Keepers of Tradition

Back in November, we introduced you to Taza Chocolate and promised you more info on an upcoming public program at Lowell National Historical Park.  Well that day has come. Tomorrow, in the Park’s Visitor Center, we are presenting on Mexican chocolate traditions here in Massachusetts.

Alex Whitmore, co-founder of Taza Chocolate, will talk about his Mexican-inspired, stone ground chocolate company located in Somerville. Taza manufactures minimally processed chocolate made from fair trade organic cacao beans. Rotary stone mills imported from Oaxaca are used to grind the roasted beans. Each one is hand chiseled with a pattern specifically designed for grinding chocolate.

Ricardo and Maria Candiani, owners of Mr. Jalapeno in downtown Lowell, grew up in Hermosillo, Mexico. They will share recipes and traditions passed down within their respective families. These include mole, a sauce made from finely ground ingredients, including chocolate. Delectable samples will be available at this free program, which is sponsored by Lowell National Historical Park. Saturday, February 12, 2011 at 4:00 p.m. at the Visitor Center, 246 Market Street.

Come join us to hear stories and taste samples of Mexican style chocolate and chicken mole. This free program takes place Saturday, February 12, 2011 at 4:00 p.m. at the Visitor Center, 246 Market Street.

Click here to watch the program.

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Often, in our work as folklorists, we meet immigrants from various parts of the world who have resettled in the United States. Our impulse is to focus on their cultural traditions — the music, dance, crafts, and annual celebrations they left behind and how they are managing to hold onto them while making their home in a new and foreign land.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that new immigrants would also wish to fit in, to understand what holdiays are celebrated here in America, what foods are typically served, or why certain decorations perennially appear.  Why is everybody roasting turkeys? What’s up with all the lights?  Who is the bearded guy in the big red suit? And why is everyone fixated with buying gifts?

And I suppose it’s also not surprising to learn that here in Lowell, within the Cambodian community, some believe that part of becoming “American” is learning to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas. With the blurring of religious beliefs and commercialism, one can hardly blame them.

Along these lines, we were asked to address a group of Cambodian elders that were gathering at the  Coalition for a Better Acre for a holiday program. Everyone seemed to enjoy the lunch, which was a fitting mix of American and Asian dishes: roast turkey, sweet potatoes, corn, pickled mustard with pig ears, pad thai, and rice.

We had hosted some of these same Cambodian elders for a tour of Lowell National Historical Park in September. This time, we were meeting on their territory. CBA invited us to lunch and requested that we briefly explain the history and customs of Thanksgiving and Christmas to the mostly non-English speaking audience. David Blackburn did the honors, seen below holding a plate of turkey and sweet potatoes.

Turns out that hardly anyone in the audience was familiar with the Thanksgiving holiday. Christmas, on the other hand, many were aware of — and it would be difficult not to be, given how pervasive the marketing of the holiday is and the fact that schools and businesses are closed on December 25th. One man asked in Khmai, “What is the purpose of Christmas?” David offered this answer, “It depends on who you are.  For Christians, Christmas is a celebration of the birth of the savior, Jesus Christ.” Despite its Christian origins, the secular celebration of Christmas is ubiquitous in America. David spoke of the German origins of the Christmas tree and the custom of bringing evergreens into our homes at the darkest time of the year.

I wonder how many immigrants think all Americans celebrate Christmas regardless of their religious beliefs, cultural heritage, or family traditions. Hanukkah, Eid, and Kwanzaa fly just under the radar of mainstream American popular culture. Perhaps it is the immigrant’s remove from certain holidays, and their struggle to understand them, that is quintessentially the American experience. After all, it is the complexity of American diversity that makes this country what it is.

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I grew up, like most people in this part of the world, eating European style chocolate. So having this Mexican traditional chocolate was revelatory.

Alex Whitmore, Co-founder of Taza Chocolate

If you attended last summer’s Lowell Folk Festival and wandered into the foodways tent in Lucy Larcom Park, you would have seen (and tasted) that we were into beans. Cooks representing five different cultural cuisines shared their favorite bean dishes with the crowd (750 servings in all).

In an upcoming public program at Lowell National Historical Park, we will be exploring a different kind of bean. Just two days before Valentine’s day, we will present a program on the Mexican tradition of manufacturing, baking, and cooking with chocolate made from stoneground cacao beans.

