Tag Archives: Paraguay

“Recetario Soberano”: Defending Sovereignty One Recipe at a Time

By Ángel Tuninetti and the Centro de Estudios Heñói Team

Paraguay is a poster case for the damage that industrial agriculture can cause on food security and food sovereignty. The landlocked South American country was almost self-sufficient in food production until the 1990s, mainly thanks to the diversified crops and animal production of the fincas campesinas [small peasant farms]. 

Then, in 1996, GMO soybeans were introduced, and with them, an industrial agricultural model aimed at the production of commodities, followed later by other GMO crops, such as corn, rice, and wheat.  Now the country depends on the import of vegetables and fruits, since 95% of the cultivated lands are dedicated to genetically modified crops for export. This production involves the use of 60 million liters of pesticides per year (10 liters per inhabitant), and is defended by mercenaries, the police, the army and the judicial apparatus. This is a war for the future of Paraguayan people and their right to food sovereignty.

To defend the right of the Paraguayan people to their food sovereignty and their culture, the Centro de Estudios Heñói, a small NGO based in Asuncion, produces and publishes its Recetario Soberano. It consists in collecting and rescuing traditional peasant and indigenous recipes kept alive and transmitted from generation to generation, but that are not part of the typical Paraguayan fare that you will find in recipe books and traditional restaurants.

How are traditional indigenous and peasant recipes rescued?

Through a process in which we seek to understand the cultural significance of recipes, linking them to their roots, memories, and their socioeconomic, political, and symbolic history for the communities.

The process of recovering traditional recipes starts with interviews with Indigenous and peasant leaders to capture their stories and memories, recording them through audiovisual media, and capturing the recipe preparation in their environment, as a communal event. The communities have embraced the project, and their leaders recognize the importance of their culinary traditions, such as the ingredients from the Chaco region, often not included in the “official” Paraguayan gastronomy. As Ana Romero, a young leader from the Kemha Yat Sepo, of the Enxet People,  said, “in the Chaco, the indigenous food traditions of the peoples continue to be practiced, but we are a diversity of peoples, territories, and foods. In the Alto Chaco, we do have similarities in our food system; we are based on tuna, algarroba, mistol, and chili peppers.”

Ramón Medina, a leader from Kamba Kua, Pilar, emphasized the importance of community: “It is important to preserve not only the traditional food or recipes of Paraguay. But also, the entire history of community building, solidarity, sharing, inviting one another, the grand gesture of inviting one another. People liked and were happy to invite and be invited by others”.

Image Credit: Heñói.

Food sovereignty is intrinsically tied to land rights. As Mario Rivarola, the leader of the Mby’a community of Hugua Po’i, Caaguazú, pointed out, “to recover these typical foods of the Mbyá peoples, we need to recover the land to recover the Mby’a traditions and culture. That is the responsibility of the State, to comply with and enforce the national and international regulations that guarantee access to our ancestral territories”.

The first two recipes rescued

Chipa Manduvi

Image credit: Heñói

Ingredients: Corn flour, roasted and ground peanuts, cassava starch, milk, salt.

Preparation: Mix the corn flour, ground peanuts, and cassava starch in a large bowl. Add the salt and mix well. Add the milk little by little, kneading until you get a smooth, even dough. The amount of milk may vary, so add it gradually until the dough has the right consistency. Form the chipas and place them in a baking dish on banana leaves. Bake in a tatakúa (traditional brick oven) or preheated oven.

 

Ka’i Ku’a

Ingredients: Corn with husks, fresh Paraguay cheese, pork lard, milk

Image credit: Heñói

Preparation: Remove the husks from the corn, wash, and set aside. Remove the kernels from the corn and ground with a mill. Mix the ground corn with the Paraguay cheese, pork lard, and salt until you get a smooth dough. Pour the mixture into each husk, close it, and tie it at the ends and in the middle, forming the characteristic “monkey waist.” Place the husks in a pot with enough water. Let it boil for about 30 minutes. Remove and serve.

Image credit: Heñói

Why work to recover these recipes?

First, because we are aware of the problems of food on a national and global scale. These include the loss of food sovereignty, understood as the human right and self-determination of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food, as declared by La Vía Campesina. Peasant and indigenous communities have the right to eat what they want and have eaten traditionally, but the current food production system is dismantling their capacities for resistance because of the destruction of biocultural corridors, due to the relentless advance of agricultural, livestock, and forestry extractivism on their lands and territories. Inadequate nutrition has also meant increased deaths from chronic non-communicable diseases like obesity, diabetes, and hypertension.

Secondly, because we want to question what is Paraguayan gastronomy. In local literature, what is generally referred as “Paraguayan cuisine or gastronomy,” includes recipes that are assumed to be traditional without questioning the colonial heritage they often possess. This general idea of ​​Paraguayan gastronomy recipes is separated from the productive and creative labor behind the raw materials, the utensils, the culinary recipe itself, and the significance that all of these have for the organization and structuring of Indigenous and peasant communities. In other words, vorí vorí, sopa paraguaya, locro, and jopara, understood to be the intangible cultural heritage of Paraguay, could not exist without the productive Indigenous and peasant labor behind them. The  “typical Paraguayan fare” you would find at a traditional restaurant or food fair often excludes the diversity and richness of the culinary art developed in different Indigenous and peasant territories.

