Memory and Flavors of an Afro-Diasporic Dialogue Toward Food Justice: Contributions from the Venezuelan Experience

Introduction

Understanding how race, class, and gender play a central role in organizing the production, distribution, and consumption of food, and the food system as a racial project, ^{1 , 2} is key toward food justice, which seeks transformation of the current food system eliminating disparities and inequality. ³

The globalized food regime is rooted in the expansion of monoculture to supply the global food market, ⁴ with several socioecological impacts, including climate change and biodiversity loss. The expansion of this regime did not improve food security. In 2016, the number of people with chronic hunger increased from 777 million to 815 million, and overweight people worldwide more than doubled between 1980 and 2014. ^{5 , 6 , 7 , 8} This reveals racism as an endemic feature of the global food system, and therefore food must be situated in power relations and disputed identities. ⁹

White supremacy culture crosses all the food system, and its visible–invisible power is given by its supposedly disguised presence making it very difficult to name or identify. ¹⁰ The globalized food regime is shaped by whiteness interests and privileges concentrating power; transferring the social and environmental impacts to racialized and discriminated groups. ¹¹

Examining white supremacy and food racism debates would bring a powerful perspective to food sovereignty–food justice studies in the Latin-American context. Latin America's dominant elites remain the heirs to the white settler culture. ¹² Indigenous and Afro-descendant movements have challenged the white bias of the ideology of mestizaje, which operates as a homogenizing force of the society. ¹³ For Venezuela Rivas and Ruette ¹⁴ propose the term white-creole “supremacy.” ¹⁵

In this context, food movements have created progressive and radical agendas. ¹⁶ From the North, food justice is focused on the access to healthy food by marginalized groups as racialized people, and it considers trauma and inequity, land, labor, and exchange as critical aspects.^{15, 17 , 18} From the South, food sovereignty was proposed by the global peasant movement La Via Campesina to contest the FAO's food security concept, claiming for the rights of small-scale and indigenous farmers to access land, seeds, water, and markets through redistributive reforms.

The alliances among these two perspectives have been proposed as a primary goal for strengthening the food movement ¹⁹ to overcome the rural–urban and North–South divides, and we also suggest here, to foster Afro-diasporic alliances. In the United States, the experiences of the civil rights movement, the Black Panther Party, and the food justice movement show the central role that food has had in the black liberation struggle. In Latin America, the Afro-descendant people represent nearly 21% of the population, ²⁰ marginalized by the structural racism legated by colonialism.

Since food injustice is rooted in the agency of white supremacy, social memory could be a way to understand the hierarchies, omissions, and silences around food. At the same time, a way for the revitalization of the ways of healing historical trauma was developed by oppressed communities. ¹³ These healing resources could serve as powerful tools for weaving experiences, learnings, strategies, and agendas among Afro-diasporic food movements. Also, silence in the memories could be emerging as a response to overcome the difficulties related to food that subalternized groups experience by the intersections of oppression by race, gender, class, and geography among others. We attempt to understand the polymorphic, social, intersubjective, and embodied aspects; the practices of significance and representation that people have over their memories. ^{21 , 22 , 23 , 24}

Cameroonian author Achille Mbembe ²⁵ states that one of the main strategies of “make die and let live politics,” necropolitics, is hunger. ²⁶ It has been used by racism as a device of war and annihilation. This colonial logic of death targets the bodies of black and indigenous people, and it shapes the production, distribution, and consumption of food in current societies. However, this logic has also led to the emergence of the conscious and unconscious processes of ethnic–racial reaffirmation around food.

The socially built hierarchies on what is remembered and what is forgotten are ways of facing racism and endorracismo, ²⁷ and consequently, they generate mechanisms that allow the biological and cultural continuity of life. Social memory is the dynamic, collaborative, and creative “retrospective reconstruction” ²⁸ of the past. The social frameworks of memory, ²⁹ —milestones, foundational events, and institutions—are the basis for the construction of collective meanings.

