Food and Community
Semester: Spring 2025
Praxis Course: SPAN 247: Gastropoetica Latinoamericana
Faculty Advisor: Juan Suarez Ontaneda
Field Site: Puentes de Salud, ACLAMO
Praxis Poster:
SPAN_Praxis Poster Presentation group 4 Revised
Further Context:
For our course this semester, we partnered with Puentes de Salud, a non-profit organization that provides health care and afterschool services for the Latinx community of South Philadelphia. We also worked with ACLAMO, another non-profit organization that offers bilingual resources to address the gaps in accessibility for Latinx youth. Over the semester we participated in two meetings with the students at Puentes and one with the members of ACLAMO.
During our first meeting with Puentes, we created activities and infographics for the students with the various products we had discussed during class. Items like potato, pineapple, beans, corn and coconut were discussed in a cultural, social and historical lens. We discussed how important these items were to our day-to-day life, their role within our Latinx heritage, as well as the way each crop made its way to the Americas. Each student received a zine that consisted of each ingredient and its foodway to the United States. Afterwards, we bonded with the students and decided on our next activity.
Our second meeting consisted of creating accessible recipes that connected us to our culture that the students could recreate at home. As half of our group was from Texas, we decided to make mangonadas, a popular Mexican drink made from mango chunks, mango extract, lime juice, ice, tajin and chamoy. We guided the students through the process and explained why this recipe was significant to us. Many of the students and organizers tried this drink for the first time which was really special for our group to create a sense of community surrounding a common food from our own cultures. Through this process we were able to connect with the students as we shared our favorite dishes and experiences in the kitchen.
Lastly, we met with ACLAMO, their students joined us on campus for a couple activities, a campus tour and dinner! The goal of this meeting was to allow the students to see themselves represented in higher education and show them a realistic view of college. We shared experiences about our dining hall and their cafeteria experiences. And discussed how we would like to see Latin American culture represented in these spaces. We built community with these students by connecting over common foods we loved from our own homes and hoping that dining halls and cafeterias would make more efforts to include all cultures.
It was a very meaningful experience to be able to connect with both the Latin American history we discussed during the class, and the diverse Hispanic population of the city of Philadelphia.