Reina de mi corazon.
Where are you? In what corner of my body do you hide?
How can I find you?
Do you call me?
Call me whenever you can, plis
If you have power,
If you ate today,
Cause I can’t bear the pain in your voice if you didn’t.
Lament, hunger, frustration in your voice.
Fatigue that doesn’t come from exercise,
But the absence of food.
You can’t just live off the sun!
You can’t swallow dirt or suck the wind!
Drinking water is allowed,
If it finally comes through the pipes at 3am
And you get up running to fill your bottles
That you’ll boil and bottle and ration,
For drinking,
For bathing,
For washing,
For dishes,
For peeing and pooping,
For cooking.
For cooking.
The Origins of Harina P.A.N. Corn Flour
In 1960, after a lot of trial and error, a Venezuelan beer company, Polar, figured out how to use flaked corn (used in brewing to lighten the colour and body of beer) to make a pre-cooked corn flour to make arepas in minutes. Arepas, the national bread, “corn’s favourite daughter,” an indigenous food, was revolutionized. They called the flour Harina P.A.N., which is a play on words. Harina means flour and P.A.N. (pan) means bread, as well as a made-up acronym that stands for Productos Alimenticios Nacionales (National Nutritional Products). Before Harina P.A.N. monopolized the shelves, my mother recalls grinding corn at the table at five years old, part of the long process of making arepas starting the night before. It was arduous, ancestral work done by women who shucked, de-grained, de-husked, cooked, rinsed, ground, kneaded, shaped, and baked the corn into arepas. This simple and nutritious corn patty can be filled with your heart’s desire, and continues to be synonymous with Venezuelan (and Colombian) patriotic identity. It is a symbol of enduring, delicious, indigenous culture. And it’s gluten free! You’re welcome!
The Harina P.A.N. Woman
As the bag of Harina P.A.N. entered our cabinets, a beautiful woman entered our homes too. She sports a red polka dot headwrap, juicy red lips, and red hoop earrings. She is gorgeous. I grew up seeing her just as often as I looked at my mother and tias in simple headwraps, modest jewelry, and definitely no winged liner.
In 2018, I was dating a make-up artist who was willing to put me into drag for the first time, and I felt all the cliché elation and inspiration that first-time-in-drag can bring. I felt gorgeous. Done up like the nameless “Harina P.A.N. lady,” I looked in the mirror and saw my sister, my mother, my aunts, my Tia Reina. My Tia Reina makes arepas basically every day. When I was younger, we had a long running diaspora phone call joke where I would ask her if she had made arepas that day too. Her hands are burn-proof.
Going Home to Venezuela
When I returned to Venezuela in 2023, after 13 years away, my family had not had running water for over a month, and I still had amazing meals. The heat was unforgiving and the nights were lit by the apocalyptic orange glow of refinery burners looming nearby. The 27-year-running Chavista dictatorship in Venezuela eventually led to widespread food insecurity, malnutrition, protests, violence, and a refugee crisis (to summarize a socioeconomic crisis impossible to summarize). My home town, Punto Fijo, is particularly affected compared to main cities like Caracas. My family got skinnier and skinnier, exhausted from communism gone wrong.
Finding Reina With Y Josephine
Feeling sad and homesick and hungry for theatre that wasn’t fucking boring-ass naturalism, I got into a studio with my friend and musician Y Josephine, who happens to be from my hometown. Sessions with Y felt like coming home. Y and I share a dialect, a history, a queerness, a familiarity, and a joy. A love of women. A love of coffee. We would write together, eat together, cry together. We would jam with each other, dancing to her music, playing to my dancing, and Reina was born over many years of collaboration and friendship and food. The first song in the show, Carne Mechada, came out of our very first exploration with multidisciplinary art dula Liz Peterson. The task was to musicalize and physicalize my mother’s carne mechada (shredded beef) recipe. I’ve included it here for your cooking pleasure — I hope you think of home when you make it.
CARNE MECHADA (Reina’s recipe)
Get enough beef chuck to feed your family and cover it with water in a pot. Boil it with big pieces of cilantro and onion, a piece of a bell pepper, a pinch of salt, not a lot. When the meat is cooked, take it out and let it cool. Save the broth. Shred the meat when it’s cool enough to handle. You can give this task to your sisters and niblings and roommates.
While you boil the beef, fine chop a sofrito: onion, garlic, leek, parsley, cilantro, peppers, (aji dulce if you can find it, good luck) carrot, tomato. (Add a chile here if you want heat. My family never did that. My papi has tummy troubles). Pan fry the sofrito in a big pan with onoto oil (this is optional — but if you wanna make onoto: fry whole annatto (achiote) seeds in the oil in the same pan until the oil tints a deep red and strain them out before they burn).
Add a bouillon cube and the sofrito to the onoto and sweat it out. When the sofrito is soft, add the meat, marry them together, and cover the beef with the same broth you boiled it in. Let it simmer away til it’s almost evaporated, low end of medium heat, then add more and repeat til you’re out of broth (or desired fall-apartness of the beef). Adjust for salt and garnish with more cilantro. Always add more cilantro. Unless you have that cilantro-tastes-like-soap thing. I feel sorry for you.
You can eat carne mechada with rice, black beans, fried plantains, and cheese if you want to try Venezuela’s national dish, pabellón. Or you can just eat it in an arepa.
If you want to learn how to make an arepa, come meet Reina.
Reina runs at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre from May 21 – 31, as part of Genrefuck. Reina envisions the many lives of the anonymous woman depicted on a bag of Harina P.A.N. corn flour. A movement-centric hybrid between theatre, dance, and performance art that resists categorization, it invokes and celebrates personal femininity through a collection of poems, sculptures, and choreographies in conversation with music by Y Josephine.
Good post. Very enjoyable reading about your inspirations.