Food systems are concrete and symbolic spaces for the production of narratives of the past. We will explore them from an Afro-Venezuelan perspective in the context of an economic crisis intensified by the global health emergency that affects daily eating practices. Also, this is dialogue with the Afro-diaspora and the political and affective support among these experiences that was promoted during the COVID-19 lockdown. We seek to analyze the role that culturally different codes have in achieving food justice and food sovereignty.

Our aim is to contribute to the understanding of structural racism beyond folklorized discourses about food, economy-focused views of food access, and the approaches centered on mestizo peasant identities. From this experience, we ask ourselves: Which are the meanings of the food systems that are produced, recovered, and transformed from the social memory in the current context of increasing of mediatization of racial violence throughout the continent ³⁰ ?

Our positionality is rooted in our own experience as black women, researchers in anthropology and agroecology, and food activists. ³¹ We situated our research in an intersectional approach to deconstruct the underlying and disguised racialization of food in Venezuela. In this work, we discuss the results of the Sabores de la Memoria Afro project, started in May 2020. Sensations, images, processes, actors, practices, knowledge, and injustices and resistances experienced, created, and managed by Afro-Venezuelan and Afro-diasporic voices are the subjective universe to which we want access.

Food Crisis and Race in Venezuela: Past and Present Context

Venezuela is confronting an unprecedented food crisis. The scarcity of main food items consumed in the country, the high cost of food (especially processed ones), oil prices crisis, and the impacts of economic sanctions ³² have impacted the right to food. According to the FAO, the prevalence of undernourishment has increased from 2.5% in 2010–2012 to 31.4% in 2017–2019. ³³

To understand the current situation, Felicien et al. ³⁴ pointed out that colonization, modernization and today, globalization configure the Venezuelan food system. Throughout history, food has been a vehicle for social differentiation and state–elite alliances maintain the concentration of power in the agri-food system. They propose to explore power in relation to race, class, gender, and geography, using food as an analytical lens to understand the roots and complex dynamics of this crisis.

The Afro-Venezuelan communities have forged a historical resistance rooted in food and agrarian struggles. The workforce knowledge and innovations of enslaved Afro-descendants sustained the agro-export model of la hacienda plantation. They created spaces—of and for freedom—based on polycultures (arboledillas or haciendillas ³⁵ and conucos ³⁶ ), which supported the autonomy and food access of the Afro-Venezuelan population. ^{37 , 38} In these spaces of freedom, there was an exchange with the indigenous peoples, conditioning a diverse universe of responses of appropriation to the territory, knowledge and practices associated with food.

During the past 20 years under the Bolivarian Process, ³⁹ institutions and public policies in favor of Afro-descendants have been expanded, and also the particular agendas of social movements have been joined to government programs ^{40 . 41 , 42} New frameworks for collective action have been proposed by Afro-Venezuelan social movements, mobilizing both ethnic–racial identities and peasant identities, ⁴³ and processes of revitalization of traditional knowledge related to food and agriculture have emerged. Intercultural education programs in rural Afro-Venezuelan communities ⁴⁴ and the attention to strategic crops such as cocoa have deepened what García (2010) ⁴⁵ has called Afro-epistemology, a proposal that challenges epistemic racism in the educational system. ⁴⁶

Afroepistemology is understood as knowledges, spiritualities, practices, methodologies, politics, and reflections–actions–transformations on problems of the diaspora from the racialized perspective. “... we are convinced that there is a knowledge with its specificities that we call Afroepistemology in the framework of the Caribbean and its complexity.” ⁴⁷ These efforts have paved the way for emerging responses during the current food crisis in Venezuela, intertwined with the COVID-19 pandemic and echoes of Black Lives Matter.

Methods

This work brings together virtuality and ethnography, by using social media as a mediated and connective form of interaction. ⁴⁸ The work started on May 10, 2020, the Afro-Venezuelan day and lasted until December 2020, developed under the project Sabores de la Memoria Afro. We use two digital platforms: the social network WhatsApp (WA) to collect the contents (recipes, testimonies, and photos) and the social network Instagram (IG) to post the contents collected.

