Enrique Gautier

Hallaca

Tupi-Guarani? Warao? Arawak? Noun.

A Tamal to my anglophone friends

Hallaca is a word I always betray. I grew up eating hallacas. Each memory filled with cool nights with joy and merriment during Christmas. I worked for my Hallaca and thus felt entitled to each Hallaca I ever ate. I learned Castilian Spanish, proud of my ability to conjugate a verb in seventeen tenses, but I never learned how to conjugate Hallaca in the ancestral Guarani, Arawak, Carib or Warao. 

I grew up in Venezuela without ever learning Guarani, Carib, Tupi or Warao. Father drank Rum Caribe, my mother worked with someone called Gaucaipuro, a funny name to a six-year-old, I loved going to La Guaira, and I had just moved to a small town called Araura. School taught me Venezuela got its name after Americo Vespucio traveling across the Guajira peninsula. 

I can picture Lozada and Vespucio in their late fifteen or sixteenth century armor thinking of gold and riches. The houses sitting on top of wooden stilts reminded Vespucio of the brick beauty of Venice. The irony is that Lake Maracaibo didn’t have golden gold, just tons of black oily gold. Would Americo Vespucio ever imagine that the greatest salsero of my generation, Oscar D’ Leon was going to write a song him?

As I child I was taught to find pride in the contributions of my French, Spaniard, Italian and other European ancestors. I never learned why Gaucaipuro’s name was significant, nor where La Guaira, Araure or Guajira came from. I did learn that a Guajiro was not to be trusted. There was never any reason for the child or preteen in me, to ever ask why an Hallaca was an Hallaca in Spanish, much less translate it into English years before I even knew English at all. 

Venezuela’s biggest holidays are Christmas and New Years. This is a time to get presents, new clothes and to eat Hallacas. Every family has a “secret recipe”. This is where the betrayal starts. To explain an Hallaca I have to say it is a tamal. A tamal is a word which brings memories of Mexico, chiles and spicy-heat levels my young Venezuelan palate could not tolerate. Hallacas and Tamales share ancestral love. Each made with masa. Masa the native dough. But Cortez conquered North American Náhauatl (Aztec*) tribes. Venezuela lacked the infrastructure. Instead, it was a century of slow massacre and assimilation. 

Last year while searching the Naropa Archive a digital dictionary landed in my lap. The dictionary was published in 1956 by a Arawak Catholic priest. His name: John Peter Bennet. This is the first time I had ever seen so many of my words. Words I could easily twist my tongue into. The words ayakhata (to hide, conceal, place out of view) stood out. I had seen hallacas spelled as Hayaca, so maybe Hallacas was the Spanish corruption of the Arawak word to hide. After all an hallaca hides all of its ingredients in plain sight. 

Growing up I was told that Mexico and Venezuela were sisters. Countries with shared love for food and music. My grandmother loved listening to Mariachis, and growing up I would spend hours watching El Chavo del Ocho or the great movies of the Mexican golden era starring Pedro Infante or Maria Felix. But I had never heard of a Tamal until I was six years old and mother and father took my sister and I to a Mexican restaurant in Caracas. I had never wondered if Mexicans knew what an hallaca was. It was Christmas food after all, and everyone in Venezuela loved them, so of course Mexico had to know what an hallaca is. 

I remember the complexity and hierarchy of making an hallacas. As a child you are told that you will be allowed to progress from one job to the next as you “learned” the traditions from Abuelita. At first, the budding repressed chef in me loved doing the jobs, more importantly I wanted to be close to the Hallaca and get one of the first Hallacas of the night. 

The first job is to clean plantano (plantain) leaves. Each leaf has to be a vivid green, oozing with chlorophyll, the kind you see in ceremonial grade matcha. Eventually if one lives long enough, mainly by avoiding Abuelita’s projectile like chanclas, you graduate to stew duties. Each job is truly complex. Fail to properly clean leaves and the hallaca progresses from an earthy hearty dish to an actual dirt stew. 

Each job matter. 

Each name matter. 

Get beet juice instead of onoto and while the hallaca looks red, it loses its soul. Substitute ingredients at your peril. Just ask my dead Abuelita.  

My understanding of Hallaca hit differently at age thirteen. I had to leave Venezuela. Leaving meant different things at different times. At first, it was a lifeline. Salvation in the form of false incarceration. Though I came here “legally” as a student, eventually my time ran out. I had to dodge locations and travel for fear of deportation. Status changed. Seasons changed. Invariably Hallacas changed. At first explaining what an hallaca was to our new neighbors was an exercise in mental gymnastics. Yes, they are tamales, except they don’t taste like tamales I used to say. Then the invariable question would come, what are they then?

What are hallacas? Abuelita called them pastel. Pastel’s literal translation is cake, but, an hallaca is not an slice, though it is filled with interesting ingredients. There are the contradictory placement of sweet raisins next to salty Spaniard olives. Do not ever use black olives, I can guarantee my Abuelita will project a chancla from the beyond. They are savory pies, made from native corn, not imported wheat, except they are steamed or boiled, not baked. 

Perhaps if I list the ingredients, it may help to translate what an hallaca is/means. You have hen (not chicken, and not a Cornish hen, just a plain old hen), beef and pig shoulder (the meat triumvirate) olives, raisins, pimenton (both red and green), onions, onoto, lard, wine, salt, a pinch of black pepper to soothe the soul, sacred wine (preferably stolen from a church), and masa tainted with blood tainted onoto. 

Onoto, like hallacas, grows from Venezuela’s marrow. It is a bitter seed imbued with the love of a people lost to a language I wish I knew. It is a seed birthed from the Bixa orellana tree. A tree native to the Amazon tainted with a western name. 

But even listing the ingredients fails to name the betrayal. Sure, if you know the right butcher, at the right shop in South Florida, you may get the “meat” that you want. But it takes thirty years to understand that pork shoulder is the right pig dismemberment to get the guiso just right. By then, I had to call an hallaca a tamal. I had already betrayed language for expediency, for belonging. Then again Mother told me more than once that “indios” made the first hallacas, but it was the Spaniards that gave it the right flavor.

I remember the last time we made hallacas with Tio John in Venezuela, not knowing I wouldn’t see him for eight plus years. He listed the ingredients, wrote them in his memory, and scribbled them in an English I didn’t understand. 

Father, Mother, Sister and I came to Florida. Well not really, at first it was just Sister and I. Not the “whole family” just enough of us to make us feel as a family. But like opening that plantain leave, the family unwrapped under the relenting Florida heat. Eventually Father moved with “his family” to Colorado. Ironic Colorado and onoto have the same color. Both ironic red. Both native lands connected but apart. 

Mijo, la hallaca necesita paciencia, un dia te dare toda la receta, Abuelita said. But that day never came and here I am betraying hallacas, replicating her recipe from a memory I wanted to forget, because Guarani, Warao, Tupi, Arawak and Carib live in my blood. 

Perhaps next time I make Hallacas---

or an ayakhata---

 I may pass onto my English speaking son---

 the spark refusing translation---

Words lost to world, but not our soul. 

Ayakhata---

A-ya-kha-ta---

Or I could betray it again as  aɪ.jəˈkɑː.tɑː