Nicholas Bascuñan-Wiley¹

SUMUD AND FOOD: REMEMBERING PALESTINE THROUGH CUISINE IN CHILE

Abstract
For Palestinians in diaspora, memory establishes and validates national consciousness and embodies the ongoing struggles for Palestinian legitimacy on a global scale. Within this community, cuisine and the methods of its production are an essential medium for the retention of cultural knowledge. This paper examines the role of food in the experience of Palestinian collective memory in the Chilean diaspora through sensory ethnography of restaurants and home cooking, in addition to interviews with Palestinian chefs, storeowners, and local residents living in the Chilean towns of La Calera and Quillota. Based on this research, I suggest that the continued reproduction of Palestinian cuisine in Chile simultaneously constitutes an engagement with the local context and a form of diasporic sumud (steadfastness)—a long-term and long-distance connection to Palestine and a quotidian resistance to symbolic erasure. Memory as resistance occurs in the diaspora both through the practice of diasporization itself and the reproduction of Palestinian food culture in the private and public sphere, the intergenerational exchange of traditions and memory, and the voicing of the Palestinian cause within the Chilean context.

Food and memory have long played a fundamental role in the construction and maintenance of Palestinian national identity within the homeland and in the global diaspora. Given the ongoing Israeli occupation and territorial contestation for a Palestinian state, Palestinian cuisine and collective memory—and the intersection of the two—are central to the ongoing struggles for statehood and symbolic Palestinian legitimacy. Take, for instance, the role of food in Palestinian hunger strikes in Israeli prisons or the boycotting of Israeli produce during the first intifada.² Similarly, many Palestinians can remember intimate details about the neighborhoods their grandparents were exiled from and some keep physical objects, such as the keys to their houses, as proof of residence and the traumas of exile.³ Food and memory-based resistance also occurs within the Palestinian diaspora in quotidian and subtle ways that sustain Palestinian identity and facilitate connectivity within a transnational community.

This paper examines the ongoing political role of food memory within the Chilean-Palestinian diaspora. Chile hosts the largest population of Palestinians outside of the Arab world, and the migratory history between the two regions exemplifies the movement of culture and ideas across immense temporal and spatial distances.⁴ This connection is both long-distance, spanning thousands of miles, and long-term with the earliest migrants leaving Bilad al-Sham⁵ and coming to Chile as early as 1850. Memories and traditions have been passed from generation to generation throughout the years, and the Palestinian community has both incorporated new waves of migrants and integrated into local communities. The diaspora has also remained politically and culturally involved in Palestinian affairs, which is particularly visible in the ongoing production of traditional cuisine. Chilean-Palestinians take great care in reproducing and sharing the recipes, traditions, and experiences that embody memories of Palestine. This process occurs within home kitchens, bakeries, sweet shops, grocery stores, and restaurants, with both other Palestinians and non-Palestinian Chileans. I argue that food culture in the diaspora constitutes a form of diasporic sumud⁶ (steadfastness in Arabic)— through continued resistance to both the Israeli violence toward the Palestinians and the loss of memory, traditions, and identity in diaspora. I am not suggesting that Palestinian cuisine in diaspora is stagnant or unchanging or that there have been no developments to the recipes and culinary practices used throughout Chile. Rather, even through the Chileanization⁷ of Palestinian cuisine, a symbolic connection to Palestinian nationalism and identity remains.

This article examines the various different ways that food memory functions as a form of diasporic political resistance for Chilean-Palestinians living in the towns of La Calera and Quillota. Resistance occurs simultaneously through the practice of diasporization and through the production of Palestinian food in the private and public sphere, the intergenerational exchange of traditions and remembrances, and the voicing of the Palestinian cause within the Chilean context. Additionally, this article responds to a recent call in the social sciences to reincorporate sensorial experiences into ethnographic observation and writing.⁸ Sensory ethnography offers an avenue to explore the ways that food-based memory and food culture are lived and practiced by owners, workers, and customers. In what follows, I begin by reviewing the existing literature on sumud, food consumption, and memory, while also considering the specificities of the diasporic Chilean context. I then discuss my methodological approach and recount instances from my fieldwork in Chile during the summer of 2016 that exemplify the multiple manifestations of Palestinianness⁹ in Chile. Finally, I conclude with a general discussion of food memory, resistance, and diaspora. Culture is itself a form of struggle and, thus, the study of food practices and resistance in diaspora illuminate larger themes of belonging, movement, and connectivity.

FOOD MEMORY AND SUMUD IN CHILE

Studies of collective memory have long argued that the past is often remembered in ways that reflect, and are mobilized in, the present moment¹⁰—a notion that is particularly salient within the Palestinian case.¹¹ Siri Schwabe develops a concept for this particular type of Palestinian memory in the Chilean diaspora.¹² She notes, “Palestinianness is formed, expressed, and explored, both temporally and spatially, via a distinct form of traveling memory—or what I call transmemory—on the one hand, and place-making on the other.”¹³ In the case of diasporic Palestinians in Chile, memory moves across vast temporal and spatial distances covering thousands of miles and multiple generations and never stops developing or being reconstructed.¹⁴ Memories of a Palestinian homeland, in a simultaneously imagined and constructed way, are often at the center of Palestinian identity, especially given the transnational or global nature of food-based memory.

