Category: Latino Family Traditions

Family, Family and Social Media, Latino Family Traditions, Parenting

Writer Unplugged and Observing Life

Mona Alvarado Frazier
Graphic by Fredrich Terral



Sometimes it’s enough just to observe and not write a darn thing for three days. No notes on the iPhone, no tweeting, no posting on Facebook, no checking on stats, no reading or writing blogs…you get the picture.This was the type of weekend I had but didn’t plan. It was all about observing people in different social settings:nightclub, birthday party, family bar-b-que. 


On Friday night I went dancing at a night spot popular with the 60’s-80’s generation. Now these were men and women ranging in age from mid forties to early seventies dancing up a storm to Motown, Bee Gees, Stevie Ray Vaugh, Santana  and the Gap Band. The lively spirit of people having fun permeated the place. I re-met people from high school, the old neighborhood, and former work places. Yes, there is life after parenthood, life after divorce, life during the empty nest period. There is life to live and enjoy at any age.


Early Saturday morning I drove 4 hours to Northern California with my mother, sister and cousin to attend a birthday party. There’s a wealth of stories that go on during a long drive. My mom reminisced about when she was a young girl and her family followed the crops from Southern California up to Fresno. From picking oranges, lettuce, cotton, almonds, and grapes. She can identify a variety of trees, gnarly bushes, and vines. This led to stories of her parents, three brothers and two sisters, all who have passed on except for her and her sister. The inflections in her voice rose from happiness to wistfulness with momentary seconds of grief. The passing years remind her of the inevitable. It reminds me too. 


My sister and I were in the front seat and began talking about our dating life. Of course, we were whispering. My hard of hearing mother who begins each sentence with “What?” leaned forward. “Don’t whisper, I want to hear.” We’re still hesitant about bringing up our new dating lives in front of our mother not because we’re embarrassed but we still get the 20 questions like we did when we were teenagers.Okay, we really are embarrassed. 


Besides the new guy’s family and job, there are questions about ethnicity and religious affiliation. After we filled her in she did not comment on whether they were Latino or not or whether they were Catholic or not. Seems she is full of surprises. My cousin then asked ‘regular’ questions asking how we met these new men. After a few rounds of laughter, mom commented that we sounded like we were in our second ‘teenagehood.’ She wonders why we whisper. Then I realize I do this to my sons and daughter sans questions of ethnicity/religion. We are our mother–mostly.


My niece’s baby’s first birthday took place in one of those party places for toddlers, complete with colorful muraled walls, loads of Fisher Price toys,enclosed trampolines, costumes for kids, and arts and crafts tables. We had to take off our shoes and wear socks. Pizza slices, juice boxes, fruit ke-bobs, gourmet cupcakes and Mickey Mouse cake pops, decorated the tables all taken care of by uniformed attendants.  

My mom took a look at the fruit and cake pops for her great grand-nephew’s birthday and reminisced about her grandchildren’s birthday parties twenty-some years ago. What happened to our Latino family tradition of Carne Asada, Mexican rice or chicken Molé?  Or  the craziness of Chuckie Cheese. 


Five year olds taking pictures and video with their mother’s cell phones, like they knew what they were doing (and I’m sure they did), also had us reminisce about the big camcorders our husbands used to document our own children’s birthdays where blindfolded kids battled a Piñata for its candy.



And we want to know how do these young mommies fit everything their babies need in those small diaper bags that look like designer purses or backpacks, surely not in the pockets of their skinny jeans. It is not lost on my mother that many more children are bi and multi-racial, quite different in her day. But she asks: why are so many of these kids named after singers, athletes, and actors? 


On Sunday at the family bar-b-que with Tri-tip, chicken, macaroni salad, and chile beans we (the older crowd)  visited by engaging in conversation, which I observed seemed to be lost on our kids generation: the fifteen to late twenty somethings. They may not be fluent in Spanglish or Spanish but they are experts in tech speak. Many of them were engaged with their phones: texting, video chatting, and posting photos on Facebook (or Facelift/Facetime as mom alternately calls it).


