Join documentary filmmaker, activist, and scholar Dr. Sarah Portnoy to discuss her documentary and museum exhibit, Abuelita’s Kitchen. The event, part of the Pépin Lecture Series at Boston University, will take place at 6 pm at 808 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 124, in Boston. Free. You may reserve a spot through Eventbrite HERE.
This multimedia exhibition, led by USC professor Sarah Portnoy, shares the food stories of ten Indigenous, mestiza, Mexican-American, and Afro-Mexican grandmothers, or abuelas, in Los Angeles through photography, text, a documentary film, kitchen artifacts, family recipes, and audio stories. The exhibition examines food, identity, place, and culture, showing how these abuelas preserve traditions for future generations.
Abuelita’s Kitchen: Mexican Food Stories features 22 photographs and one large map and 10 objects, including molcajetes, a comal, a tortilla press and more, one from each abuela in the exhibition. The exhibition explores the dishes the grandmothers make in their home kitchens, including chiles en nogada, mole, tamales, pozole, mixiotes, enchiladas, and more. Their migration stories are detailed in a colorful map of Mexico and L.A., while a final section of the exhibition presents their identities as traditional cooks, mothers, and grandmothers through photographs with their family members. Jessica Magaña-Sandoval is the exhibition’s photographer. A 28-minute documentary directed by Ebony Bailey, also called Abuelita’s Kitchen: Mexican Food Stories, will screen continuously at LA Cocina during the exhibition. The project has an Instagram account, AbuelitasCooking.
The exhibition reveals each abuela’s relationship to Mexican cuisine, their birthplaces in Mexico, and the city of Los Angeles, where the grandmothers live. For that, the 17 students of Portnoy´s USC Annenberg class, “Recording the Voices of Latinx Women & Food in Los Angeles: A Multimedia Oral History Project,” have created a website and audio stories and videos which will be available for viewing online on Telemundo’s streaming platform and on smart devices via QR codes. The audio and video tell the stories of these women, two of whom were born in the U.S., while the rest immigrated from places such as Mexico City, Puebla, Yucatán, Jalisco and Guerrero, bringing with them their knowledge of traditional dishes.