Food, and its production and consumption, are global practices that are central to the construction of identity and culture.¹⁵ What, where, and when we eat are situated within specific spatiotemporalities and historical moments.¹⁶ Furthermore, both culinary (ways of cooking and preparation/presentation methods) and gastronomic (bodily consumption and taste) processes constitute the collective knowledge that bridges the temporal and spatial gap between diasporic context and a homeland.¹⁷ The experience of being Palestinian in Chile is a global one where heritage and identity are drawn from a multiplicity of connections between the global and the local and spaces in Chile, Palestine, and the larger Palestinian diaspora. Both the production of food and the movement of ideas are global processes, or foodways, composed of flows of both food and discourse.¹⁸ The Chile-Palestine connection is a transnational foodway that is not temporally or spatially bound to a strictly Chilean or Palestinian national identity. Instead, the global connections between these identities are reestablished within each local context.¹⁹

The practices of eating and remembering are inextricably linked. Food studies has paid a great deal of attention to the ways that memory, practiced through the production and consumption of cultural cuisines, shapes, and is shaped by, the places and actors involved.²⁰ Food also allows for the sharing of memories and traditions of past times and places through generations and between communities.²¹ For Palestinians in Chile, memories about Palestine or a Palestinian past can be recognized and recalled by diasporic members who have no spatial experiences in the homeland by referring to the narratives of other members and the reproduction of those experiences in a new context. Remembering through the consumption of food is thus more of a practice of “recognition” of memory rather than “recall.”²² This is a subtle but powerful difference where recognition entails a reproduction, or even reliving, of memory, while recall entails only the awareness of memory. Food memory helps to maintain links with the past and with distant places, but it also reestablishes the meaning of home in the local or diasporic context.²³ Palestinian cuisine, both within Palestine and in exile, is essential to collective memory and to connection with a homeland.²⁴ Practices and recipes are passed down through generations during observations in kitchens and during family meals and are seldom transcribed in cookbooks. This transient movement of food knowledge through time and across space occurs primarily through the family and other community networks. Cuisine also functions as a way of legitimizing memory and Palestinian existence through the reproduction of traditional customs.²⁵

DIASPORIC SUMUD

Given the struggle for Palestinian statehood and legitimacy, food memory itself is resistance. Food activism²⁶ is central to Palestinian culinary practices as a mode of opposition to occupation and Israeli dominance and appropriation.²⁷ Israeli adoption of Palestinian cuisine has been a key strategy of what Jeff Halper calls the Israeli “matrix of control” over Palestine and an integral element of the larger project of Israeli nation building.²⁸ As a result, the fight to reclaim national dishes and to remember the homeland through cooking serves as a powerful contemporary example of sumud and resistance for Palestinians within Palestine and in the diaspora.²⁹

Sumud itself takes on multiple meanings for Palestinians. Lisa Takari notes, “Sumud’s incarnations have been many, but the dominant motif has been Palestinians’ determination to continue under adversity, fortified by their roots in their land, the strength of their traditions, and family and kin solidarity.” ³⁰ Sumud occurs in pragmatic interactions between institutions and in social solidarity within communities. Dedication to sumud connects both the individual and the collective to a Palestinian homeland and a larger Palestinian community. The practice and embodiment of sumud reach wide and deep within Palestinian consciousness as steadfastness in resistance to occupation and erasure.³¹ Due to the exile and estrangement faced by Palestinian migrants in Chile, the production of sumud is visible and powerful within diasporic contexts.

The concept of sumud emerged as early as the British Mandate and gained traction as a slogan of political resistance during the First Intifada in 1987 with Palestinian leaders’ direct calls for Palestinians civilians to remain living in the land itself and to avoid physical and symbolic expulsion at the hands of the Israeli army.³² The idea of steadfastness has carried over into the diaspora and has acquired new meanings in their local contexts.³³ The everyday remembering of Palestinian identity in Chile and the unwillingness to forget the ongoing violence and occupation occurring in Palestine happens particularly because of the precariousness of the Palestinian cause. This is an everyday process and a subtle one. Producing, consuming, and selling Palestinian food in the diaspora is an act of “resistance through existence” through a process that Leonardo Schiocchet calls “the hyper-expression of Palestinianness and the . . . ritualization of the quotidian.”³⁴ Palestinian families in Chile continuously reproduce and reinvent the cooking traditions passed down to them both in private home kitchens and public restaurants, making Palestinianness visible throughout Chilean society.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: DIASPORIZATION AND CHILEAN-PALESTINIAN IDENTITY

Before turning to analysis of fieldwork, a brief account of Chilean-Palestinian history is needed. The Palestinian diaspora has recently gained increased attention in conversations on Palestine and, more generally, within transnational and transcultural studies. Since the Nakba,³⁵ the deterritorialization of the Palestinian people and the communal experience of exile have had a heavy influence on Palestinian identity, particularly given that more Palestinians live in diaspora than within Palestine itself.³⁶ Palestinians living outside of the homeland have experienced varying receptions in host societies, resulting in a multiplicity of relationships to Palestinian national identity and the Palestinian cause.³⁷ Diasporic Palestinians advocate both symbolically and politically for the right of return, an end to the Israeli occupation, and for a range of Palestinian political groups. That said, some authors examining the Palestinian case have pushed against applying the label of diaspora. Sari Hanafi³⁸ and Julie Peteet³⁹ have both argued that the Palestinian community living outside of the Palestinian territories does not constitute a diaspora but rather some other form of displacement (i.e., a refugee community, Palestinians in exile, or even an “unachieved” diaspora). Hanafi and Peteet show that Palestinians do not meet the most prominent definitions of a diaspora for a number of reasons: a lack of “temporal” and “spatial depth”; absence of a clear “center of gravity”; and no legal or social sense of belonging in the host community.⁴⁰ Yet in their analyses, these authors have focused predominantly on the Palestinian communities in the Middle East and the United States.

When we consider the Palestinian diaspora in Latin America and, more specifically, Chile, we see that the term “diaspora” fits Hanafi and Peteet’s criteria more closely. First, the Palestinian community in Chile has a spatial and temporal depth that few other Palestinian communities have, which allows for the reterritorialization of Chilean spaces as diasporic Palestinian spaces. Second, there is a strong “center of gravity” that is based upon several nodes of cultural and political connectivity (La Calera-Quillota-Patronato-Santiago, etc.). Finally, Palestinians in Chile demonstrate simultaneous participation in the local context and sustained connection to Palestinian national identity. Yet, I want to go beyond this to argue that not only does the Palestinian community in Chile constitute a diaspora, but also that the ongoing practice of diasporization is itself a form of resistance. Recent developments in diaspora studies have moved away from the notion of diaspora as an “entity” and toward diaspora as a “stance”⁴¹ in an attempt to avoid teleological traps characteristic of other migration theories.⁴² The practice of diasporization visible in the narratives of the participants of my study is indicative of resistance within exile on two fronts: resistance to the total loss of connection with Palestinian memory within Chile and resistance to physical and symbolic erasure and appropriation of Palestinian identity by Israel. The history of Palestinian diasporization in Chile starts with the history of Arab migration to the Americas and the continued transnational engagements with the homeland.