So I’m wondering now, what will they observe when they are ‘unplugged.’ What will their long car trips sound like? Will they place their phones (or maybe phone chips) on tiny docking stations and playback their tech memories stored for twenty years in the Cloud? 


What stories will they tell about their childhood, their parents times, their grandparents? Will they know how to cook chicken Molé? Will their children know what a Piñata is?  Will they know what to do when they are unplugged.

Family, Latino Family Traditions, Lent, Mexican Cooking, Mexican Holiday foods, Mexican Vegan food, Roman Catholics

When We were Catholic-Lent

Mona Alvarado Frazier
by J. Cobb
My mother is Roman Catholic. She baptized and raised us as such. We attended Catholic schools from first to twelfth grade. Everything you can imagine in the 1960’s-70’s era of Catholicism, in our Latino home, we had it: Virgen of Guadalupe, St. Jude, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus statues. We had an altar under the niche in the stairwell.Wooden crucifixes, lit votives, rosary beads, and brown scapulars dotted our rooms along with framed pictures of the Pope, JF Kennedy, and Cesar Chavez. The parish priest came to our house for dinner. That’s how Catholic we were in those days.  

Now, three of the four of us are Christian and the other doesn’t affiliate with any denomination. We don’t practice the Lenten season like we used to ‘back in the day,’ the Roman Catholic way. But my mom still asks us every Ash Wednesday “…where are your ashes.” Don’t you commemorate that Jesus died? Don’t you fast? Do you eat meat? Surely you give up something-chocolate? wine?
She’s legally blind so we could lie and say we had them but they smudged, but come on who’d lie on Ash Wednesday. For a couple of years we’ve explained that our Christian denomination doesn’t practice the marking of ashes on the forehead, but that soon leads to an argument. It’s her way (the Catholic highway) or no way. 
No use in arguing with my mother about religious doctrine versus biblical scripture. So we look for common ground. Yes, we assure her that we do believe Christ died and rose again, we can fast, we can make this a season of service, and introspection. “That’s good,” she says. “But what about the food?”
Yes, the Lenten food we made in the (Catholic) past will still be made during the Lenten season. But it’s not reserved for the Friday’s of Lent. The food has become part of our family tradition, except for the fish sticks.   
When we were Catholic we ate comida Cuaresmena (food of Lent): tortitas de camaron (shrimp patties), nopales (cactus), chile rellenos and Capriotada (bread pudding). We also ate a lot of potatoes, beans, and vegetable soup, but they weren’t half as good or as special as the one’s mentioned.  
Shrimp patties photo by MexicoCooks.com
Capriotada-photo by Janie R.

This is my sister Debbie’s recipe for Capriotada:
Ingredients
sliced French bread( regular or sour dough), piloncillo (raw sugar cone), dark brown sugar, cinnamon sticks, raisins, walnuts, shredded Monterey Jack cheese, oil/butter or spray oil , and water.

Pour 6 cups water in large saucepan, stir in one piloncillo, 4 whole cinnamon sticks, and 1/2 cup brown sugar. Use medium heat and bring to a boil. If you want it sweeter add 1/2 cup brown sugar. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. Add raisins during last 3 minutes if you want them softer. Discard cinnamon sticks before pouring syrup on bread.

Coat a 13x 9 oven proof baking dish with cooking spray, butter or oil. Preheat oven to 350.
Layer bread in pan and pour on syrup, layer with grated jack cheese and walnuts. Proceed with layering until the loaf of bread and all the syrup is gone. Bake for 30 minutes, if too soggy, bake another 15 minutes. 

Serve warm or chilled. For Vegan Son I use a non-diary cheese or leave out the cheese. Some people use only pillocillo, almonds, and Mexican Cotija cheese. It’s a matter of taste, just like it’s a matter of how you practice Lent. 

I’m hungry now, so I’ll post some of the other recipes at a later date.