Art y Culture

Have you ever wondered why so many women crowned Miss Universe are from Latin American countries? Dr. Manny Alvarez, the senior medical correspondent on Fox News, said, “The women look that way because they eat the seven Latin power foods.”

Alvarez, the author of “The Hot Latin Diet,” said there is a fast track to that bombshell body.

“This diet helps women stay slim and sexy and maintain their natural curves,” Alvarez said.

The book is geared to women, and the recipes are designed by Hispanic female chefs, and promotes fewer carbs, flavors and color of food (no white), along with the balance of exercise. The bottom line is keeping a good-looking body while having fun in the kitchen.”*

Pastel de Tres Leches. Just mention those four words to those who have tasted the traditional “cake of three milks,” and they often become both gaga and wary — as if it were an intoxicating drug they had to quit but are unable to forget.

At its most basic, Tres Leches is just a big, luscious sponge. Once you bake the dense cake, you soak it in a mixture of sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk and cream.

Some cooks top it with whipped cream. Others shellac it with shiny meringue. It seems as innocent as a wedding cake!”*

Houston is one of two Texas markets being tested for Tyson Food Inc.’s new product line aimed at the Hispanic market.

Tyson Al gusto!, which means “Tyson To Your Liking,” is a line of specially-cut and flavored products designed to make it easier for consumers to prepare traditional Latin dishes at home. Six fresh chicken items are currently being tested in Houston and Dallas.”*

The magic number at Machu Picchu Charcoal Chicken & Grill is 24. That’s how many hours their rotisserie chicken soaks in a secret brew before it’s slid onto a spit and roasted over hot coals to a succulent, smoky-to-the-bone perfection.

Twenty-four is also about the number of seconds that it takes to walk to Rosy and Hugo Cerna’s other restaurant, also dubbed Machu Picchu. Why open a second Peruvian restaurant a tamale’s throw from the first?

“Because we really wanted to serve pollos a la brasa,” says Rosy Cerna about their charcoal chicken. “It’s a national dish in Peru, but you never serve it at a restaurant where you have all the other Peruvian dishes like we have at Machu Picchu. Pollos a la brasa has to have a restaurant of its own.”*

25 Union Square, Somerville. 617-623-7972.
Hours Mon-Thu, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri-Sat, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sun, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.

Unlike the rest of her high-fashion associates, Venezuelan supermodel Patricia Velasquez isn’t spending the springtime under a barrage of hairstylists and stylist fittings.

Instead, she is at the helm of the Wayuu Taya Foundation, a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization that since 2002 has worked to improve the living and educational standards of Latin America’s poorest indigenous people.”*

Make a variation on classic chile verde by using tomatillos in a sauce for a fluffy omelet made with panela cheese (a fresh Mexican cheese that softens to rich creaminess when heated).”*

“Members of America’s premier Latino theatre troupe star in a funny, tough-minded and penetrating look at Southern California power politics. The twin brothers — Water, a rising star State Senator, and Power, a cop who breaks all the rules — are caught in a life-or-death scandal that threatens to destroy their lives and dreams. A gripping and explosive piece of California noir fiction.”"*

Satellite imagery obtained from NASA will help archeologist Bill Middleton peer into the ancient Mexican past. In a novel archeological application, multi- and hyperspectral data will help build the most accurate and most detailed landscape map that exists of the southern state of Oaxaca, where the Zapotec people formed the first state-level and urban society in Mexico.

If you ask someone off the street about Mexican archeology, they’ll say Aztec, Maya. Sometimes they’ll also say Inca, which is the wrong continent, but you’ll almost never hear anyone talk about the Zapotecs,” says Middleton, acting chair of the Department of Material Culture Sciences and professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rochester Institute of Technology. “They had the first writing system, the first state society, the first cities. And they controlled a fairly large territory at their Zenith—250 B.C. to 750 A.D.””*

An innovative exhibition that traces the genesis and evolution of Chicano and Latino music over the past 70 years is currently on view at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is accessible via telephone. “Sounds Latino!” continues through June 30 and highlights renowned singers and groups whose papers and other collections are represented in the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives ( CEMA ) located in UCSB’s Davidson Library.

The bolero, mambo, corrido, swing, boogie, Tex-Mex, and even punk rock are woven into the fabric of Latino cultural heritage, and the multidisciplinary exhibition engages visitors through the visual and theater arts as well as recorded music.

“We bring to life some of the music that many people may not have known was part of the historical chronology of Latino music over the last seven decades,” said Salvador Güereña, director of CEMA. “It’s important for younger people to know the impact it had on music across the spectrum.”

