I often invite a group of friends over to make my favorite Mexican food, chilaquiles. The recipe is fairly straight forward but infinitely customizable. At its core the dish is just tortilla chips and salsa, and anything else is optional. Obviously, the complexity comes from how you make the salsa and all the other things that go in the dish, but it really is simple. My favorite way to make them, without getting too in the weeds about the salsa because who cares, is chips, homemade green salsa, shredded chicken breast, cotija cheese, and a fried egg on top. All that served with some refried beans and toasted bread. 

 

Although it is normally just a breakfast dish, whenever I have friends over to eat it we make it for dinner and watch a movie or something. The first time I did this little get together I was just craving chilaquiles and couldn’t justify making a whole pan of them for myself, so I invited friends to eat. Simple as that. I tossed on the music my mom plays in the kitchen when she cooks, and got to making them. I did it all myself and had the food ready for when guests arrived. This process was not as fun as I had hoped. I was used to cooking with my family, helping each other with ingredients and chatting throughout the whole ordeal. Instead I was alone, making Mexican food for people who had no connection to it and might not even like it (luckily they did like it). So, the next time I decided to have a little Chilaquiles shindig, I told my guests to come over before the food was made, and that they would have an active participatory role in making it so that they could learn how. Thankfully I have good friends, and they loved the idea. 

 

It seems corny, but I think that the simple act of making food as a community reminded me of home and of my culture. The fact I was making my favorite Mexican food wasn’t enough to recreate the feeling of being in a Mexican kitchen. In retrospect this makes perfect sense. My family back home makes burgers and fries a while playing ranchera music and goofing around, and even though that food is certainly not part of traditional Latin cuisine, it still feels like part of our culture. The community is the culture, not just the food. So having that experience, even with people from entirely different backgrounds and ethnicities, tied me back to home. It was comforting and simultaneously exciting to be sharing a piece of my history with my  friends. 

 

So, the chilaquiles are certainly Mexican and making them is a reminder of home, but that picture is incomplete. My identity cannot be tied down to a dish of food or a style of music, but it is tied to a feeling of community and sharing.