As the date approaches, more info will be posted, but in the meantime, I thought I’d share some details from my recent visit to Taza Chocolate, a Mexican-style chocolate factory in Somerville, Massachusetts.

My guide was Alex Whitmore, co-founder of Taza Chocolate. Taza is one of several businesses located in an industrial building near the Cambridge/Somerville border.  Walking into the main entrance, I was immediately overwhelmed by the pleasant aroma of chocolate. If only one could record smells . . .

As companies go, Taza Chocolate is fairly new. Established in 2006, Taza is dedicated to manufacturing minimally processed chocolate made from fair trade organic cacao beans. Rotary stone mills from Oaxaca are used to grind the roasted beans.

Before touring through the factory, Alex and I sat down for an interview. Turns out, Taza is one of only 18 companies in the United States that are a “bean to bar” chocolate manufacturer, meaning rather than buying processed chocolate, they actually make chocolate from cacao beans bought directly from growers in Central America.

The majority of businesses making and selling chocolate are called “chocolatiers.” They may make delicious chocolate candy but they buy they don’t start by roasting and grinding their own cacao beans. The smooth, melt-in-your mouth chocolate we associate with Swiss, Belgium, and Italian confections is a relative newcomer on the scene. As Alex reminded me, the indigenous peoples of Central and South America consumed chocolate primarily as a drink for thousands of years before the delectable substance was introduced to Europeans. “The [cacao tree] is indigenous to Central and South America. And because of that, it became culturally important as a food stuff in the early civilizations of the Americas. The Europeans didn’t actually get their hands on the cacao bean until after the Columbian exchange when the Spanish brought it back over to Europe. They didn’t really start making chocolate as we know it today, in a solid form until the late 1700s, early 1800s. And It wasn’t really developed until the mid to later 1800s as a fine candy.”

The chocolate made at Taza differs significantly from chocolate manufactured around the United States. “We make chocolate in a very specific tradition . . .  The entire process is very much inspired by Southern Mexican chocolate making.”

Cacao beans come from the theobroma tree, which grows best in a hot and humid climate. The fruit of the theobroma tree is a cacoa pod, which contains seeds called beans. Alex points out that “Because Taza chocolate is made with such  minimal processing, our product tastes like our ingredients.” What this means is that it is really important for the company to personally source their beans, buying directly from farmers with which they have developed a personal relationship.

Once the beans are harvested, they are fermented and dried before being shipped to Taza. Fermentation creates more complex flavors. Alex made the comparison between the taste of flour and water, like matzoh (unleavened bread) to the more complex taste of bread made with yeast.

I asked Alex about his time in Oaxaca, Mexico, where he studied under several molineros (Spanish for stone ground millers.) In this part of Mexico, being a molinero is a family tradition which is passed down from father to son and kept rather secretive. Although Alex learned a good bit about dressing the grinding stones, he was never allowed to see stones with freshly cut patterns.

As is done in Mexico, Taza uses granite milling stones to grind their cacao beans. They hand chisel each millstone with a pattern specifically designed for grinding chocolate.

Stone ground chocolate, like stone ground grain, leaves granular bits behind, which gives Taza chocolate its rustic texture. After our interview, Alex led me through the factory to see various stages of production – winnowing, grinding, roasting, tempering, molding, and packaging. Taza also runs a retail store, and offers factory tours to the public three times a week.

If you’d like to meet Alex and learn more about their unique products and philosophy, plan on attending our program on February 12, 2011 at Lowell National Historical Park — Visitor Center. Details to follow.

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The days are getting shorter, the weather colder. Pumpkins are in abundance and grocery store shelves are brimming with packaged candy. Also to be expected are skeletons and ghosts, jack o lanterns, gravestones on people’s front lawns, ghoulish storefront windows, and, come Sunday, hoards of costumed kids roaming their neighborhoods in search of treats.

Halloween has been commercialized for so long that some youngsters may not know that this very American of holidays has cultural antecedents around the globe. For example, the ancient Celtic festival of the dead, Samhain, the Italian All Soul’s Day, the Japanese Festival of Lanterns, Obon, the Mexican Dias de los Muertos, and the Cambodian Ancestor’s Day, Pchum Ben. Common to all of these autumnal festivals is the belief that the souls of the departed return to the world of the living for a short period of time. All of them also involve offerings of food. Although Halloween takes place on the last day of October, and Obon in late August, the Cambodian Ancestors’ Day usually occurs in mid-September and lasts for a lunar cycle. The latter, a 15-day observance, is regarded by Cambodians as a time to commemorate and be reunited with deceased relatives. It is an especially important day for those with bad karma who have yet to be reincarnated and are trapped in the spirit world. 