The first was used to extend the invitation to participate in a collaborative exhibition of recipes and stories related to Afro-diasporic culture, through the networks that the researchers themselves had. The invitation could be freely replicated by anyone who received it, thus generating a fractal of relationships and connectedness. The contributions would reach the project email or the WA contacts of each of the researchers. The second moment consisted of posting the images and the stories received on the project's IG account. The contributions were framed in events of interest to the Afro-Venezuelan and Afro-diasporic cultures (Table 1). The IG posts were preceded by images and curatorial texts prepared by the researchers.

In each call, a more “private” interaction was established between researchers-collaborators, through “direct” dialogue between personal WA contacts. This allowed for a more direct relationship simulating the ethnographic relationship in the field, allowing to develop the research with the double challenge of the separation imposed by the COVID 19 pandemic, and the already complex context of digital divides in Latin America. ⁴⁹ In the private conversations that were held through WA, thoughts about the recipes, emotions, tastes, and memories were exchanged before submitting the formal collaborations. The participants delved into the motivations of making a recipe and writing the stories. Also, through the “private” dialogues the formal aspects of the call, such as deadlines and number of photos, etc., were coordinated.

The IG led to the separation and exposure of content-information of the collaborators, in a free and informed manner. Ethnographic research has challenged the restriction of territory to access the use of the digital environment. This is an approach “more than multi-situated, an ethnography of mediated interaction, fluid, dynamic and mobile.” ⁵⁰

The call for collaborations was oriented toward being self-identified as Afro-descendant people based on the general request of: (1) a photo of an Afro dish or food crop, (2) a self-portrait of each collaborator, to consider the relevance of representation (we were adamant that we do not want this knowledge to remain anonymous), (3) a short text combining the recipe with the details of its preparation and medicinal properties (if any), and (4) a written testimony about the relationship between the recipe and the Afro-descendant identity of the author. In total, 41 people, mostly women (32) and 2 collectives, participated. We receive 46 contributions from Venezuela and other countries from Africa (Ghana, Tunisia, and Uganda), Europe (France), Latin America (Brasil, Colombia), and the Caribbean (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guadalupe, Haití, Saint Martins, Trinidad y Tobago).

We analyze the contents of each publication to identify the main elements that show the intersections between race and food according to the representations of the past and the present of each participant, in relation to their particular history about the African diaspora. Some testimonies and stories are presented next.

Eating Diversity: The Rural–Urban—Diasporic Connections Through the Afro-Foodways

For most recipes, the vegetable ingredients are mainly those traditional crops that are related with conuco farming in Venezuela. ⁵¹ In Table 2, the main food groups and food items, the types of use and processing, and the number of recipes are presented, including varieties in the case of food groups.

Six groups were created with sets of food items: bananas, beans, meats, peppers, species, tubers, and roots. Also, there were three food items that are related with traditional afro–gastronomy in Venezuela and other Afro-diasporic communities of Latin America: brown sugar, coconut, and cocoa. These were used in a high number of recipes, and they are presented individually in Table 2.

It is important to note in the case of meats, the use of several parts that are under-valuated by the Venezuelan average consumer, as are visceras and feets, but this kind of food is very valued among communities and used in traditional gastronomy ⁵²

Coconut is a typical ingredient of Afro-diasporic food preparations, ⁵³ and is consumed in its diverse forms: milk, oil, flakes, and grated. There were medicinal drinks (with star anise, aloe vera, and greens). Cocoa was used in a few recipes only from Venezuela. Although it was a fundamental crop for colonial plantations, has been historically managed by Afro-communities, and currently, is regaining its importance as a commodity for exportation, its use is surrounded by conflicts, contradictions, and tensions in which the cocoa has served as a means not only for liberation but also for subjugation, and ultimately as a commodity and not for food.

