During a few weeks of travel in Trinidad and Guyana in late 2011, one song came on the radio again and again. It was soulful with a reggae beat. It was violent, tragic, and had an edge. It was the ballad of a murder occurring in Central station, sung with…
Mistura, a gastronomy festival held in Lima every September since 2008, is an identity feast. Gastronomy in Peru has many layers of hidden meanings, it is not just about the food. In her acclaimed documentary Mistura:The power of food, director Patricia Perez sets out to discover what these deeper meanings…
Mexican food is a complex cuisine with so many regional variations that it would be crazy to try to sum it all up in a book. So instead, what Roberto Santibañez did in his latest book “Truly Mexican”, was to focus in what he believes lays the backbone of Mexican…
In 1968 the eventual founders of Patagonia and North Face outfitters, Yvon Chouinard and Douglas Tompkins, and two other friends drive their VW bus on a whim to Patagonia. The follow the then mostly unpaved Pan-American highway from California to Chile on a trip that took 6 months. The journey…
Francis Ford Coppola, who is now a hotel owner in Buenos Aires (see Casa Escondido below shot Tetro, a mostly black and white film on the streets of La Boca, the gritty port district in Buenos Aires where tango was born. The colorful barrio is as much of a…
While this cookbook isn’t directly about Latin American food, it does have relevance – and no, it has nothing to do with the author’s last name being Pizarro (no relation to the conquistador). In Latin America, particularly South America where temperature changes are more prevalent than further north, food is…
The more Brazilian food I eat and the more I visit Brazil, the more I realize how little I really know about Brazilian cooking. The country is massive, a continent of its own. By Leticia Moreinos-Schwartz’s The Brazilian Kitchen (Kyle Books, 2010) is the best all around study on Brazilian…
Magaly Solier is better known as an actress in Peru, having starred in Claudia Llosa’s Madeinusa and the more recent La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow), which is nominated for best foreign film at the Oscar’s this year. Her childhood dream has always been to be a singer, however,…
For much of the past month I’ve been traveling throughout the Amazon in Ecuador and Peru while researching oil contamination and exploration, so it was with great interest that I watched Crude, which was released on Tuesday in North America. The film outlines the court case Aguinda vs. Chevron-Texaco that…
Peruvian cuisine is one of the driving forces of Peru’s economy and growing national pride. Like Japan or France, here food, and the people that make it, are respected at all levels of society. It is the most revealing aspect of Peruvian society, more so than music or futbol. A…