Search the internet and this desciption by Vathany Say pops up from 2003 on the Khmer Institute website:  “Before sunrise on the morning of the Kann Ben [the 14 days leading up to Pchum Ben], special food is prepared for the ancestral spirits to enjoy. Favorite dishes of various flavors and colors are offered. They range from the simple and traditional nom ansom (sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves with assorted fillings) to the more elaborate and rich amok (steamed fish fillet marinated in a complex mix of spices and herbs).

As a gesture of kindness, the hosts also prepare bai ben (steamed sticky rice mixed with sesame seeds and then formed into balls) to be thrown into shaded areas about the temple grounds. This mixture is an offering to the hungry souls who have been forgotten or no longer have living relatives to make them offerings.”

This description of Cambodian foodways associated with Pchum Ben was written about contemporary practice in Cambodia, but it could easily apply to ritual practice here in the United States. Indeed, we observed just this sort of alimentary offering in the shaded area of the parking lot of the Triratanaram Temple in North Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Founded in the 1990s, Triratanaram temple is home to Buddhist monks in the Merrimack Valley and is an important place of worship for the Cambodian community of Greater Lowell.

We had come to view the stupa which had been built for the Triratanaram Temple by Yary Livan and Samnang Khoeun.

But we had no idea that our visit on September 24 would coincide with Pchum Ben. Before entering the Temple, Maya Men, an employee of the temple, gave us a brief tour of the grounds. At the edge of the parking lot we noticed six plastic bowls filled with food and incense. Maya explained that today was a special celebration – Phum Ben – the end of a two-week ritual celebration memorializing the dead. Samnang notes, “It’s a celebration of our ancestors.” Maya adds, “It’s like Halloween. In our culture, we believe that the dead – we don’t know whether we go up or down. There are three levels to Hell. At this time of year, they let out all of the dead for 15 days. People who have committed a lot of sins, they cannot see the sun.”

“Like vampires?” I ask. “Yes. During this time, they let them out from the underworld, before sunrise. You call for them. The food is an offering to the dead – a way of placating them so they won’t cause you harm.” Indeed, these poor souls, known as Priad spirits, are said to fear light and can only recieve prayers, food, and be reunited with their living relatives during the darkest day of the lunar cycle, which is the day of Pchum Ben.

Maya explained that the monks only eat before noon. A breakfast and a lunch. We headed toward the Meditation Hall and could hear the chanting, which was amplified. Samnang explained that he would bow three times – once for the Buddha, once for the darma (the Buddha’s teachings) and once for the monks, but assured us that we did not have to, “If you don’t believe.”

Removing our shoes, we enter.  Inside are monks and nuns and laity, sitting on the carpeted floor facing the abbot, Venerable Sao Khon Dhamathero. Many of the women wear white blouses adorned with delicately embroidered white scarves. The chanting and prayers were loud. It was difficult to hear Maya and Samnang explain what was going on and what things meant. The sweet, pungent smell of incense filled the air. At the altar were several statues of Buddha besides the main marble one from Burma. Behind this large Buddha was a round disk emitting colored flashes of light. Below, an assortment of food and liquid offerings included cooked rice, mushrooms and coriander, bananas, a bottle of ginger ale, and a Starbucks Frappuccino coffee drink. A metal bowl was filled with 49 rice balls – symbolic of the 49 days the Buddha fasted before becoming enlightened. Honey-colored, shiny paper spires reached toward the sky.

The chanting and prayers ended soon after noon. We were invited to join everyone for lunch. We accepted, a bit embarrassed to be imposing. Everyone sat on the floor to eat, circling many bowls of various dishes – noodles, caramelized pork, vegetables, fried banana, banana leaf wrapped around bean paste and sticky rice, and soups. 

When we left, we were offered a goody bag of sorts – two large gold-colored shopping bags filled with what appeared to be donated food and supplies: a box of Yogi cereal, a huge bag of low-fat potato chips, flavored instant coffee, toothbrushes, toothpaste, Motrin, Dove soap, and a loaf of packaged bread. All items had been blessed by the abbot. Leaving with the overflowing bags was an uncanny reminder of trick or treating, but with a Cambodian twist.