As an expression of diversity, the varieties and types of use and processing reveal the importance of some of the food groups and items. In the case of bananas, different types of varieties were used, such as: guineo, titiaro, roco and also plantain; these are used in several forms and processed in very creative ways. Their role as a staple crop for Afro-descendant communities is widely recognized in Venezuela and also for Afro-diasporic communities. ^{54 , 55} They are also noted for the tuber and roots group, which is also an important crop group for conuco, the uses of which also include the use of the leaves and several forms of cooking.

In general, sweets preparations account for several recipes (19 from 46) and the most used sweetener is the panela or brown sugar. Although rice was not reported in all recipes, it was used in many preparations: desserts, sweet and fermented drinks, and also as side food in meat-based dishes. The constant availability of some food crops (such as plantain and squash) described in the testimonies facilitated the creation and rendering of multiple and diverse food options that are culturally specific. Carney ⁵⁶ provides a group of African plants present in historical records of plantation societies of tropical America, which include some of the food groups reported in the recipes, for example: black-eyed peas, bananas, taro, and yam. She notes the relevance of this food legacy for enslaved agency in sustaining the cultivation and familiar diet. As it is exposed in this work, this legacy is resonating in the present, when these foods are evoked and used in Afro-food recipes in a way that weaves current food practices with memory and identity, recreating the legacy that Carney points out. The diversity of tropical food crops used in recipes and associated with traditional farming systems as conuco remark the interconnections among rural–urban communities and also important convergences among Afro-diasporic foodways.

In the light of what Pieroni et al. ⁵⁷ called a strategy for dynamic conservation, this first approach could contribute toward framing a food justice–food sovereignty dialogue, recognizing and including appropriate and culturally differentiated management practices toward linking rural–urban food movements. This leads us to believe that food practices, instead of being monotonous and uniform, are being constantly reinvented and diversified in the realm of everyday life given the stable availability of food crops, which allow this creative diversification of food processing.

Emerging from this, we can propose for Afro-diasporic communities the next principle: the more stable availability and access of a food item, the greater creativity in food preparation. For the food sovereignty debate, the element of cultural appropriateness could be fostered based on this principle that is coupled with narrations about the care practices performed by women from which an intergenerational knowledge transfer occurs and promotes this adaptability-diversity-creativity nexus, creating with the same ingredients a family of preparations and recipes.

Territories of Afro-Food Memories

The stories that were evoked to account for the Afro-food-memory relationship started from a specific territory, although they were produced from an interaction in social networks. Each contribution evocates remembrances of food linked to a nested set of places. For the most part of the recipes (Tables 3 and 4), an interesting network emerges. This was composed by the evocation localities, the places from which the contributions were made; connected through the memories with evocated localities, the places that were named in the recipes. From this relationship among the localities, we draw a landscape of Afro-food memories.

These places emerged in different scales that accounted for a particular food imagined by the collaborator. Thus, different scales were used: Local (towns, villages), regional (Eastern Venezuela, the Caribbean, Barlovento), national (Guadeloupe, Venezuela, Cuba), and continental (Africa) made up this network. The Caribbean region is a significant place with a nodal feature. An important set of recipes, evocation places, and evocated localities are concentrated in this area. Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Trinidad, and Tobago, Saint Martin's appear as evocations and evocated localities. In the map, these areas of greater concentrations of evocations represented in the map (Fig. 1) constitute territories of Afro-food-memories.

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FIG. 1.

Territories of Afro-food memories. (The yellow and orange areas represent a higher concentration of evocation and evocated localities). Elaborated by Yoly Velandria, GIS Specialist. Centro de Antropología- Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas.

These reveal the nature of the activist networks that were participating in each call, and the relevance that the Caribbean region has for this group of peoples as it is noted in the evocated localities. This also coincides with the idea of “Black spatial imaginary” of Resse, ⁵⁸ who points out that the imaginary about the gastronomic past “… are racialized and spatialized.”