Our approach recovers the meaning that Indigenous and peasant communities give to food, to specific recipes, and to their relationship with nature, culture, society, the economy, and the power relations that permeate the ways in which food is produced, distributed, and consumed. 

Image credit: Heñói

In a country ravaged by extractivism, preserving and promoting ancestral cooking is an imperative to save traditional cultures and promote community building.

Remembering Francisco Solano López’s Foodways in Paraguay

By Bridget María Chesterton   

Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance
Map highlighting the territorial disputes of the War of the Triple Alliance. By Hoodinski, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The defeat of Paraguay by its powerful neighbors, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, during the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) left the country in ruins. The complex causes of the war can be boiled down to the fact that Paraguayans sought to limit the growing power and influence of Brazil in Uruguay’s politics and economics. As Paraguayans held off their enemies over a number of years, the Paraguayan military and population was forced to feed itself on nothing more than oranges, manioca (yucca), and the occasional emaciated cow. It was a military and a country on a forced starvation diet.

The President and dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano López (popularly known by his military title “el Mariscal”), had led his country into this disastrous conflagration that left more than 90% of the male population dead from battlefield injuries and disease, but mostly from starvation. Struggling to understand Paraguay’s defeat in war, post-war intellectuals were quick to blame Solano López. However, by the 1930s, narratives about the war were changing. A new Liberal elite born after the war began to remember Solano López as a “hero” who saved the country from being totally dismembered by the allies. This stemmed from the logic that, while the country was certainly defeated in the war, it—and its people—remained.    

These new national narratives took many forms, including recipes. In 1931, Raquel Livieres de Artecona published the first Paraguayan cookbook. She stated in the introduction that it was written in the new “nationalist orientation [for] public education.” [i] For Livieres, the primary purpose of her book was to educate Paraguayan students about their glorious culinary past.

Newspaper article featuring picture of Raquel Liveres de Artecona.
Fig. 2. Image of Raquel Liveres de Artecona, in the public domain.

These recollections and recipes—based on the oral testimonies of women who remembered the war—proved to be powerful reminders of the importance of culinary survival after a devastating defeat.[ii] As an oral historian, Livieres recorded the memories of female survivors and their recipes. Not only did she collect the recipes, but she also named each individual woman who contributed to her collection. While it is impossible to tell where in Paraguay many of these women lived, it is most likely that the majority of the women lived in and around Asunción and were both white and elite, like Livieres. Even though not all Paraguayan women were included in this tome, some of the war’s survivors are remembered and also acknowledged and given a place in the broader history of Paraguay. By preserving these voices, not only had the country and its women survived the war, but its food traditions had also made survival possible. It was fundamental, then, to honor the past with foods that were beloved by the nation’s most important war hero, el Mariscal.

Livieres’ book, one of the few works written by a woman in the Liberal era (1904-1936), highlights the “heroic” food choices of el Mariscal.[iii] Written at the height of Liberal era politics in Paraguay and immediately following the broad educational reform in 1925 that refocused education in Paraguay along nationalistic lines, the text aligns with the new educational plan developed in the country.[iv] The cookbook was designed to be used in public schools in home economics courses throughout the nation and as a result found a wide audience among female Paraguayan students. As noted by the famed Paraguayan Liberal-era writer and intellectual Manuel Domínguez in the prologue of the cookbook, the book highlights “how our forefathers fed themselves” and thus “was one of the reasons, tested in war, behind their nutritive strength.”[v] During the Liberal era, Paraguayan food memory thus became a place where Paraguayans could take pride in their nation. 

Exploiting ideas of historical revisionism surrounding Solano Lopez, certain recipes in the cookbook were highlighted as “preferences” of the newly minted hero of the war and of Paraguay more generally. Writing that “a cream cake” and a “tomato jelly” were favorites of el Mariscal, Livieres taps into a clearly patriotic national narrative and a shared food recollection that honors the memory of Solano López.

A Spanish version of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with Wedges
Fig. 3. Image used with permission of the owner, Carlos Vera Abed.

An English translation of Livieres de Artecona's recipe for Tomato Jelly with WedgesThrough this text, teaching women about the recipes from their nation’s history was a way to build the country’s heroic past for new generations born after the war. Thus, the text serves as a foundational intellectual work for the new Liberal era in Paraguay. Acknowledging Liveres as an intellectual in her own right gives women a place in the making of a new Paraguay.

 


 

[i] Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A. 1931), np.

[ii] Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay, 10.

[iii] For more on the remaking of Solano López as a national hero, see Bridget Maria Chesterton, The Grandchildren of Solano López: Frontier and Nation in Paraguay (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013).

[iv] David Velázquez Seiferheld, “’Desratizar la enseñanza es una tarea auténticamente nacionalista…’: La polémica sobre el nacionalismo y la Escuela Nueva. (1925-1941),” Historia de la educación – anuario 16 no. 2 (December 2015).

[v] Manuel Domínguez, “Prolog,” in Raquel Livieres de Artecona, La Cocinera Paraguay (Asunción: La Colmena S.A., 1931), np.

 


Bridget María Chesterton is Professor of History at Buffalo State University where she teaches Latin American History and Commodities Histories. Her current book project is entitled Hotel Guaraní: The Brazilianization of the Paraguayan Middle Class during the Stroessner Era and is currently under contract with the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has also published in Food and Global History, Journal of Women’s History, Hispanic American Historical Review, and Journal of Social History among others. Her email is chestebm@buffalostate.edu.