All photos by Maggie Holtzberg, 2010.

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There was a time in the not-so-recent past when you had to know your way around a library, a card catalogue, and the periodical index if you wanted to do any kind of serious research in folklore studies. Oh how things have changed. Wikipedia is one thing, but it lacks the imprimateur of scholarly review. If you can’t get yourself to a university library, but still want to dig deep into folklore research, there is a handy alternative. 

We were delighted to learn about a new resource that makes folklore books, journals, and gray literature (things like white papers and policy materials, conference programs, presentations, syllabi, and teaching materials) available to all via the internet. It was developed by the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Libraries and it is called Open Folklore. Go explore . . .

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The Cambodian community has become an important part of Lowell’s ethnic urban history. During the 1980s, Lowell was one of a handful of official resettlement communities for Cambodian refugees fleeing war, genocide, and famine. Coming with little in the way of material wealth, many settled into a community known locally as “The Acre” — an area that has served as a gateway neighborhood for generations of immigrants coming to Lowell in search of a better life — Irish, Greeks, Poles, Scots, Portuguese, French Canadians, Italians, and Puerto Ricans. 

This section of Lowell got its name back in the 1840s when mill owners, who were concerned about having immigrant Irish workers living in their midst, donated an acre of land southwest of the city’s center. Today’s Acre is larger than its name implies and is home to many Camobodians. 

Last week, we hosted a group of Cambodian “elders” from the Coalition for a Better Acre  at Lowell National Historical Park. Chief of Cultural Resources David Blackburn pointed out the Acre and several Park and downtown destinations on an orientation map in the Visitor Center. 

Some members of the group had immigrated to Lowell in 1985, others more recently. Only two had visited Lowell National Historical Park, and no one had ridden the trolley. They were excited! 

Ranger Joanne Marcos shared Lowell’s history through stories of mill girls, labor conflicts, and new immigrants settling into ethnic enclaves — all of which were translated into Khmer by Rasy An, staff member at Coalition for a Better Acre, and Duey Kol, Assistant Director of Cultural Programming at the Park.

The group of visitors was especially animated when entering the Boott Cotton Mill Museum. Standing around a water-powered loom, one man recalled his mother weaving by hand in Cambodia. They marveled at how hard the mill girls worked, the heat and humidity, the long hours, the deafening roar and clack of machinery.

Our last stop was a visit to the Boarding House exhibit where they saw what the mill girls ate for breakfast, the tight sleeping quarters, and the clothing they wore. On the way out, we stopped briefly into the immigration exhibit — where the last panel of a timeline focused on some of Lowell’s more recent immigrants. There on the wall was a black and white photo from 1985 of a Cambodian family taken at the TWA terminal in Boston. One women in the group pointed to a man in the photo, who turned out to be her brother-in-law.  What a welcome surprise for them to see their story on the wall, for all to see.

This was the first of what we hope will be many interactions with the Cambodian community through our new partnership with the Coalition for a Better Acre. Through this visit with us, it was apparent that, despite the language barriers, they came away understanding Lowell’s importance in America’s industrialization and how they fit into the city’s story. In the future, the Park plans on nurturing relationships with other ethnic communities throughout the city.

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Great weather and great programming! We suggest heading down to New Bedford this weekend for the 7th annual Working Waterfront Festival. This year’s theme is All in One Boat: the Cultural Mosaic of New England’s Working Ports

In addition to the focus on cultural diversisty, the festival programming speaks to the common challenges facing fishing communities around the globe, especially in light of recent changes in fisheries management. Come enjoy live maritime and ethnic music, listen to tales from Cape Verdean Longshoremen, try your hand at mending a fishing net, watch a coast guard rescue demonstration, walk the decks of a scalloper, eat fresh seafood, and immerse yourself in an insider’s view of the local industry that brings seafood from the ocean to your plate.

We are happy to see that retired fisherman, Marco Randazzo, who we met years ago in Gloucester, will be demonstrating his knot tying and rope sculptures on Sunday.

Marco Randazzo with some his rope sculptures. Photo by Scott Alarik, 2000.