Since the 1860s, migrants from Bilad al-Sham have moved to Amrika (the Americas) in waves to seek better economic opportunities than were available under Ottoman rule and, later, to escape the violence and persecution in the region.⁴³ Travelers left from modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan and settled in cities throughout the Americas. Early, predominantly Christian, migrants became merchants and traders within local economies upon arrival, often beginning as faltes,⁴⁴ or door-to-door salesmen. These initial Arab migrants to the Americas set the foothold for future economic, political, and social engagement in local contexts and diasporic connection to distant homelands.⁴⁵ Today, large communities of Arab descendants can be found throughout Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Honduras, and Mexico. Throughout the twentieth century in Chile, Arab migrants from the towns of Beit Jala, Beit Sahour, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem began to make a name for themselves in economic and political realms.⁴⁶ Take, for instance, well-known politicians like Rafael Tarud Siwady, the Chilean minister of economy in 1953, or important economic actors like the Yarur brothers, who played an essential role in the development of Chile’s textile industry.⁴⁷ Families of the first migrants joined the initial arrivals, and subsequent generations born in Chile helped to establish tightly connected Arab communities throughout Chile with major sociocultural hubs in cities like Santiago, Viña del Mar, and Concepción.⁴⁸

In addition to local presence in Chile, Arab migrants were attentive to political developments back home.⁴⁹ Diasporic engagement with the homeland continued throughout the British Mandate in Palestine and peaked with the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. Pro-Palestinian activism throughout Chile coupled with a strong presence from previous migration to Chile helped to form the diaspora itself. Transnational networks spread information about Palestine throughout Chile through personal communications and newspapers in Arabic.⁵⁰ Diasporic members remained culturally and politically engaged with the Palestine-Israeli conflict and organized protests in the diaspora, advocating for the right to Palestinian citizenship and the right of return. The birth of the Palestinian diaspora in Chile also paralleled the emergence of Palestinian nationalism happening within Palestine itself from the early 1900s through the beginnings of the occupation.⁵¹ Palestinian integration and long-distance nationalism in Chile continued throughout the twentieth century as subsequent Palestinian migrants joined established family networks during instances of violence with Israel and within other diaspora communities.⁵² The rise of Palestinian nationalism and the formation of the Israeli state gave way to new diasporic identities—Los Chilenos-Palestinos (the Chilean-Palestinians) emerged as a term for Arab migrants in Chile with connections to both a Palestinian and Chilean homeland. Developments in Palestine would continue to influence the diasporic participation of migrants in Chile and the process of diasporization throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Today, the Palestinian presence in Chile is long-distance, long-term, numerous (around 500,000 members), and diverse.⁵³ Los Chilenos-Palestinos have continued to connect politically and culturally with Palestine and the local diasporic community. Chilean-Palestinian activists of all generations participate in a variety of organizations, social clubs, and university groups in support of the homeland. In 2014, Chilean protesters in solidarity with Palestine marched against the war on Gaza, protesting the Israeli attacks while establishing a “presence” in Chile.⁵⁴ Additionally, many Chilean indigenous activists protest alongside Palestinians given the “deep resonance of Palestinian struggles against loss of territory, state repression, colonialism and racism with the same struggles on the part of Latin American indigenous peoples,” ⁵⁵ and various transnational political groups in Chile have advocated for Palestine at different essential moments.⁵⁶ There is also a large online community of Palestinians who advocate for education about, and solidarity with, the Palestinian cause. This web-based network has raised awareness and connection between local, regional, and global Palestinian communities.⁵⁷ Contemporary Chilean-Palestinian presence in Chile embodies a particular sense of ongoing politics of resistance in the diaspora that fuels local participation.

The cultural presence of the diaspora is also visible throughout Chilean society and has contributed to the retention and reassemblage of Palestinian identity in Chile. While little has been written on the role of food and eating, there is some literature on other Chilean-Palestinian cultural practices. Given the overwhelming majority of Chilenos-Palestinos who identify as Christian, the Orthodox church has continued to play a large role within the diasporic community and in connecting with other Christian communities in Palestine.⁵⁸ Music has also enabled collaborations between Chileans, Palestinians, and Chilenos-Palestinos, and has provided a platform for advocating for resistance to Israeli violence—for instance, popular musicians such as Ana Tijoux.⁵⁹ Additionally, the diasporic community has used literature and theater as forms of cultural resistance to the occupation and as a way to center memories of the homeland within public cultural spheres.⁶⁰ The first division Chilean soccer team Club Deportes Palestino⁶¹ also help to ground Palestinian activism through the depiction of the map of Palestine on the back of the jersey and during friendly matches with Palestinian soccer teams. In general, Chile provides the Palestinian diaspora a space to belong and participate within the local, everyday context while continuing to connect with and advocate for Palestinian identity through transnational networks.⁶² Elizabeth Mavroudi calls this simultaneous citizenship in a host country with continued national allegiance to an external identity “pragmatic citizenship.”⁶³

The quotidian practice of pragmatic citizenship can be seen specifically within Quillota and La Calera—two towns that are central to this paper and that have historically and contemporarily been important diasporic spaces for the Chilean-Palestinian community. Quillota and La Calera were early settlement locations for Arab migrants given their central location on north-south railroad routes. Travelers would have to disembark at these major land ports to go to Santiago and to connect to the next train. Early Arab families settled in these towns and opened a number of textile businesses that are still operating today.⁶⁴ Recently, these communities have also become home to migrants of Palestinian heritage fleeing from Iraq and Syria.⁶⁵ Overall, Palestinian food memory and diasporic sumud are central to the experience of Chilean-Palestinians. Additionally, diasporization by community members is a form of resistance that is facilitated by the Chilean context. There still remains a need for further study of diasporic cultural engagement and political connections to the homeland. This paper attempts to address this gap and to develop a platform for similar studies to come.

