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This article traces the social history of gallo pinto (rice and beans) in Costa Rica in order to unpack the meaning of this innocuous marker of southern Costa Rican identity. Southern Costa Ricans describe pinto as a traditional food, yet they reject its possible origin in Afro-Costa Rican culture. While Costa Ricans' use of tradition, as word and concept, marks and thereby validates contemporary praxis, the concept simultaneously erases the African cultural heritage of a country that imagines itself as white. This case study demonstrates how multiple lines of evidence (personal interviews, journalistic and academic articles, literature, and institutionally sanctioned histories) can highlight the cleavage between local memory and history, and illuminate larger cultural issues.
In this article, I examine the concept of tradition as it is used by Costa Ricans to explain the ubiquity of their breakfast cuisine. During my field research in southern Costa Rica, women often spoke with me in interviews about the foods they cooked and the accompanying recipes that they had learned from their mothers.1 The most common food mentioned was a dish of fried rice and beans, known locally as gallo pinto, or simply pinto.2 Gallo pinto is eaten daily for breakfast, often accompanied by a fried egg and occasionally by fried plantains and fried sausage. Here, I argue that while Costa Ricans' use of tradition, as word and concept, marks and thereby validates their contemporary praxis, the concept simultaneously erases the more uncomfortable aspects of their social history-particularly those aspects of the changing political economies within which foods are embedded. In the case of gallo pinto, what is particularly obscured is the African cultural heritage in a country that imagines itself as white. In what follows, I use personal interviews, journalistic and academic articles, literature, and institutionally sanctioned histories to analyze the meaning of the seemingly innocuous meal of rice and beans. In this way, I unpack a cultural identity marker that, given its familiarity in everyday life and its social history, is at once immediately personal and deeply political.
Practice into Discourse
DOÑA EMILY: Yes. Well, what we eat the most is rice and beans . . .
THERESA: Do all of the people here know how to make pinto?
DOÑA EMILY: Yes, everyone.
THERESA: And...