Africa has a homogeneous and nominal presence as a reference for the origin of food and processes. However, that knowledge was disseminated and modified in the Americas, and this did not remain immobile or isolated. The monolithic and blurred image of Africa is strongly attached to specific regions that are recognized as Afro-descendant, as is reported for the next three recipes:

“It is likely that the way to prepare the chenchén in Dominican Republic has remained as a legacy of African women in the island, either directly or that reached us by Haitian influence”… (Yessenia Mesa, El Chenchén Dominican Republic)

“The use of greens in different preparations is common even today in Africa” (Vegetable stew, Marisela Bravo, Caracas, Venezuela).

“It is a quintessential Barloventeño sweet, it is made by Africans” (Cafunga, Reinaldo Mijares. Caracas, Venezuela)

The diaspora is presented as a landscape of fragmented memories, which are interwoven through the foods, flavors, and practices that are collectively imagined and remembered. The imaginaries that we find in the recipes go beyond the notions of center and periphery, and they provide valuable insights about food heritage and agency.

This scope on different scales has also been pointed out by Ugueto-Ponce ^{59 , 60} from the study of the political identities of the Afro-Venezuelan community of Curiepe, which are nourished by libertarian narratives built from social memory and settled in the territory within the framework of the complex religious ceremony that they practice. From the project Sabores de la Memoria Afro, the territorialized imaginaries cross different scales to make a transcontinental connection, that is, diasporic.

Memory and Agency from Afro-Diasporic Food Heritage

The colonial period is quoted as the historical moment when a lot of the recipes were produced. As it is presented in the next testimonies, traditional agriculture emerged as a space of knowledge production related with the most important colonial crops (cocoa, sugarcane), but also with peasant and family farming with which food preparations are strongly linked. The techniques used for food preparation are also evoked as afro-identity elements, related with specific rural scenarios that are used for validating the belonging to the Afro-diaspora.

From this, we suggest that identity is nourished materially and symbolically by the rural–urban relation, including a migrant's experiences as the testimony of Gregory from Guadeloupe living in France. This challenges rural–urban divide notions. From this circular and synergistic dynamic, a range of possibilities could emerge to create effective solutions for food access.

In these testimonies, the frequency of the consumption of some crops and foods is another reference of Afro-descendants: The presence of these foods in at least two generations, and the narratives centered on the female figures were important. This could be recognized as a contribution to regain the matricentrality in food processing and consumption: We are talking about the triad conformed by the grandmother, the mother, and the aunt; the strengthening of ancestry, knowledge transfer, and the strengthening of cultural identity.

However, although the participation was made from the self-recognition as Afro-descendants, for Venezuelan recipes, strong references to the miscegenation appeared, describing the national food culture. In the case of Venezuelan contributions, the narrative shows the need to use the mestizaje ideology as a device to understand the cultural diversity and identify static elements of the black and African or the indigenous in the Venezuelan identity. Thus, the Afro-Venezuelan identity is integrated into the mestizo identity. In some recipes, the narrative defines the Afro-Venezuelan nuanced by the idea of miscegenation.

Afro is an integrated component of that composite identity, which is, at the same time, a simile of national identity. For example, the diversity of items and their use are associated with African heritage; on the other hand, the flavors, the collective, and the role of women in the practice of preparing this recipe are recognized as a contribution to the mestizo matrix. It can be seen especially in sweet preparations, where this knowledge is recognized as Afro and as part of the country's “criolla” confectionery, as is shown in the next testimonies:

Venezuelan gastronomy is the product of the miscegenation of all the cultures that have come together here. The African heritage is evident in our food through preparations that incorporate grains such as black beans, greens and roots (Carabinas or hayacas of black beans, Marisela Bravo, Venezuela)

The Sancocho is like the blood that runs in the veins of the mestizo. Hot, spicy, chunky, glossy, full of courage, of pride, of people, of help, made with several hands (Sancocho, Patricia Franco, Venezuela)

Before it was a super cheap dish, which, like all mixed food, was made from leftovers. For us black people, it is an exercise of memory (Cumbe de Esperanza and Cooperativa Unidos San Agustin Convive Teretere/Tere Tere, Caracas, Venezuela).

Thus, in response to that, we think that the creation of a language is needed that goes beyond the idea equivalent to a checklist of markers that will be incorporated into a white matrix, because this is another form of supremacy that assumes that a central matrix exists and the other elements of the cultural diversity are accessory and subordinated.