SENSORY ETHNOGRAPHY AND FOOD-MEMORY WORK

In order to study the politics of memory through food, we must come to our senses—literally. Culinary and gastronomic processes of production and consumption are imbued with a plurality of simultaneous and interactive sensual experiences that are inextricably intertwined with memory. Taking a bite of food, for instance, provokes encounters with aroma, texture, flavor, and perception within and through numerous spatiotemporalities. Life is not lived, nor remembered, in one sensory dimension. Yet, the multisensory, or transsensory, realities of everyday experiences are often left out of ethnographic accounts and social science data in general. Instead, most scholarship trusts a vision-centric paradigm (I’ll believe it when I see it!). Recent efforts in the social sciences⁶⁶ have argued for a more inclusive and sensorially saturated set of research practices and reports. Paul Stoller, for instance, pushes researchers to take their sensorial experiences seriously, noting, “tasteful ethnographies mix an assortment of ingredients—dialogue, description, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, smells, sights and sounds—to create a narrative that savors the world.” ⁶⁷ This paper puts flavor first and centralizes food and eating by paying extra attention to marginalized senses—such as taste⁶⁸ and smell⁶⁹—and how the simultaneous experience of many stimuli come together to form one blended, multisensory experience.⁷⁰

“Doing sensory ethnography”⁷¹ requires that the researcher be in tune with their own senses in addition to the sensory experiences of others and the sensorial relationships between people. As a methodology, it is a collaborative practice and a process of relational sensory perception that produces a collective “way of knowing.”⁷² During the summer of 2016 (May–August), I conducted sensory ethnographic observation in several Palestinian food spaces in the Chilean towns of La Calera and Quillota including restaurants, home kitchens, grocery stores, and street-side food vendors. I ate food, purchased ingredients, observed interactions, participated in food preparation, and spoke with people in each location. In addition to several informal conversations and interactions that I had throughout visits, I also recorded seventeen interviews⁷³ with Chilean-Palestinian customers, workers, and owners.⁷⁴ Interviews with restaurant staff were carried out in their place of work in order to be present in the food setting and to respect busy work schedules. As many participants explained, restaurant labor is demanding and workers and owners often must spend countless hours making sure that day-to-day tasks run smoothly. Participants were recruited for interviews from initial visits to food spaces in the towns that were visibly Palestinian (identified by the presence of flags, Arabic writing on signs, music playing, geographically specific posters, etc.) and then through a network sampling process.

During interviews, I asked participants about their daily activities related to food, their connection to Palestine, and their memories surrounding the production or consumption of Palestinian cuisine. These conversations allowed me to see how food spaces, such as street corners, restaurant and home kitchens, and different dining areas, function as “remembrance environments”⁷⁵ where memories are shared between families and communities through culinary traditions and eating practices. My retelling of the stories and conversations that took place in this paper are themselves a form of memory work. As Susannah Radstone notes, when working with the memories of others, “memory work occupies the liminal space between forgetting and transformation.”⁷⁶ For instance, my own memories of eating and living in Palestine in 2014 also shaped my encounters in La Calera and Quillota during the fieldwork in 2016. Even currently—as I reflect on the time I spent researching—I am working with my recollections as a “field site.”⁷⁷

My previous experiences as a researcher gave me entrée into a number of local food spaces and shaped my position as an authority on Palestinian culture with a number of participants who had never traveled to Palestine. In this sense, I have inhabited an in-between position throughout much of this project: I am not Palestinian, but I have been to Palestine, which often prompted participants to ask me about what Palestine was like. I am half-American and half-Chilean, and often participants placed me somewhere in the middle of being a gringo (Spanish for foreigner) and a local. Similarly, I speak conversational Chilean Spanish and Palestinian Arabic, but not without an accent. Participants spoke mostly in Spanish, but frequently referenced words or sayings in Arabic. Finally, I am an academic from an American university and also have local knowledge and family connections that give me an ability to navigate a number of different social arenas as both an outsider and an insider. This in-betweenness often prompted the participants with whom I engaged to answer the questions I asked about their lives in great detail, to which I try to do justice in the following analysis.

SUMUD AND FOOD

Palestinian national consciousness in diaspora is manifested in a variety of ways, shaped by the multiplicity of interacting identities, social connections, and spatiotemporal experiences. Here, I consider three different, yet interconnected, ways that Palestinian cuisine is produced in the diaspora by situating the discussion within stories from fieldwork. This is by no means an exhaustive description of the experience of food production; rather, it is a testament to the multiplicity of representations of Palestinianness and sumud within the Chilean diaspora.

EDU AND MARTA

I met Edu when a friend recommended their favorite restaurant in Quillota, A Lo Árabe. After climbing the steps to the second-floor entrance, I was immediately confronted with the restaurant’s bright wallpaper: a painting of the Palestinian flag stretching around the room and covering three of the four walls. On the other wall hung a colorful map of Palestine. The rest of the room was full of décor that included camel statues, lamps, and wood plaques with engravings in Arabic. Chatting customers sat in red plastic chairs around four or five small tables, each covered in a green cloth. A pleasant smell of meat roasting and the sizzling sound of a fryer emerged from a small kitchen in the back. Edu owns A Lo Árabe, and he manages it with his mother, Marta, and sister, who were helping stock shelves and serve food when I arrived. Edu’s great-grandparents on his mother’s side had emigrated from Beit Jala, Palestine, to Quillota, while his Chilean grandfather on his father’s side had left Chile to marry a Palestinian woman in Palestine before returning to settle down. According to Edu, his was one of the first Palestinian restaurants to open in Quillota. He decided to start the restaurant as a business venture after noticing the demand for new cuisine from local Chileans who now make up his most faithful clients.

But Edu also opened the restaurant for more symbolic reasons. Running A Lo Árabe allows Edu to continuously situate Palestinian identity within the local Quillota context, throughout Chile, and in the global Palestinian community. To him, the Palestinian diaspora in Chile constitutes an important segment of Palestinian history—what he calls “la segunda parte de Palestina” (the second part of Palestine). The diaspora affords Edu space to politically engage with the Palestinian cause and to connect individually with Palestinian national identity. The reproduction of home-cooking traditions in A Lo Árabe and the creation of a visibly Palestinian space within Quillota encompass a form of quotidian resistance through existence and steadfastness in the diaspora. Edu brings Palestinianness from the private sphere (home cooking) to the public sphere (the restaurant), and, in the process, both openly advocates against the erasure of Palestinian identity and facilitates the integration and appreciation of Palestinian food and culture among non-Palestinian Chileans in Quillota.

