End Pupusa Abuse!
Inspired by the article “The Gentrification of Pupusas” (linked at the bottom) from our fellow Salvi site SalvaCultura. Yesterday I visited my local Whole Foods and saw for myself the monstrous frozen “pupusas” produced by the Tres Latin Foods company, in such flavors as carnitas, chicken, pinto bean & cheese, spinach, and green chile. As noted in the article, the company is owned by two white individuals from Boulder, Colorado.
While some people may not see this as such a big deal, as a Salvadoran, I find it personally abhorrent to see a staple of my own culture to be appropriated, bastardized, homogenized, and commercialized for the profit of white people. It triggers memories of how much of our history as Central Americans has been mediated by the expropriation of our resource and culture by white capitalists seeking to make an easy buck. But also from an analytical perspective, it also denotes that the Salvadoran community has reached a point of cultural hypervisibility in the United States, leaving us open to the predation of the racist white imaginary, which operates on the exotification and fetishization of the “other.”
Hmm. Lots to process.