Matriarchs Are the Soul of Salvi Cooking
Courtesy of Ten Speed Press.
Ask me about my favorite food, and I’ll rhapsodize about pupusas. Growing up as the daughter of a Salvadoran¹ immigrant in Montgomery County, Maryland—a hotspot for the diaspora—I couldn’t get enough of this delectable dish, comprising doughy tortillas and a combination of meat, cheese, beans, and loroco. (I always opted for just chicharrón.)
On special occasions, I requested pasteles, a savory Salvi pastry that is a mixture of meat and vegetables, with a flaky fried dough encasing—and no holiday dinner was complete without my family’s special salsa (a spicy tomato-based sauce that was almost like gravy). I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy such meals if it weren’t for my grandmother’s labors of love. Paulita worked hard to bring my father and my uncles to the United States in the 1970s. Decades later, we’re miles away from our ancestral homeland—but because of the recipes she jotted down for us, we can stay in touch with our roots.
Despite their vibrant presence on both coasts (California, for example, is home to 32% of the Salvadoran population in the U.S.), I rarely see other Salvis in the media. Naturally, I couldn’t have been more excited when I heard that, through a major U.S. imprint, Karla Tatiana Vasquez—founder of SalviSoul, a platform that chronicles the recipes and traditions of the Salvadoran diaspora—was publishing the first-ever Salvadoran cookbook, aptly titled The SalviSoul Cookbook.
“To read it is to go on an odyssey through history—maybe even your own family history, as was the case for me.”
The book doesn’t just teach readers how to make dozens of Salvi dishes; it also incorporates conversations with Vasquez's relatives and family friends as well as other women she met through this project, emphasizing the need to preserve the stories of the matriarchs who are so crucial to our culture. To read it is to go on an odyssey through history—maybe even your own family history, as was the case for me.
I recently had the chance to chat with Vasquez over Zoom. We discussed the power of documentation, the importance of developing a relationship with your heritage on your own terms, and the wonders of embracing generational traditions.
Intervenxions edited this interview for concision and clarity.
First and foremost, what drew you to a culinary career? What has food meant to you over the years?
I grew up here in LA, and although there was a lot of Latino influence, there were very few places where you could be Salvadoran outside of your home. The places my family visited that felt Salvadoran were restaurants. Food was always central; it sculpted the way we spent our time.
Apart from that, it was my experiences of sitting at the table as a child and listening to stories from my parents. I was curious about a lot of the ifs. I knew we were in the U.S. because of a civil war—although if you try to contextualize what that means to an 8-year-old, it’s like, “I don’t know; it’s a bad thing.” But I was always obsessing over, “What would my school uniform be if I were attending school in El Salvador? What would my afterschool snack be?” There were these small questions that would just pop into my head. Sometimes my parents would volunteer that information at dinner time, and it was always a way to touch home for me.
When I got older, I had a health scare. I was diagnosed with a chronic illness. I haven’t talked too much about this, but I like to be transparent about it because my diagnosis grounded my work and activated me. I started working with the farmers market; I started working with the WIC [California Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children] moms; I started volunteering at the LA Food Policy Council. I saw how food can be politicized and weaponized —and of course, I knew that, since my family partially knows all these recipes because my grandmother was the cook for wealthy Salvadorans in San Salvador.
I had a journalist ask me why I say in the book that sopas are an event—“It’s just a soup,” he said. I think we’ve forgotten how much communities in the Global South have suffered poverty and food scarcity. They’re events because if you’re making a sopa, it means that at that point in time, you have all those ingredients for this one dish.
All of these elements made me think cooking wasn’t just entertainment and distraction. It was a place where you could gather your tools and practice justice for a community. It meant giving visibility to stories; it meant learning recipes for foods that my grandmother and great-grandmother learned.
Karla Tatiana Vasquez. Photo by Ren Fuller.
Was there a particular incident that inspired the SalviSoul project? How exactly did it come about?
When you’re meant to do something, little moments that steer you in the right direction will keep happening because sometimes you’re so resistant to it. It gets to a point where you’re like, “Okay, fine! I can’t ignore this further. I can either be a fool and ignore this, or I can be a fool that tries.” Because there’s never enough certainty.
When I started SalviSoul, I had just gotten married. I loved cooking. After working throughout the food industry, I felt like I was finally queen of my own castle. Cooking with my mom in her home was difficult. It was like, “Get out of my kitchen; you’re not being helpful here.” And I finally had my own space. I really wanted to cook these foods I had grown up with, but I was like, “I am not Salvi enough; I don’t know these foods.” I thought about the stories I’d heard as a kid, about people who migrated and assimilated. My parents would say things like, “She was born Margarita, but she goes by Maggie now.” I felt we were lost already—and to be lost within yourself is a travesty on top of a travesty. Having the experience of being an adult and a married woman and wanting to share something and coming up short really was profound for me.