In addition to the symbolic meanings of the restaurant for Edu, the food served at A Lo Árabe allows him to start a conversation with Chilean customers about his own heritage and the ongoing violence in Palestine. This is visible not only in Edu’s interactions with his customers but also in his relationships with Chilean friends who have never previously eaten Palestinian cuisine:

A lot of people come here and ask me, “Hey, you know what? Is this a restaurant with Arab cuisine?” “[I respond] Yes.” “Well, teach me about Arab cuisine. What is it?” For me that is super common, you get me? But it is also beautiful to come here and teach the people who have maybe never eaten Arab cuisine and then they start to eat and enjoy it. They ask me, “Are you Palestinian?” I tell them, “My grandfather was born near Beit Jala, and then I tell them that history.”

While I visited with Edu, he brought out a few pictures of his grandparents living in Beit Jala and pointed to decorations in the room that were gifts from Palestine, telling short anecdotes about the objects as he showed me. Customers would occasionally ask about the restaurant’s decoration and theme—wanting to know more about Palestinian culture and Edu’s connection to it. Occasionally, Edu noted, these conversations would end up centered on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Edu would condemn the violence as customers listened. For Edu, owning the restaurant and serving Palestinian cuisine affords him the opportunity to talk with customers about Palestinian politics and the migratory history of his family.

The stories that Edu tells customers revolve around memories about Beit Jala that were passed down to him by family members who had lived in or visited Palestine. Though he has never been to “the homeland,” Edu plans to make the trip one day. During one visit to A Lo Árabe, Edu handed me a plate with chicken shawarma, a tabbouleh salad, and a few falafels next to a plate of hummus. The bite of falafel with khubz, or pan pita (pita bread), immediately and involuntarily brought me back to the time I lived in Birzeit, Palestine, and would eat falafel sandwiches from a street vendor’s cart every morning. Edu explained that the restaurant’s cooking (which was done mostly by his mother) sparked his memories of his grandparents and the stories they told him. I told Edu about my own recollections from Palestine that I had while eating his food, and his face lit up. He smiled widely and asked me what Palestine was like, what it felt like to actually be there, and how the food tasted since he had never been. I had no single response for Edu but instead told him about some of the most memorable experiences I could muster: the fresh bread available daily from the corner bakery near my house, the sweet and tangy tamarind juice I drank on Ramadan nights, and the times my neighbor would invite me over for makloubeh.⁷⁸ Edu listened intently while I was recounting my experiences. For the moment, I had become an authority on “the homeland,” having actually lived there. Yet simultaneously, I had also reaffirmed Edu’s own authority over Palestinianness, given my remarks about the similarities in taste and tastiness of his cuisine to the food I had previously eaten throughout Palestine.

Edu’s mother, Marta, sat down with us as I was eating and accepted my compliments on her cooking. Marta grew up eating Palestinian cuisine in Quillota using recipes⁷⁹ that her parents and other family members brought with them from Beit Jala. She had continued to prepare dishes from her childhood as an adult, noting that she cooks certain basic foods differently than her Chilean friends—making rice with noodles instead of plain, for instance. Marta told me that the recipes that she uses at A Lo Árabe are the same recipes that her mother and grandmother cooked before her. However, she further explained that in Palestine today, they do not eat exactly the same foods now as they did in the when her family migrated. Throughout her life in Quillota, the recipes Marta prepared had slightly changed given the local ingredients available and the likes and dislikes of those who tasted her cooking. Marta also noted that Edu had Chilenizó (Chileanized) a few menu items including a dish he named chorillana árabe. A chorillana is a Chilean dish consisting of fries covered with grilled onions, sausage, steak, cheese, and gravy. In Edu’s chorillana árabe, instead of steak there was shawarma meat. For Marta, the production of cuisine simultaneously inhabits a number of spatiotemporalities: recipes resemble originality and adherence to tradition while also being dynamic and malleable to each new reproduction in the diaspora. While Marta continues to make food based on recipes brought to Chile by her parents in the 1950s and ʼ60s, the food made from these recipes is produced, consumed, and shaped by the present moment—emblematic of both steadfastness in tradition and belonging within the local context.

Marta and one of her Chilean friends do all the cooking for the restaurant. She laughed when she told me that this friend now cooks Palestinian food for her own family after twenty-five years of working at A Lo Árabe. Marta said that, though she lives in Quillota, she feels more Arab than Chilean, and noted how she has passed this identity on to her family and friends:

I got married. My husband isn’t Arab, but he Arabized himself (Se arabizó). For example, he likes Arab food and he has more [Palestinian] customs than I do. And curiously, my children, who were raised very attached to my father, go around with a necklace with the Palestinian map on it, they eat Palestinian food, speak in Arabic, and on Facebook they have their name written in Arabic, you get me? They also go to the Palestinian [soccer] stadium in Santiago. They are very Palestinian even though their father isn’t Arab. The youngest of my children [Edu] came up with the idea to open this business because when I cooked, the house filled with people.

Through cooking and eating practices, Marta’s husband and children have become deeply connected to her family’s Palestinian heritage and have embraced various forms of Palestinianness. Even Marta’s assistant, who has no familial relation to Palestine, has invested in and connected to the Palestinian culture through food. Similar to Edu’s conversations about Palestinian politics with customers, Marta engages with non-Palestinian Chileans and teaches them about her own connections to Beit Jala and her memories of Palestine.

