Very interesting. I hadn’t heard of the Mam language before. Many years ago in my much younger days, I spent a month in a Guatemalan town called Quetzaltenango, short for Xela in Mayan. According to Wikipedia, ‘Mam is a Mayan language with half a million speakers in the Guatemalan departments of Quetzaltenango, Huehuetenango, San Marcos, and Retalhuleu, and 10,000 in the Mexican state of Chiapas. There are also thousands more in Oakland, California[3] and Washington, D.C., in the United States.’
Because of the 80’s film El Norte, I was under the impression that many of them ended up in Los Angeles. So I had no idea that some of those in the highlands around Xela displaced by the brutal civil war ended up in East Oakland.
The article you linked to about the top Mayan foods said the following about Traditional Breakfast: ‘Simple foods are often the best. The typical Maya desayuno includes scrambled eggs, a side of black beans, fried plantains (akin to bananas but larger, with more complex flavor), a bit of queso blanco (white cheese), and a cup of rich coffee made from local beans. It’s all accompanied by a cloth-lined basket of warm yellow corn tortillas.’
That is so true. The week I spent with a local family in Xela, that’s pretty much all I ate every morning, and evening. I can say that every meal eating nothing but that quickly got old for me, since I didn’t grow up with that food.
So I did a Yelp search of Guatemalan restaurants in East Oakland, a few came up:
- Comedor Guatemalteco
- La Bendicion de Cristo
- Rinconcito Chapin
- Chapinlandia Bakery
- Las Marianas Food truck
Wonder if any of them are run by the Mam community?
