Mujeres del mundo,Women of the world, is one of the current projects I am working with. Other time I will write about Eli’s and I surrealistic film project. It has been a fantastic time of living and studying generation of 27:vanguard, medieval , tea, culture ,and philosophy. I apologize for not writing before. You would understand I rather write in my native language, not because I do not think English is a beautiful language, but because it is like black and white for me. Spanish is colors, adjectives, hyperboles, metaphors, verse, prose, sonnets. It has been a time of returning to me. As a victim of immigration, I suffered what is called as the negotiation of identities.
I was given the opportunity to choose between a three month practice, working in the Institute of Culture, Flamenco, Gastronomy, Wine and Vinegar making in Jerez de la Frontera, teaching Spanish as a second language, or do a research thesis. It was very difficult to decide, until I had a class with a professor, (now my tutor), and film director about the intrahistoria, later she led me to meet with Mujeres Del Mundo. It is a group of immigrant women from Latin America, Italy, and Morocco that get together to share their food, wine, stories and recipes. But there is more than that happening. It is a vehicle where cultures and different visions of the world interact. A collective restaurant was born thanks to this group and gave the Spanish citizenship to four illegal immigrants. Their stories are real.
Intrahistoria refers to the history you will not read in a traditional history book. It is the stories and testimonies of people like you and me. It is also the history of the forgotten. Those people that you see asking to clean your wind shield, working in the agricultural fields, or selling you flowers in the stoplight. The history limits to tell about what was important to a bourgeoisie and elite, what they did, what they ate, what they thought, fought. In fact when everything was ruin by wars, writers were hired to rewrite, reinvent history. They were writers that belonged to an accommodated social class. They were the only ones that could write and read at that time. That is why I say: Thank you romanticism, Grimm, Larra, thank you Federico Garcia Lorca, Romancero Gitano, for bringing costumbrismo , libros de viaje and gave us a break in our manipulated history, preventing a forgotten, unknown culture, lifestyle, to disappear. Even though the recovering of the popular culture by the romantics, folklorists was great, we still see it through the writer’s point of view. I do not think against that, I cataloged myself as a folklorist. I rather describe it as seeing the panorama through a new lens. Intrahistoria searches to recover that history from the source itself from testimonies and stories of real people and it is crude, naked. Some people call it marginal history; I call it the real history. Eduardo Galeano smiled.
La empanada Chilena is a Collective Restaurant in Calle Sacramento, about four blocks from our piso in Cadiz. They make the best empanadas chilenas in Cadiz. The collective is a project that started about a decade go. It took a lot of business research until it finally happened. The empanadas are baked in a thin and soft pastry dough filled with ternera, chicken, or ham , cheese and pineapple, mixed with herbs, spices, egg, and tomate frito.
“ I first lived in Germany but although I found a good paying job without papers, it was prohibited to enroll children that did not have papers, and I had three daughters. It was then when friends from Cadiz told us we did not need to be legal in Spain to attend school and helped us move” -owner
“ This collective came true thanks to our friends here in Spain. It was not thanks to the banks or immigration agencies. It was thanks to friends that love you and want to see you succeed. If we just stay in our house and not think about getting involve in friendships, like Mujeres del Mundo, This was not possible. - Bere (owner)
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