Vintage recordings were brought back to life for the exhibition –– which also includes interpretive texts, photos, artifacts, and historical documents –– and Güereña included the telephone component because he wanted “Sounds Latino!” to appeal to young people and engage them through the music. Over 40 music selections can be accessed by telephone, including pieces by Lalo Guerrero, whose archives are housed at UCSB; Tito Puente; Perez Prado; Adelina García; Ritchie Valens; Don Tosti; and the Chicano punk rock group The Brat.

“Not everyone has an iPod or an iPhone, but pretty much everyone has a cell phone,” he said. “Also, Latino music lovers aren’t limited by the four walls of the exhibition room. They can pick up a phone anywhere and at any time call in for a bolero or mambo or boogie and listen to their heart’s content.”

More information about the exhibition, including directions for accessing the recordings, is available at http://cemaweb.library.ucsb.edu/cema_exh_present.html”*

COOL - Use your cell phone and enter phone number (805) 357-4694, wait for prompt, and then enter selection number followed by the pound sign. These are mainly vintage recordings transferred from original disks, including hisses and pops. Go to this page to see what you can listen to.

A contemporary musical infused with Latin rhythms edged out a musical-theater classic in the battle for nominations for the 62nd annual Tony Awards, the prize created to honor the best of Broadway.

In the Heights, a warm-hearted Latin/hip-hop musical set in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood of New York, collected 13 nominations, compared to 11 for a sumptuous revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

In a season marked by strong re-stagings of musical-theater favorites, a revival of Sunday in the Park With George won nine nominations, while a revival of Gypsy amassed seven.”*

Workers in the country illegally have likely been at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville for almost 20 years, said author Stephen Bloom, a journalism professor at the University of Iowa.

“This is the worst-kept secret in Iowa,” said Bloom, who in 2000 published a book chronicling how Agriprocessors’ Hasidic culture affected Postville, a town in northeast Iowa.

The only “thing you need to work at the plant was a strong back and a strong stomach” and a Social Security number, whether it was valid or not, he said.

“Iowans don’t want to do this kind of work for minimum wage and few or no benefits,” he said.”*

Postville became a melting pot in 1987 with the arrival of 200 Hasidic Jews who turned a defunct meatpacking plant into a kosher slaughterhouse.

Business boomed at the plant, reviving the economy while pitting the newcomers against the Lutheran community.

Stephen Bloom detailed the struggle in his 2000 book, “Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America.” When the slaughterhouse first opened, local workers were given jobs. Then in the early 1990s, Eastern European workers came to work in the plant.”*

Under conventional economic logic, Mr. León is uncompetitive. His yields are just a fraction of what mechanized agriculture churns out from the vast expanses of the Great Plains.

But to him, that is beside the point.

The Mixteca highlands here in the state of Oaxaca are burdened with some of the most barren earth in Mexico, the work of more than five centuries of erosion that began even before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, their goats and their cattle. The scuffed hillsides look as though some ancient giant had hacked at them, opening gashes in the white and yellow rock.

Over the past two decades, Mr. León and other farmers have worked to reforest and reclaim this parched land, hoping to find a way for people to stay and work their farms instead of leaving for jobs in cities and in the United States.”*

Seaweed found at an inland settlement in Chile confirms that the village is one of the oldest inhabited sites in the Americas and demonstrates that residents had extensive contact with the coastline, 50 miles away, researchers said Friday.

Radiocarbon dating of the seaweed shows that the samples are 14,100 years old, give or take 120 years. That means the site, called Monte Verde, is at least a millennium older than the so-called Clovis sites in the American Southwest, long believed to be the most ancient in the New World.”*

Phantoms come, phantoms go. They swirl around Leonora Carrington, a tiny woman of 91 with a tart intellect and a posh British accent, as she sips Earl Grey tea at her kitchen table. They rise like black vapors from the pavement of Avenue Reforma, where a menagerie of Carrington’s enigmatic bronzes startle pedestrians and spook passing cars.

“Nobody ever takes this chair,” says Carrington in her genteel, impish voice, indicating one of four matching seats for her tea-time guests. “I think it’s haunted by my husband.”

After more than six decades of living in Mexico, where she has raised two sons and outlived two husbands, Carrington is being showered with accolades, exhibitions (including the outdoor sculpture show on Reforma) and essay tributes as one of her adopted country’s greatest living artists and its last remaining link to a key chapter of Modern art history. She appreciates the attention. “They’ve been very receptive and very kind here in Mexico.”"*

The curandera is weary from work. Three, four, five times a day, the immigrant farm workers knock on her apartment door, begging her to cure their ailments.