Edu’s restaurant allows him to simultaneously connect with Palestine and Palestinianness (through, for instance, the decoration of the restaurant, his Palestinian necklace, or his name in Arabic on Facebook) and to start a conversation with customers about his familial history and the ongoing conflicts in Palestine. Regardless of the temporal or spatial distances between him and Palestine, Edu remains dedicated to bringing his identity into the public. Similarly, Marta is able to interact with memories of her parent’s migration from Beit Jala to Quillota and reproduce recipes within the restaurant’s kitchen and during meals with friends and family. During the day-to-day operations in A Lo Árabe, Edu, Marta, and others engage in a process of diasporic sumud—critically engaging with contemporary Palestinian politics and reproducing culinary traditions passed down through the generations—while also connecting with customers and friends in Quillota through food and eating.

CAMILA, ALAN, AND RUTH

It’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon on a sleepy side street in downtown La Calera. Sitting outside of Camila’s restaurant, I watch a few customers trickle into the store and order a garlic sauce-stuffed shawarma sandwich with a few syrup-soaked baklavas for dessert. The restaurant owner, Camila, a middle-aged woman wearing a red apron with her hair tied up, shuttles back and forth between the cash register and the kitchen to deliver food orders. The metal gate that covers the front of the restaurant is pushed up, opening the dining area to the street where Camila’s son, Alan, is leaning on a broom listing his favorite foods of the restaurant. “You’ve got stuffed peppers, stuffed potatoes, kebab and rice, rolled grape leaves, and, of course, shawarma.” Camila urges Alan to continue sweeping the sidewalk and, in between orders, she pops over to my table to chat. “I decided to open the place because there was no comida árabe⁸⁰ left in Calera after the last Syrian refugees moved to Viña,” Camila starts. “I designed the restaurant with un toque árabe (an Arab touch) and I sell comida casera (homemade food). Though it is a lot of work, our food is always fresh—often I bring it made straight from my home.” Camila and Alan work with a few other nonfamilial employees to sell Palestinian cuisine to their mostly Chilean customer base.

While we chat, an older couple strolls by the restaurant and wave to Camila, greeting her with a friendly “It’s been a while!” Camila explains that she grew up in La Calera and was raised by her parents and aunts and uncles who migrated from Palestine to the area in the 1960s. As a kid, Camila would leave her house barefoot to play with her cousins during summer days. Calera was such a small town that she practically knew everyone as family or family friends. Though they do not get together as much, Camila still greets old friends as the pass by her restaurant. Camila’s interactions with Palestinian cuisine occur within the restaurant as she talks with passersby and with family at home. After a few more minutes of chatting, Camila’s mother, Ruth, joins us at the sidewalk-side table. She adjusts her glasses and listens to Alan explain my project to her. “Oh, what can I tell you?” she starts. “I moved to Chile from Beit Jala in 1961. I made my family in Calera. All of my six children and their children are here. The restaurant, though, that’s all Camila.” Camila, who has been listening in, adds, “My mother taught me how to prepare the food. Every day I would watch her roll grape leaves and see how she stuffed the potatoes. And that’s how I learned. In my house growing up, there was only Arab food.”

The restaurant allows Camila to make a living within her hometown of Calera through the production of cuisine that she learned how to make while observing in the kitchen as a kid. Through food, Camila connects her family to memories and recipes from her mother’s childhood in Palestine. Ruth, who has lived the past fifty years in Chile, continues to prefer cooking Palestinian dishes to Chilean cuisine:

I don’t really like Chilean food as much. I like Arab food, lentils, beans, green peas, more than anything else. It’s the fundamentals. We have always eaten Palestinian food. The tradition continues and it is not going to disappear. Even if I go, they will continue with the tradition—the tradition of the kitchen.

Ruth points to Alan and Camila, who are each with customers, indicating that they will carry on the culinary practices that she has taught them after she passes. Ruth adds that Alan used to join her while she worked in the kitchen and quickly picked up the skills to make particular dishes. Demonstrating in the space in between us, Ruth’s hands gently fold and roll an imaginary grape leaf while tucking in pretend meat filling. She laughs as I watch on intently. The fortitude of memory for Ruth is located in what she has taught her family and it is rooted in a particular locality within La Calera—there is a connectedness between the family members that is visible in inter- and intra-generational exchanges of culinary traditions.

Private sphere production of Palestinian cuisine is also central to diasporic sumud and memory in the diaspora. As Ruth sips a cup of black, Arabic tea that her grandson brought her, Alan proudly recounts family history. Along with two other Arab families, Camila’s family settled in La Calera in the 1950s and ʼ60s and began to work within commercial enterprises and textiles, becoming famous in the region for their goods. Large portions of the family would, and still do, get together on Sundays at Ruth’s house to compartir (share) in large almuerzos (lunches). Camila remembers these times fondly:

On Sundays, only counting my family, there were ten people. Then, if ten people came to say hi to my father, my father would bring those ten people to the house for lunch. We would set the table while mom would quickly prepare the food for those ten guests. Arabs are known for being sweet people who open the doors of their houses to the people.

Camila notes that these get-togethers happen less frequently since her father passed away a few years ago, but friends and family still visit for occasional Sunday lunches or on special occasions. The discussion of Sunday lunches sparks conversation among Camila, Ruth, and Alan about the role of Palestinian cuisine in weddings, baptisms, and funerals. Camila notes that during Chilean-Palestinian vigils, for instance, people drink bitter coffee before the ceremony then drink sweetened coffee afterward. Attendees also go to the house of the family to eat fate, a rice-based dish with yogurt, cauliflower, and goat meat. Camila also noted that, “Regardless if the person was well known or not, or whether it is a large or small vigil, they make the same food.”

The production of Palestinian cuisine in diaspora is a notably gendered practice.⁸¹ In Camila’s restaurant, and within many other homes and restaurants I visited, women do the majority of the cooking and meal production. Men usually take on the role of acquiring the produce and ingredients and, in the case of the restaurant, serving, and communicating with customers. The labor for Palestinian cuisine is also time-consuming, particularly with tasks like rolling grape leaves or making baklava dough. Special events can often be huge affairs with hundreds of guests in attendance and preparation and production can last many hours. While explaining these details, Camila mentioned, “If you have your immediate family, then all your siblings and their families, and then your parents and their siblings, the table can fill up fast.” In addition to doing most of the production labor, women also take on the role of culture, memory, and tradition keepers, tasked with retaining recipes and production techniques and passing them on to younger generations. Within Camila’s family, Ruth was one of the few members actually born in Palestine, and her memories are central to the narratives of diasporic resistance that are passed on to younger generations.

