The Gluten-free Chicano cooks
Chile Verde Con Granitos Y Calabaza
Michael Sedano
Company was coming and the Gluten-free Chicano was busy as an agent provocateur at a peace rally. The Gluten-free Chicano wanted something easy but not ordinary. He had the perfect ingredients on the calendar—the day before, Frito Lascano held his annual La Pelada and the Gluten-free Chicano had 30 pounds of roasted Hatch chile in the refrigerator.
The fastest use of freshly-roasted chiles is soup. Remove stems and seeds, chop lightly then whiz in a blender. Add water or broth to keep the blades moving. Make a cup of chile paste. In a saucepan, heat the chile, stirring in broth, milk, half-and-half, or yoghurt, or cream, to produce the thickness you want. Serve in a fancy bowl with a chile ring garnish. Prep time: 10 minutes.
Serving soup is for a less engaged day. I decided to make a variation of Frito’s pumpkin soup. This distinctive stew gets chewiness from granitos (canned white hominy or Mexican style), plus texture from lots of meat. The bit of sweetly aromatic squash adds interest to the mélange of richly spiced vegetables. The chiles determine the chilosoness, so be prepared with habanero or other hot sauce if your chiles are not.
Careful preparation comes out famously. I make enough so guests take home plates and I have leftovers to freeze. This preparation can go inside tamales and tamal season is a cumin in, loud sing hot tamales.
Ingredients to serve 20 or freeze for later
3 lb boneless pork
1 bag diced nopales or 2 pencas
2-3 lb roasted green chiles
2 cups white hominy with liquid
2 cups diced orange winter squash; butternut, pumpkin
Fresh cilantro
4 green onions
Onion, garlic, comino, salt
Sharp knives.
Cut everything to the same proportions.
Cube meat and squash to ½” or 1” cubes.
Dice/chop onion and nopales to size of grains of hominy.
Chop the chiles after removing stems and seeds.
Thinly slice 3-6 dientes of garlic.
Slice green onion into 2" pieces, chop greens.
Deep, wide sartén, or large saucepan. Medium flame.
Lightly brown the aromatics and squash.
Add pork and brown.
Add chile and its juice, mix together.
Add granitos and some juice, mix together.
Add green onion
Chop a big pinch of cilantro stems and leaves, sprinkle on top.
Reduce heat to lowest simmer.
Cover and cook two hours, stirring regularly.
If you added too much liquid, slightly uncover lid and it boils off.
When this chile verde is done, the pork is fork-tender, the base viscous and saturated with flavorful liquid.
Serve over steamed rice or puro chile in a bowl and the guests can come and go, walk around the room and talk of Michangelo.
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| orange squash, white hominy, browned pork, nopales, green chile, green onion |
Geneology of A Place In Los Angeles, from a book by Ana Muñiz
Margaret Garcia's studio in Northeast Los Angeles radiates energy onto busy Figueroa Street. Ana Muñiz finds the building housing Garcia's studio has long radiated with energies of exceptional vibrancy. An academic writer, Muñiz' entry into non-fiction literature about Los Angeles will entertain and inform her readers. Today's excerpt is from a book in search of an LA Lit publisher.
The House
(Excerpt from the narrative non-fiction manuscript, The Old Haunt: One Room, Three Lives, and 100 Years of Struggle Over Urban Policing, Violence, and Gentrification by Ana Muñiz)
I fall in love with The House at first sight; white adobe rising out of the earth, topped with a beige Mission-style façade. Built in the 1920s, The House is raised with several steps leading up to the door such that, looking from the inside out, people’s heads barely reach the windows. The ceilings are high. On the east-facing side of The House is a series of five long windows with old latches that swing open to let in the sunshine. In front of these windows is where I put my writing desk.
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| The House. |
I sign a one-year lease to rent The House in Highland Park on June 9, 2011. I stay for the next 12 years until, one rainy night, The House is destroyed. But all that is far away now, in the summer of 2011, when I construct an altar in the back room of The House with bunches of flowers, candles, and cholla ribs. On the wall above it, I hang a photograph of the desert outside of Tucson and a few line drawings of naked women à la Degas.
