Pinchos Puerto Rican BBQ Chicken Skewers Recipe...
And pre-conceived labels placed upon you.
10 Latinx Chefs You Need to Follow for Food Inspo on Instagram and Self-Identification
Thanks so much to Shayne Thompson for including me in her list of 10 Latinx chefs to follow. I was wondering why I had received an influx of followers. Y’all know when it comes to me, that could be for a good reason or a bad reason. So, I asked one of my new followers where they found me and they led me to the article! So cool! I have a Google alert set for my name, but my name was spelled wrong in the article so Google didn’t pick up on it.
One thing I noticed in the blurb was that Mami had been labeled as Afro-Boricua by this writer.
Mami doesn’t identify as black.
Anyways…Maybe I should have reached out to the writer (eventually, I did) and the publication (eventually, I did) BEFORE I put it on display in my stories. I admit and apologize for being impulsive in my temper. However, maybe it’s also best to check in with people before placing pre-conceived labels upon them. It’s better journalism. And there’s a lot of bad journalism out there. I’m not a journalist. I’m just a writer. But, I don’t write anything I don’t have a receipt for. I don’t write assumptions, I write facts. And I’m leaving the Instagram story up for other journalists to follow suit.
This story was originally published in 2018, one year after Hurricane Maria. Now Puerto Rico faces another catastrophe, the pan de coño. I’m sure most of you never saw this story. And I’m also sure that you will appreciate the pinchos recipe that is at the bottom of this newsletter.
September 20, 2018
Above Image: A guava BBQ sauce lacquers Puerto Rican pinchos | PHOTO BY JAMES RANSOM
Although the roads were marked in Puerto Rico—kinda, sorta—we couldn’t find the damn road that led us to my cousin's house in Vega Baja. And my cousin knew this would happen. Which is why she told my mom, my cousin and me to wait for her at El Patio BBQ and that she’d escort us into the subdivision. We may have been visiting from California that summer, but, because we spend time in PR every year to see family, we thought we could handle it. So off we went, with confidence, toward Arecibo.
We knew we were officially lost when we saw the Walmart. We turned off the main highway. And turned. And turned. Until finally my mom spotted a trailer on the side of the road. It was hoisted on cinder blocks, with a sign out front: PINCHOS DE POLLO 3x5$.
I was looking down at my phone and heard the car door open. I looked up in surprise, only to see my mom power walking away from the rental car, toward the trailer. When the vendor saw us, he pulled a couple of pre-marinated chicken skewers out of his Cambro and set them over the grill. The chicken thigh fat danced and sizzled as it turned Hawaiian Tropic gold. Then, he slathered the skewers in that quintessential Puerto Rican guava BBQ sauce, whose sugars immediately started to caramelize and pop, lacquering the chicken. He removed the glazed skewers from the grill, placed a slice of French bread on top of each, and handed them to us in a foil packet.
We took a bite. The sauce was thick and luscious, sweet, tangy, and sharp, the guava sauce a perfect counter to the rich dark meat. In PR, most everyone's BBQ recipe is the same; the importance is the addition of guava. Some use fresh, some use packaged. This one tasted bright and juicy.
We stood in that parking lot, alongside Carretera 2, eating our delicious skewers, totally forgetting that we were lost, lost instead in our pinchos, and caught unawares when my cousin pulled up in her car 30 minutes later.
That vendor was no longer on the side of that road. We checked on our visit to Puerto Rico in April of 2018, a few months after Hurricane Maria. His kiosk has been ravaged by the wild winds, or washed away. All that was left were the cinder blocks that were enforced into the ground with rebar. There was another vendor who had been in the same spot for several years; he sold piraguas. His kiosk was no longer there.
I don't know where these vendors are now. Maybe they all moved to the States to find jobs and to start new lives. I just hope they're okay.
At the time, we couldn’t bear to think that it had been eight months since Maria. I’m still met with the staccato of the disconnected telephone line that belongs to my family back in Vega Baja, one of the cities that got an extra helping of flash floods in the aftermath of the already destructive hurricane. It’s hard to think about my gente suffering, while I'm here, virtually helpless, in California. Of course, we sent money, care packages, and plane tickets to move friends and family from the motherland to this one. But it wasn’t not enough. I remember finally getting in touch with my cousin (fuck, we called and called), and asking her if we should come out there to help. Her words were both honest and hurtful, “Honestly, you’d just be another mouth to feed and another worry.” At the time, there wasn’t shit we could do. And she was right.
Though I was there in April of 2018, every day I scoured the news. I saw that the death toll of 64 was a severely undercounted number, and that it's actually closer to 2,975. Did anyone bother to check in on the ones who lived alone or were buried in muddy avalanches? The ones who were voiceless, abandoned and forgotten? It’s not enough. It’ll never be enough.
But that's why it’s especially important to show support at the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York every year. Honoring over 8 million Puerto Ricans living in both Puerto Rico and the United States, the NPRDP is being coined “the largest demonstration of cultural pride” in America. While millions gather to celebrate PR culture with food, music, and dancing, emotions ran high at the parade one-year after Maria. The parade was expected to have even larger numbers than usual, including those who fled the island and became a part of the ni de aqui, ni de alla diaspora, neither here nor there. They were in attendance.
Some would say that it’s always summer in Puerto Rico. September is generally when tourists flock into San Juan for their summer vacations. It’s the high season, as they say. It's also the beginning of hurricane season.
As my gente's country faces forward and attempts to heal in the face of disaster (and now with the pandemic), and as Puerto Ricans marched with their hearts on their sleeves in the parade, I'll think of that summer before Maria, when we got lost on a highway in Vega Baja and found these pinchos de pollo, 3 for $5.