While chatting in front of the restaurant, Ruth remarked on the atrocities of the Israeli state and the ongoing oppression of el pueblo Palestino (the Palestinian village). After fifty years of living in Chile, Ruth returned to Palestine in 2011 to visit her home and her sister. She remembered with anger the six hours that she was held by Israeli border security. “They didn’t tell me anything, just kept saying wait, wait. That’s the Israeli occupation for you. They don’t want Palestinians who have left to come back. When I was born, it wasn’t Israel. It was, and continues to be, Palestine.” For Ruth and the rest of her family members, the ongoing occupation in Palestine is remembered and followed daily. Alan, for instance, said that he participates in number of Facebook groups that share daily news, and recipes, from Palestine.

For diasporic members, memories of culinary experiences in Palestine are hard to disentangle from the observation of ongoing violence in Palestine. Remembering is a process that spans generations and temporalities, visible in Camila and her family’s interactions in both the restaurant and the home. La Calera has contextual specificities as a historical and contemporary diasporic space for multiple generations of Palestinian families. Today, Sunday dinners in Camila’s family are less frequent, but they are still powerful ways of connecting with friends and family through food and through kitchen traditions. The restaurant itself is also a way of presenting Palestinianness to local Chileans while making a living. Within the private and public spheres, Camila, Ruth, Alan, and the rest of their family have different connections to remembering Palestine and producing Palestinian cuisine that are heavily shaped by age and gender. Yet, collectively the ongoing persistence of Palestinian food memory in La Calera constitutes a symbolic resistance to forgetting and diasporic sumud through food.

ABU LAITH AND NADIA

Abu Laith’s restaurant sits a few blocks north of the Plaza De Armas, the heart of Quillota’s small downtown. Two red, wooden doors in the middle of an otherwise tan building open up to a dozen square tables with plastic covers surrounded by black folding chairs. The inside is sparsely decorated: a strand of lights strings around the square room near the ceiling, a bronze camel statue rests on the counter of a cash register, and a dusty, grey boom box on a stool in the corner plays a mixture of reggaeton stations and local ads. On the morning of our interview, Nadia, Abu Laith’s mother, greets me and then guides me through the empty dining area to a cramped kitchen in the back. There, cooking preparations for the day have already begun and Abu Laith is hard at work, rapidly chopping garlic. Our entrance prompts him to stop momentarily, wipe his hands on his shirt for a clean handshake, and then pull a chair out for me next to a metal industrial sink and his workstation. I accept the seat and begin to fumble with my notebook and phone recorder, only to see Abu Laith hold up a finger to indicate I should wait on the questioning. “Try this,” he says in Arabic, picking up a blender full of a thick, brown paste. “It’s my version of hummus.”

I tear off a piece of a baguette, dip it into the bowl, and put it into my mouth. The bite is exquisite and unlike any other hummus that I had previously tasted. Abu Laith’s hummus has a runnier consistency than I am used to and a heavy flavor of garlic with a note of lemon. He explains that while he is happy with the flavor, it is not exactly the way he used to make it in his restaurant in Beit Jala, Palestine. He used boiled peanuts in this Chilean version instead of chickpeas,⁸² and the bread with which we had scooped the hummus was a baguette from a bakery in Quillota—not the classic flatbread, or khubz, he was used to. Despite the alterations he had made, I thoroughly enjoyed the snack, and Abu Laith was pleased with my reaction. He poured more hummus into a dish and placed it in front of me. “Now,” he said, “what questions do you have for me?”

Abu Laith moved to Chile from Beit Jala, Palestine, in 2013, together with his mother, wife, and son. Transitioning to life in Quillota was initially difficult due to linguistic and cultural differences and the need to immediately search for work. He opened his restaurant in 2015 selling comida árabe but immediately had to deal with numerous difficulties in running the business. The rent was high, the workers he employed were not dependable, and every day a new issue demanded his immediate attention. Yet, Quillota meant a new life for Abu Laith and his family away from the occupation of, and war in, Palestine. “No hay futuro en Palestina” (There is no future in Palestine), he told me at one point during the interview. Chile, while not free of its own difficulties, offers both economic promise and a sense of community—it is a place where his children can grow up away from the violence in Palestine while still connecting with their heritage within the local diasporic community and advocating for Palestinian equal rights in the diaspora. Abu Laith mentions frequently meeting with other Palestinians of various generations in Quillota and traveling to Santiago, Chile’s capital city (about an hour-and-a-half drive away), to meet with more Chilean-Palestinians. In fact, he received the inspiration to open a restaurant on one such trip to the capital after seeing a number of established Arab restaurants in the city.

Moving to Chile and settling into Quillota with his family proved to be an expensive endeavor for Abu Laith. The restaurant served as a primary source of income and allowed him to make enough money to cover basic expenses. When it came to figuring out what to put on the menu, Abu Laith and Nadia decided to prepare dishes they had always made in Palestine and only slightly tailored them to the local Chilean palate, serving primarily during the hours of almuerzo in the middle of the day. Occasionally, Abu Laith would buy spices and a few key ingredients, such as leben (fermented milk) and grape leaves, from a Syrian grocery store in the neighborhood of Patronato in Santiago, though fresh produce was constantly purchased locally. Preparing dishes that he used to make in Beit Jala reminded Abu Laith of being home though he lamented on the differences between making food in Chile and Palestine. “When we cook here [Chile] the food is not exactly the same—there are some ingredients that you can’t get here, or they are too expensive. But we continue to make food from home for ourselves and the customers and, through that, we remember what it is like to eat in Palestine.” Though Abu Laith recognizes the difference in the experiences of producing cuisine within a new spatial context, he intentionally reproduces recipes from Beit Jala in Quillota to both retain memories of Palestine for himself (and later to pass on to his children) and to make a living in Chile. Regardless of the ingredients or context for cooking, continuing Palestinian traditions keep Abu Laith simultaneously connected to the homeland and the diaspora in a quotidian and pragmatic way.