To finalize this section, we want to note some aspects related with the omissions that also emerged. It is remarkable to note the forgotten physical, mental, and spiritual exploitation suffered by the Africans and their enslaved descendants, as noted earlier: an endemic feature of the global agri-food system.

Although the colonial and slavery times emerged as a temporary reference for the most part of the recipes, this was not recovered in its violent and devastating dimension. These contradictions have been pointed out by Resse, who states that “life and precarity—exist in tension,” ⁶¹ referring to the people of Denwood, in the United States who figure out ways to navigate that tension in relation to food, remarking abundance, choice, and community cohesiveness in their reflections about the food past. Nevertheless, more data are needed to explore these omissions and the violence, inequalities, and injustices present in the diasporic imaginary.

For now, we can just propose further explorations that the embodiment of racialization-inferiorization and the ideology of miscegenation are the two components that prevent us from seeing white supremacy and its mechanisms in our Latin-American context.

Conclusion

The current context of multiple crises and increasing violence represents a crossover, where a central debate deals with life and the intersections between race and food beyond the survival sense. In this light, the dialogue among Afro-diasporic communities, scholars, and social movement is critical.

Food as a social-ecological-cultural-political complex is a critical place from which it is possible to unveil how white supremacy functions in our national and Latin-American contexts. Understanding the narratives about the food system evoked from the social memory; and the production, recovery, and transformation of meanings related with the privilege-dispossession dialectics could provide critical insights for mobilizing an Afro-diasporic agenda toward transformative actions for food justice and food sovereignty. Our results show critical elements to this mobilization: memory landscapes of afro-diaspora, the symbolic and material relevance of rural–urban relations, and the role of agri-food diversity, but also the complexities of miscegentated contexts of food racism.

We learned that the struggle for black liberation needs to be oriented by the notion of diaspora that constitutes ourselves. ^{62 , 63 , 64 , 65} With the aim of fostering this dialogue, and creating comparative and relational frameworks for linking the struggles for Black liberation, we must promote and build bridges toward the unity of the diasporic horizon with the fundamental understanding that ALL Black Lives Matters. Food is a central issue for that.

A dialogue between the North and the South has discussed anti-racism and miscegenation in the Latin American context. The use of concepts and approaches from the North is undertaken from a critical perspective to situate these in the Latin-American context in which the idea of mestizo is central. ⁶⁶ Here, we propose to extend this dialogue to understand how the racialization of food operates in a veiled way by the miscegenation ideology in Latin-America countries.

In Venezuela, this dialogue has the challenge of re-positioning race as a subjugating and analytical category, which reveals the impacts of structural racism in Latin America. The Afro-Venezuelan movement has overcome four discussions: (1) the biological understanding of race that was attached to the idea of Venezuelan identity as the result of the convergence of the black, the indigenous, and the European components (the foundational idea for the racial democracy discourse); (2) the colorism; (3) the miscegenation, understood as an ideological veil of white elites that seeks the whitening of the cultural and ethnic diversity ^{67 , 68} ; and finally (4) the positioning of the term Afro-descendent as a category of political identity from which self-recognition and the law-making process seek to break with those biologist, colorist, and whiteners' perspectives rooted on the category of race in Venezuela.

In the light of this, we propose repositioning the place for race as a sociohistorical construction, understanding how the impacts of racism on structural inequalities result in the embodiment of the racialized process that has affected and threatened the well-being of Afro-diasporic communities; and it is from these impacts that the biological dimension of race emerges. ^{69 , 70}

The notion of territories of Afro-food memories can help to position this discussion on race, since it not only delineates an imaginary spatial ordering of the diaspora, but also creates an imaginary of food practices that we could consider anti-racist. The recovery of food narratives and practices based on value and affective associations with blackness, for their use and readjustment, constitutes for us an exercise that reveals racial, gender, and class tensions based on food. Making this a work program could help dismantle the foundations of structural racism.