On top of that, my experiences at culinary school influenced me. There was a cooking class curriculum where we focused on eggs for a week because there’s so much you can do with an egg—you can bake with it, make omelets, make soufflés. Someone asked, “Why do we say ‘omelet’ or ‘sauté’? Those are French words, but nobody in this class is French.” The instructor said, “It must be because the French were the first to document it.”
I thought, “Documentation—that’s a pretty big deal. I have a degree in journalism. Why don’t I put something together? Why don’t I make something happen? What if I do something about storytelling and food and women?” And that last part was very much me realizing, “The women in my family have carried my family. They’re the matriarchs; they’re the reason we show up somewhere. The men did stuff, but they didn’t carry the family like the women did. They could never.” And to acknowledge them and say, “Let’s give credit where credit is due” felt very important to me.
“The women in my family have carried my family. They’re the matriarchs; they’re the reason we show up somewhere. ”
You definitely do bring those worlds to life. You talked about feeling distanced from El Salvador growing up; as somebody who hasn’t yet been to El Salvador, but has always dreamed about it, I identified with your introduction, where you describe visualizing the country like a movie in your mind. I’d love to hear more about your trips back to the homeland—how did it compare to what you had imagined? What surprised you?
There was a moment of epiphany for me while writing this book—I did have to lean on my family for what they knew about certain dishes in El Salvador. I remember coming back from an interview and saying to my husband, “I think I’m realizing that if I want a relationship with where I was born, I cannot continue asking them about it. I need to put skin in the game and go there, and I need to develop relationships with people who live there.”
Going to El Salvador not through my parents’ connections, but through relationships I made online, people I met who are from El Salvador—I really needed that. Now I can say that it’s not just my parents who had a relationship to the country—I have my own distinct relationship to the country. It feels grown up. But it took a while, and I still felt like an outsider.
As much as I work on my Spanish, it’s still not the same as the Spanish you hear from folks in El Salvador. And I’m like, “Okay, it’s fine. I am fine where I’m at because there’s opportunities in everything.” The honest truth is that there’s always something to learn. Even when you think you’ve seen it all, there’s always more. Having written this book, I’ve gained more access to El Salvador; I’ve collected maybe 10 cookbooks, and my book covers maybe 7–9% of the cuisine. That makes me so excited. There is more to learn.
“My book covers maybe 7–9% of the cuisine. That makes me so excited. There is more to learn. ”
When you went back, what were some of the locations on your itinerary?
I knew I wanted to visit the museums. I knew I wanted to visit the mercado. La Feria de Gastronomía was something I talked about with a coffee roaster here in LA who has a farm in Juayúa. So much of El Salvador is seasonal. I had questions about specific ingredients, and people would tell me, “You’re not here the right time of the year; you have to come back later.”
I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and that was a huge reward because I could start asking better questions. It felt so exciting to dive deeper.
SalviSoul is special because it doesn’t just focus on the food—it’s about the Salvadorans who make it. To compile recipes, you contacted dozens of Salvadoran matriarchs and interviewed them about their memories of la patria in addition to their cooking and baking processes. Can you walk me through your interview process?
Six of the women I'm related to, and for those women, I had to tread lightly. The only one who said, “Ask me anything” was my grandmother, my Mama Lucy. She was very forthcoming—I think because she was my grandmother rather than my mother. Relationships between mothers and daughters are a lot sometimes. My own relationship with my mom has evolved, but when I started this project, my mom was maybe the fifth person I interviewed. There was this quality about her that I saw in other Salvi women—like, “Why are you asking me these hard questions; what’s it to you?” I’m very grateful for that attitude because I knew I had something to demonstrate to her: “I’m here to take care of you. I’m not here to exploit anything, I’m not here to take anything from you. I’m trying to build a platform for us so we can share these stories.”
For those who weren’t related to me, I did a call-out online in 2017. I was very specific in saying, “If you love cooking, you love Salvadoran food, and if you have a story you want to share with me, I will gladly listen to it.” There were responses from so many people, from as close to me as Compton, Echo Park, and Silverlake to France, Japan, Abu Dhabi, Michigan, Georgia. I learned that I really needed to pay attention to the women.