Halfway through our interview, Nadia entered the kitchen carrying a clear, two-liter plastic bottle filled with thick olive oil and a plastic bag with za‘atar, a dark green thyme-based herb mixture. She scooped some za‘atar into a white dish, carefully poured some oil on top, and then set the down dish next to the hummus Abu Laith had offered earlier. “This is what is left of what I brought from home. I used to press the olives and mix the spices myself,” Nadia explained, handing me another piece of bread to dip with. The thick and pungent oil met the crunch of the toasted sesame seeds in each tasty bite I took and reminded me of breakfast spreads in Ramallah that were usually accompanied by jubna (cheese), sugar-dense black tea, and fresh bread. I asked Nadia if she could make za‘atar again with ingredients from the local markets or buy it from specialty grocery stores. She nodded but added that the flavor would never be the same without being back in Palestine. Nadia’s connections to Palestine through olive oil and za‘atar stem from actually possessing, offering, and consuming ingredients from home in the diaspora. By keeping ingredients brought from Beit Jala, and showing them to me, Nadia was holding on to and sharing memories of being in Palestine.

My experiences eating with Abu Laith and Nadia and the stories they shared give some insight into how recent Palestinian migrants simultaneously adjust to the Chilean context and hold on to the memories of a now physically distant home. Migrants often face hurdles under new circumstances but also find diasporic networks and existing cultural frameworks in Chile that facilitate their adjustment. For those in the diaspora, one place can be many—Chile can appear simultaneously as a new space and a space reminiscent of a homeland. The restaurant, for example, offers Abu Laith a space to continue to cook the food he was used to in Beit Jala (with some adjustment of ingredients) and, in the process, provide a living for his family. Abu Laith also mentioned that Quillota is where his children will grow up and where he can tell them about both the fond memories of, and the ongoing conflict in, Palestine. Similarly, Nadia refuses to forget about life in Beit Jala by reliving the sensory experiences of eating Palestinian cuisine and holding on to physical ingredients that traveled with her to Chile. For Abu Laith and Nadia, sumud takes place in the ongoing act of remembering and retaining Palestinian identity within a diasporic space that facilitates a connection to home and pragmatic livelihood.

CONCLUSIONS: DIASPORIC PALESTINIANNESS AND SUMUD

This article highlights the diversity of Palestinianness in diaspora particularly visible and located in the production of Palestinian cuisine throughout the Chile. For Chilean-Palestinians, remembering Palestine through food in Chile is an act of diasporic sumud—resistance to the symbolic appropriation and erasure perpetuated by Israel and resistance to forgetting memories of the homeland within the diasporic context. In essence, food memory itself is resistance and a practice of steadfastness in the diaspora. These stories from fieldwork in La Calera and Quillota highlight the production of Palestinian cuisine in diaspora as it is lived daily. For instance, Nadia and Abu Laith hold on to ingredients that they have brought from Palestine and continue to make dishes from the homeland. They intentionally retain memories and a sense of home from Palestine while still engaging in the local context through their restaurant. Other Palestinian-Chileans reconnect with a homeland that they have only heard about in the memories passed down to them. Edu, for example, uses the restaurant as a way to reimagine and reembody the stories he has learned from his family.

I have also argued that the ongoing practice of diasporization is itself a form of resistance. Chile provides Palestinians in exile a space that is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, offers a life away from the occupation, and facilitates continued support for, and connection to, Palestine. Since the Nakba and the formation of the Israeli state in 1948, the continual engagement in political affairs in Palestine and cultural resistance in Chile has been central to diasporic identity. Culture as struggle is part of diasporic political participation regardless of the temporal and spatial separation distances between those in exile and the homeland. As Edu notes, through food and its production, Chile has become la segunda parte de Palestina (the second part of Palestine). By bringing Palestinian identity into the local public, Edu engages with Quillota community members interested in supporting the Palestinian cause and centers his own identity through the restaurant. Diasporization as a practice of resistance is visible throughout various Chilean cities in addition to La Calera and Quillota given the reception of the Chilean community and the rootedness of Chilean-Palestinians in diaspora.⁸³

Though the argument for diasporic sumud through food is centered on the case of Chilean-Palestinians, this general idea merits study in other contexts. Large Palestinian communities throughout the global diaspora have also continued to produce Palestinian cuisine in local contexts and have remained steadfast in their connection to the homeland.⁸⁴ In these instances, the experience of diaspora is simultaneously localized within each specific experience and also connected to a global sense of Palestinainness. Similarly, other Arab communities (such as Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, and Iraqi) in Chile and throughout the Americas retain culinary traditions although other practices may fade. Towns throughout Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and the United States all have sizable Arab communities that continue to connect with diasporic memory and identity politics through food production.⁸⁵ While some cultural and linguistic practices have not persisted throughout generations in the diaspora, food has simultaneously facilitated the practice of homeland traditions and engagement with the local communities.

Finally, this paper has attempted to center the study of diasporic culinary and gastronomic practices as entrée into larger questions of collective memory, resistance, and belonging. This study uses sensory ethnography to foreground the materiality and quotidian nature of cooking and eating in a way that centers the narratives of participants and their interactions within transnational foodways. As a researcher, I also engaged in a form of memory work, incorporating reflections on my own personal memories as well as recounting of participant remembrances. Conducting fieldwork produced a set of subsequent questions in relation to food, memory, and diaspora that are left unaddressed in this paper. For instance, a thread of connection emerged around participant stories about the role of authenticity in the production of diasporic cuisine, given that Palestinian cuisine is not a stagnant, fixed entity. There are intricate networks and relations of power and representation within Palestinian and Arab cuisine throughout the Chilean foodscape that are shaped by various generations of Chilean-Palestinians, recently arrived Arab migrants, and non-Palestinian Chileans who own and operate comida árabe restaurants. Future studies should engage with these larger questions, such as: How do individuals negotiate authenticity and cultural identities in diaspora given the multiplicity of distinct temporal and spatial connections to a symbolic and physical homeland? How is Arab identity represented and commodified within the Chilean foodscape? Addressing these and other questions will help to situate food memory within diaspora as a significant force of transnational and transcultural engagement.

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