The House is small enough to keep warm from a single gas wall heater in the winter. The tile floors and broad white walls stay cool in the summer. Except for the fireworks when the Dodgers win, it is quiet most of the time. Most importantly, The House is filled with light, as Luis Alberto Urrea would put it, “pure heartbreak light.”[i]
Although L.A. is notoriously not a walking city, I walk a lot, with a dog or on my own, during the day and under the stars at night. When I walk out of my house and head south, I pass an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting space, a mechanic shop, a community art space, a ceramics studio, and then, an unassuming building. This is where the eye settles – a one-story red brick structure divided into five narrow units. Five white doors, lined up like teeth, stare out onto North Figueroa Street. There is an old-fashioned feel to the geometry of this building’s construction; there are two rows of windows across the front, a style from another time, and a door at one end of the building that is angled diagonally to face the center of an intersection. The building is also materially different from everything around it; there is no other bright red brick in sight. Something about it will not let me go.
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| The Old Haunt on a foggy early morning. |
To satisfy my curiosity, I pull up a newspaper archive database and run searches on the five addresses in the brick building, starting with the year 1900 and ending in the present day. What I discover is that over the course of a century, three important events occurred at one specific address in this building: a 1948 armed robbery, a 1983 murder, and a gentrification battle that first exploded in 2008. This one address – one room – will be the touch point to which we repeatedly return for the rest of this book. When facing the building, look at the second to last door from the right. That is the room. I refer to it across time as “The Old Haunt,” but it will take on several different names including the “P.M. Café” and the “Bon Mot.”
The one-story brick building is constructed in the mid-1930s in the rapidly urbanizing neighborhood of Highland Park. Shortly thereafter, one of the five units – The Old Haunt – debuts as a bar called the P.M. Café.
In the late hours of April 13, 1948, two men enter the P.M. Café and, after selecting a song on the jukebox, reveal submachine guns. The two men tie up the patrons, staff, and owner, and abscond with all of their cash and jewelry. Through a series of twists and turns over the course of the next twelve years, one of these robbers – Charles Terranova – will be implicated in a precedential California death penalty case that blows open police corruption and prosecutorial misconduct. The fallout from The Old Haunt robbery affects Terranova for the rest of his life, and today, Terranova’s son still reckons with his father’s memory.
In the 1970s, the P.M. Café transforms into the Bon Mot, an underground gay bar. In the 1980s, two men meet and fall in love here, sitting across the bar from one another. During a robbery on the sidewalk outside of the Bon Mot, one of these men, named Robert “Bobby” Brown, is murdered. In the wake of Bobby’s death, his friends and family confront a coldly indifferent police department, build a movement, and memorialize Bobby’s life by literally embedding his name and memory into The Old Haunt’s architecture. Thirty-five years after his death, those who loved Bobby return to The Old Haunt in order to heal their grief and hold the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) accountable.
In the late 1990s, the Bon Mot closes and a renowned artist named Margaret Garcia takes up the space as her studio. She swears a restless haunting presence lingers, perhaps as a result of past violence at the location. The presence plays in the water, turning the faucets on and off at night. A friend comes to visit her new studio, looks around and shouts, “I know this place! I used to come here! I remember falling drunk out the door of this place!” Margaret’s friend knew The Old Haunt in its previous iteration as the Bon Mot. Margaret makes peace with the presence and for the next couple of decades, paints, in electric color, the often-overlooked people and places around her. She paints palm trees on fire, street vendors, bars along Figueroa, and the original inhabitants of the land that became L.A. She warns me that her art is sharp, it can cut.
Margaret and I meet in person for the first time in 2022, the same year she paints a sliver of The Old Haunt in Night on Figueroa Street, and not long before a series of floods takes my house. The rains will threaten her studio too, and all the memory it contains. The Old Haunt will be threatened by other forces as well – gentrification, protest movements, political upheaval, and competing business interests.
The single room of The Old Haunt is an architectural palimpsest; the people who have walked in and out of its door, over the course of 100 years, have left their trace. We can excavate these long-forgotten memories. We can talk to their ghosts.
One room holds incredible stories.
[i] Luis Alberto Urrea, Nobody’s Son (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1998), p. 160.
About the Author:
Ana Muñiz is Associate Professor of Criminology, Law & Society at UC Irvine. Ana grew up in Tucson, Arizona and lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries (Rutgers University Press, 2015) and Borderland Circuitry: Immigration Surveillance in the United States and Beyond (University of California Press, 2022).