They complain of indigestion, of rashes, of post-traumatic panic attacks. Then there are the house calls that compel her to crate up her potions and herbs and drive across town, often after midnight, to escape the notice of immigration police.

“I’ve done so many cures that I’m exhausted; it gives me no time to rest,” said Herminia L. Arenas, 55, the curandera, or traditional healer, who has practiced in this Central Valley town since migrating 14 years ago from Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. “I want to retire, but I feel like I was sent here to help these people.” “*

Goodman Theatre’s Fourth Biennial Latino Theatre Festival — featuring visiting artists and performances by local troupes — will take place in Chicago Aug. 8-24 in both the Albert and Owen Theatres.

The festival is curated by resident artistic associate Henry Godinez.

The festival includes Culture Clash’s Culture Clash in AmeriCCa; Barcelona-based Marta Carrasco’s J’arrive, a compilation of her works over the past ten years; Al Son Que Me Toques, Lorca, Laura Crotte’s Mexican-musical adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding; Taking Flight by Adriana Sevan; and De La Oreja Al Corazon, an imaginative puppet piece from Mexico City.”*

In North Texas, mariachi groups ran music marathons Sunday, traveling from homes to churches – and even to a cemetery – to show North Texas mothers how much someone loves them.

“It’s something beautiful. It comes from our hearts, from our souls, from our feelings, from our culture,” said Hector Murillo, who plays trumpet with Dallas group Mariachi Jalisciense (as in Jalisco, the Mexican state that’s at the heart of mariachi music).

“The day seems long, but it’s really very short because we’re going from job to job to job and before you know it, the sun goes down and we’re still playing.”"*

Although Mother’s Day officially takes place the second Sunday of May in the United States, for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans living here, the celebration comes earlier.

No matter what day of the week it falls on, May 10 is the day that mothers in Mexico — and on this side of the border by people of Mexican descent— are feted.

Today, the day will be marked with a walk for peace in East Salinas and a gala dinner in Monterey, in addition to dozens of flower and plush-toy vendors scattered all over the county.”*

After much success at the WWD MAGIC Fashion and Apparel Expo in February, Colombian jean manufacturers, Michael Braden and Juliana Ramirez of Fiorana Inc., have finally launched fiorana.com. The bilingual e-commerce site is the exclusive home of Fiorana’s denim collection for Latinas, and it couldn’t come at a better time.

Research done by the Pew Hispanic Center earlier this year indicates that 78 percent of English-dominant Hispanics and 76 percent of bilingual Hispanics are currently surfing the web, which makes Fiorana.com the perfect one-stop shop for today’s fashionable Latina. “*

Mexican food is very popular, but it also has an unhealthy reputation. But a new study has a different opinion about some of the dishes.

Medical researchers at the University of Utah say native Mexican cuisine is good for you.

Researchers say they tracked the eating habits of pre-menopausal Hispanic and non-Hispanic women living in the Four Corner region (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona). “*

Pollo Campero, a Latin American fried-chicken favorite that had been seen in the U.S. only in takeout boxes aboard arriving flights, has teamed up with Wal-Mart to expand its reach to the nation’s growing Hispanic population.

A restaurant bearing the Guatemalan chain’s mascot chicken in a cowboy hat now sells its famed product inside a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Rowlett, Texas. Officials with the chain’s fledging U.S. arm, Campero USA Corp., hopes to expand its reach into more than 20 Wal-Mart locations across the country by the end of 2009.”*

2008 is going to be a rough year for Gwyneth Paltrow haters. First the actress lightened up her prissy image with her action-movie debut last week alongside Robert Downey Jr. in “Iron Man.” Now the woman who notoriously branded herself as a macrobiotic food snob has expanded her diet to include eel, cheese and even — gasp — fried churros, all to be chronicled in “Spain … On the Road Again,” a new docu-series making its debut in September on PBS. “*

Mofongo! It sounds like a battle cry.

Actually, it’s a word of African pedigree for a classic Puerto Rican preparation of mashed green plantains with garlic and pork crackling. Like many dishes from La Isla, as its children call it, mofongo has much in common with classics from Cuba (fufú) and the Dominican Republic (mangú).

If Cuban dishes can be faulted for being a bit bland, Puerto Rico’s are zesty, with the criollo taste kicked up by the enthusiastic use of cilantro and culantro, as well as the mildly peppy chile called ají dulce.”*