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In honor of National Arts in Education Week, we are singing the praises of a wonderful new web resource: Local Learning: The National Network for Folk Arts in Education.  Here you will find resources and best practices culled from the work of folklorists, folk artists, and educators around the country who have spent the past two decades working to integrate folk arts into classroom.  They make a compelling case for how educators can draw on traditional culture and local knowledge to enrich education and create stronger communities

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You wouldn’t know from the exterior of this building that inside, magic happens. C.B. Fisk, Inc., Pipe Organs  in Gloucester, Massachusetts is home to a talented team of craftspeople who build world class pipe organs. Their skills range from the ancient crafts of metallurgy and cabinetmaking to modern computer-aided design. 

Physicist and organ maker Charles B. Fisk founded the firm in 1961 to build pipe organs with mechanical action, as they were built in the time of J. S. Bach. Fisk organs typically contain thousands of pipes, most made from lead/tin alloys cast into sheets in the company’s workshop.

We visited C.B. Fisk, Inc. recently, where we began our tour with Greg Bover, Vice President for Operations. Here you see him with a 1:16 scale model of Harvard University Memorial Church, one of three current instruments in the process of being built.

It can take anywhere from five months to a year and a half to build a pipe organ And that is just the actual construction on site. Once the organ is taken apart and moved for installation, another five months to a year of tonal finishing work must be done. “That’s when the fun really begins, ” says Greg. “There are over 3,000 pipes that are going to be in this organ. They’ll all be shop-voiced, which means they’ll all be made to work to a level. But when we get to Harvard, each one of those pipes has to be adjusted to the acoustics of the building. The real work of the sonority starts once the thing is installed. Then the voicers go in, in two person teams, and go through every single pipe.”

I marvel at the stunning detail of the working model — the corinthian-like columns, the dental moldings, and the working clock. Greg explains that some rooms really warrant it. Creating a detailed model is “a huge factor in what the organ looks like and feels like. If we had fudged the cornices, it wouldn’t have had the same effect.”

“It’s math. It’s physics. It’s architecture. It’s cabinet making. Metallurgy — all of it. Organ builders — you’ve got to be a jack of all trades.”

Pipe builder William Finch gives us a tour of the entire company, beginning with the voicing room, where each individual pipe is adjusted until it “speaks properly.” In the wood shop we  watch organbuilder and voicer Nami Hamada working on the keyboard for Memorial Church. 

The casting room is where lead and tin are smelted down to form three different alloys. The pure lead has trace amounts of antimony, bismuth, and copper. These impurities stiffen the metal. William explains that harder the metal, the more the overtones are accentuated when air passes through the pipe.

We enter the pipe room, greeted by the sound of blues blasting from a boom box. Here several staff members are working on various aspects of fabricating pipes.

Listening to people throughout the shop talk about the process of making pipe organs, it is hard not to notice how the organ’s core parts are attributed with traits of the human body. The pipe has a “tongue,” “body,” and “feet.”  It is said to “speak” and must be voiced properly. The reeds of the pipe sit on a wind “chest.” It’s as if the finished product is a living, breathing, thing.

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Sharing a tent at this summer’s Lowell Folk Festival, Eric Royer and Robbie Phillips demonstrated their hand made musical instruments as part of the “Crafting Sound” crafts area.

Eric Royer invented the guitar machine in 1994 while living in Arizona, where he found it  difficult to find other musicians to play traditional bluegrass and old-time country music. Eric’s guitar machine features foot-controlled bass and acoustic guitars suspended on a copper pipe frame. Metal can be found in the banjo, resonator guitar (dobro), harmonica, and kazoo. Pedals use mechanical action to cause different effects; capos go up and down, strings are plucked, a golf ball hits the cowbell, and the “Pretty Polly” doll dances.

“Washtub Robbie” Phillips is known for his creation of odd and fanciful musical instruments. The majority of them are mono-chord (single string) instruments called diddley bows. Typically played with a slide, the diddley bow is ideal for improvising.

Robbie got started making instruments years ago when he was dissatisfied with the sound of the washtub bass he was playing and decided to make his own.  He uses recycled materials – pieces of old furniture, blocks of discarded wood, car parts, and left-over paint. The colorful instruments have a unique finish to them. After a base coat of paint, Robbie applies Elmer’s glue over the surface. Before the glue dries, he sprays latex paint, which shrinks upon drying, creating a crackled surface.

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