Sometimes their adult children would say things like, “Tell her about how you crossed the frontera. That’s a great story. You were really heroic.” But sometimes those are not stories for strangers. Those are stories entrusted to families. I soon saw that I couldn’t pay attention to what their grown children wanted me to ask. I had to show up with no agenda and ask, “What would you want to share with me?” Those stories are what’s in the book. There are stories that are heart-wrenching, very dramatic, very profound. Those are stories the women shared of their own agency, which to me felt super empowering.
My mom and my tíos always painted Mama Lucy as a victim. She suffered domestic violence at the hands of my grandfather, and I really craved to be able to ask her about her decision-making. I would never be able to ask her upfront—but when you’re in the kitchen, de repente, a portal opens and you can ask about these very tender subjects.
It was different with each of the women. Sometimes I would go and meet them for the first time, and they would be very nervous. I knew I couldn’t go in there for half an hour and ask, “Give me your story” or “Give me your recipe.” For a lot of them, we didn’t cook until the third year after I had met them. When I spoke to them, I’d be there for two hours minimum, capturing everything on video on my phone. We talked until they got a real sense of my intentions. That’s when I would say, “Hey, maybe we can start cooking, and I’ll come over and I’ll go shopping with you ’cause I’m paying for the ingredients,” and then we would cook.
As you mentioned, the stories vary in tone—I thought it was remarkable that some of them are triumphant or heartwarming, while others end on a note of uncertainty or sorrow. Why was it important to you to represent such a spectrum of emotions?
It was the most honest. I came across a quote from a writer who was answering the question, “I noticed that your second book is way better. What was the trick?” She responded, “I just got more honest.” I just wanted to present the stories how the SalviSoul moms presented them to me.
I made an effort to be as honest as possible and to not placate the Western gaze—to make these stories feel like they belong to us. We’re not trying to perform. This isn’t the Disney of cookbooks; it’s honest. That’s what makes it beautiful.
Pastelito de hongo. Photo by Ren Fuller.
Mamasos. Photo by Ren Fuller.
Reading your book made me excited to get in the kitchen. This is a first for me, as cooking has always been something I’ve been nervous about—do you have any advice or words of wisdom for people like me, who want to preserve the legacy of these culinary traditions but don’t have a lot of background in that area?
Somebody asked me this question on the tour. She had been in this country for 20-something years. I said, “Your family has been in El Salvador for much longer, right?” She said, “Yeah.” And I told her that if you look at what the numbers say, there is something to be encouraged by. What I mean by that is: My grandmother made tortillas for years at la finca. And the muscle memory she had in her hands—that’s intelligence; that’s technology that literally helped us get to the future. And if you add up all the years of knowledge of my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, the amount of time I’ve been in the States doesn’t compete. What is my measly 30-something years in the U.S. compared to the intelligence that is wrapped up in our honorable ancestors? It just means I have to put in the time to learn.
I think we get discouraged by the fact that we’re adults here, and we’re not Salvadoran enough or what have you. The U.S. is not who I am—it’s where I am. And if I say, “I can’t do this because I live here,” I’m giving it a power that it doesn’t deserve. The power is in the numbers. There’s a story in The SalviSoul Cookbook about my Mama Juana. She used to make about 600 tortillas a day. She was so grateful for that job, because she almost died picking coffee. And I think about that. There’s no way that has left my body.
“If you add up all the years of knowledge of my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, the amount of time I’ve been in the States doesn’t compete. What is my measly 30-something years in the U.S. compared to the intelligence that is wrapped up in our honorable ancestors?”
Last but not least—as a Salvadoran who’s relatively new to LA, I’d love to hear your recommendations for amazing Salvadoran food in the area.
Definitely the outdoor market on Vermont. There’s another restaurant I love called Jaragua on Beverly. A lot of the big-time pupuserias in the MacArthur Park/Pico Union area are very special. If you visit, you’ll get a feel for the community and have a great time.
¹ As Vasquez notes in her cookbook, “Salvadoran, Salvadorian, and even Salvadorean—why so many spellings exist to refer to our nationality will always constitute some of the low-hanging fruit conversation within Salvi circles. As are debates about which one is more ‘right.’” While any of these iterations are correct, this article uses Salvadoran throughout for consistency.
Brittany Menjivar is a Salvadorian-American writer from the DMV region, currently based in Los Angeles. In addition to serving as a columnist for the LA Review of Books, she has contributed to Coveteur, V Magazine, Document Journal, the Contemporary Art Review of Los Angeles, the Creative Independent, and Latina Media Co., among other publications. She is also the author of poetry and prose collection Parasocialite and the screenwriter behind award-winning thriller short Fragile.com.