and syllables that echoed through my childhood when Mom spoke over the phone to her parents or when she drilled me on conjugation and tense, lessons I can barely recall. I can\u2019t speak Spanish, and yet its cadence feels like home. Like a home I\u2019ve inherited, but I can\u2019t find the key.<\/p>\n
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When people ask me why I can\u2019t speak Spanish, I usually blame my parents: Mom didn\u2019t speak it often enough at home because Dad couldn\u2019t understand it. But if I\u2019m honest, I know that I was the one who stopped practicing, who was too embarrassed by an accent that didn\u2019t flow as smoothly as my mother\u2019s. When it comes to my Mexican heritage, is it only half-known because Mom didn\u2019t share enough with me, or because I am too afraid to enter the discomfort of my unknowing?<\/p>\n
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After our son was born, Mom drove the five hours to visit us twice over three weeks. She brought meat from Dad\u2019s freezers and filled ours with meals from my childhood. Enchiladas, taco meat, Mexican rice. She spent all day cooking or holding our son while we napped or took short walks, tried to regain a semblance of normalcy in those first, volatile weeks.<\/p>\n
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I don\u2019t remember very much from those sleep-deprived days, except for this feeling that everything was on the verge of breaking. My body. This tiny, hungry person who needed me constantly. Everything about life that Joe and I knew before he came. Everyone talks about the joy of newborns. Few talk about the fear\u2014of failing, of death\u2014that comes with them.<\/p>\n
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But when Mom was there, I felt my fears recede, a sense of reassurance in her cooking and her smile. The sense that the walls of our little apartment would hold up through all the sleepless nights and the strange, repetitive days filled with nothing and everything. Wrestling squirming legs into infant diapers, staring at the rise and fall of his chest as though all our lungs were encased by that tiny rib cage. And even when Mom left and we sat at our table with the reheated food she\u2019d made for us, there was a wholeness created by a family dinner, a comfort in tastes we knew.<\/p>\n
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As we finish breakfast, our son begins to fuss, so Joe picks him up and sits him on his lap, lets him sit at the table and look at the empty plates and thickening beans.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIn a few months, you can try these,\u201d I tell him as I scrape the spoon across the pan, because I know that beans were among my own first tries at solid foods. I wonder to myself if he\u2019ll like them, because I know that both of my brothers aren\u2019t fans of the dish. I wonder if doctors recommend feeding babies beans, or if it\u2019s one of those things my parents did that experts now swear have a hundred health risks, like giving your baby a stuffed animal to sleep with or using baby sunblock. I decide I\u2019ll follow Mom\u2019s example with this one. Our son sticks his tongue out when he smiles, and I notice again that his eyes are Joe\u2019s, but his nose is like mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We follow the recipe I\u2019ve learned by watching my mom for years …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5493,"template":"","categories":[9,49,142],"tags":[1611,6,1612,1613,1213,1614,1615,1616,1617],"class_list":["post-5492","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-literary-features","category-nonfiction","tag-alexa-t-dodd","tag-aquifer-the-florida-review-online","tag-beans-and-rice","tag-bi-racial","tag-cooking","tag-cultural-aspects-of-food","tag-dual-identities","tag-multi-culturalism","tag-recipes-that-arent-mine"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n