Donald Trump has built his campaign around the threat posed to the United States by the “aliens” who have swarmed across the border from Mexico and who are, according to his tirades, a bunch of “bad hombres,” rapists, criminals, and drug dealers. Though, of course, he has made a point of attesting to his love for Hispanics by tweeting a photo of himself eating a taco in Trump Tower Grill in order to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Given his tenuous grasp of his own country’s history, there can be no doubt that he does not know that Cinco de Mayo commemorates the defeat of a foreign enemy, France, back in 1862. A pity, because he would do well to ponder the traits with which the commander of the Mexican army characterized the head of the invading troops: arrogance, foolishness, and ineptitude—soberbia, necedad, y torpeza.
These are the very features Trump is exhibiting as he munches his taco and dreams of deporting (at least) eleven million “illegals” and building a huuuge and beautiful wall to keep them from ever coming back, and promises his rabid supporters that the colossal barrier with which he intends to divide the two countries will be paid for by Mexico.
What Trump does not seem to realize is that this is a battle he has already lost. No, I am not talking about the unfeasibility of constructing parts of his wall in the middle of the immense Rio Grande, shared by both countries. Or how he would need to defile sacred Native American land. Or the requirement that the wall be transparent enough to see the other side and simultaneously made of materials dense enough to withstand erosion and therefore opaque. Or what an impossible engineering feat it would be to rise high enough to keep out drones and deep enough to discourage tunnels that, so far, have thwarted every effort to be blocked. No, I am talking about a more modest foe of his proposal. Even before the first brick is laid, his wall was vanquished by the very taco he grins at demonically in his Twitter post, vanquished by that taco and its many food cousins from all over Latin America.
What? Food as the unsung hero, ready to foil Trump’s dream of an ethnically pure America?
As proof of what some readers may consider a startling assertion, I offer a store that my wife and I frequent here in Durham, North Carolina, where we have settled after decades of wandering. I am sure that Trump’s campaign will not bring him to this town where Barack Obama received 75.9% of the votes in 2012, the highest victory in the whole state. But if the Donald, a former wrestler who claims to relish a good brawl, were indeed to venture into this adversarial territory, I would recommend that he stop by this supermarket that Angélica and I visit, at times for convenience’s sake but more often to indulge in personal nostalgia.
I can savor under its vast roof the presence of the continent where I was born, going back, so to speak, to my own plural origins. On one shelf, Nobleza Gaucha, the yerba mate my Argentine parents used to sip every morning in their New York exile—my mother with sugar, my father in its more bitter version. Even to contemplate the bag that this grass herb comes in, allows me to recall how anxiously mi mamá y mi papá awaited shipments from the authoritarian Buenos Aires they had escaped in the forties. A bit further along in the store, I come upon leche condensada en una lata, the sort I would sip from a can on adolescent camping trips into the mountains of Chile, where my family moved when I was twelve. And nearby, a tin of Nido, the powdered milk my wife Angélica and I first fed our son Rodrigo as a baby, almost half a century ago in Santiago. Or Nesquik para niños, the chocolate we relied on to sweeten the existence of our younger son Joaquín, when he accompanied us back to Chile after many years of banishment from Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Origins, however, are never merely personal, but deeply collective, and especially so for Latin Americans such as myself, who feel an entrañable fellowship with natives from other unfortunate countries of our region. A stubborn history of thwarted dreams has led to a shared sense of purpose and sorrow, hope and resilience, which joins us all emotionally, beyond geographic destiny or national boundaries. To stroll up and down the grocery aisles of that store is to reconnect with the people and the lands and the tastebuds of those brothers and sisters and to partake, however vicariously, in meals being planned and prepared at that very moment in millions and millions of homes everywhere in the hemisphere. There is canela from Perú and queso crema from Costa Rica and café torrado e moido (O sabor do campo na sua casa) from Brasil. There is coconut juice from the Caribbean and frijoles of every possible and impossible variety and maíz tostado from Mexico and fresh apio/celery from the Dominican Republic (they look like tiny twisted idols) and hierbas medicinales para infusiones from who knows where, and albahaca and ajonjoli and linaza and yuca and malanga and chicharrones de cerdo and chicharrones de harina.
If you were to go to Sao Paulo or Caracas or Quito, if you were to try to shop for this assortment of staples or delicacies in San José or La Paz or Bogotá, if you were to ask in any major or minor city of Latin America where you might be able to pick your way through such a plethora of culinary choices in one location, you would be told that a place like that does not exist anywhere in that country. There is no shop in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, that next to an array of carioca fare would allow you to select among eighteen multiplicities of chile peppers or buy Tampico punch or sample some casabe bread.
That is what is most fascinating about this grocery store sporting the name COMPARE—a name which cleverly works in Spanish and English and Portuguese. Who would have thought that in a small town of the Southern United States (population 267,587) there could be a greater representation of variegated Latin America than in Rio with its six and a half million inhabitants or in the megapolis of Ciudad de México with its twenty million?
This is what Donald Trump and his nativist cohorts need to understand: five hundred and twenty-four years after Cristobal Colón sighted the land that would be called by some other visionary’s name, the sheer reality of a store like this one (and countless others like it all across the United States), resoundingly proves that the continent of Juárez and García Márquez and Eva Perón can no longer be understood to stop at the Rio Grande but extends far into the gringo North.
The food that hails me at that mega-Latino supermarket is not, of course, purely something that you sniff and peel, cook and devour. Hands reach for the potatoes that originated thousands of years ago in the Andean highlands, mouths water for the pineapple that the conquistadors did not know how to describe, bodies tremble at the thought of using their tongues, Proust-like, to return to a childhood home most of them will never see again. Behind hands and inside mouths and beyond bodies, there flourishes a cosmic piñata of stories, like mine, of escaping the native land, of alighting elsewhere, of crossing frontiers legally or surreptitiously, of border guards and guardian angels, of fighting to keep in touch with the vast pueblo latinoamericano left behind, of memories of hunger and repression, and also of solidaridad and vivid dreams. A woman from Honduras is piling onto her cart a ton of bananas that are the color of a red sunset and, though well on their way to decomposing, will be perfect, she assures me, with tomatillos and pinto frijoles. A couple from Colombia (I detect the soft specificity of excellent Spanish from Bogotá) discuss whether to experiment and add to their ajiaco that night some Mexican Serrano Peppers (shining green as they curve under the neon light). The husband says that’s fine, so long as she doesn’t forget to mix in the guascas herb they have just bought and which he first relished when he was an infant. Inside each of them, as inside me and my Angélica, there is a tale of heartbreak and heart warmth, of hearths orphaned back home and hearths rekindled in our new dwellings.
Where else could these shoppers (and so many other unrecognized ambassadors from every country and ethnicity of the Americas) meet in such an ordinary way, chatting in every conceivable Spanish accent (and some murmur to each other in indigenous tongues I cannot identify) next to this Chilean-American born in Argentina as if nothing could be more natural?
How many of them are threatened with concentration camps and deportations and families sundered, how many of these compatriots of ours are adrift and in danger of living on the borders of legality? I dare not ask. But what is certain, what I can proclaim from the haven of this pungent paradise full of undocumented food, is that the men and women who make this country work, who build the houses and pave the roads, who clean the houses and cook the meals and care for the children, who come from every one of our twenty-one Latin American republics and who only meet here in los Estados Unidos de América, what I can unequivocally declare is that they are not going away.
Your wall, Senor Trump, has already been breached, your wall has already been defeated by our peaceful invasion.
Along with our food, we are here to stay.