Peruvian Cuisine and Interview Synthesis

I savored each bite of a homemade Peruvian rice dish with chicken, hot dog, egg, soy sauce, and green onion today. I considered it a delicious treat for good journalism, which to me, means getting to the right location, or finding the right contacts. In this case, I had done both. But by no means did I do them alone--they were friends of Juanchi. So the recipe (wink) to receiving a mouth-watering meal while reporting involves four steps: Use a contact's contacts, go with a warm reputation preceding you, get invited to the home, and hold the interview in the kitchen.

The dear family I met today was the Moreno family, natives of Trujillo, Peru. The parents, Javier and Maritza, moved to Buenos Aires in 1993, not in search of a better economic situation, but simply to be able to live together in the same city. While Martiza and her young children (one is missing from the photo because he was out of the house at the time) lived in Trujillo, Javier lived ten hours away in Lima, where he worked a good job in the government. Martiza would take the children to visit their father once every two to four weeks, but that was hardly enough. Finally, they decided to move to Buenos Aires, where they could live in the same city. Yet they decided to leave their children with their grandmother while the couple began to form a life in the city. When they first arrived on August 13, 1993, they had $13 to their name. A friend told them of an Evangelical church that was receiving immigrants, so they quickly located it and moved in to the top floor that was home to about 100 new arrivals. When they first walked into the building, Javier approached a young man in his early 30s and asked to speak to the pastor. The corners of the man's lips curved up into somewhat of a smirk. "I am the pastor," he said. "I never would have thought he was the pastor," Javier said. "He looked so young." That young pastor was my boyfriend's father, Juan Peréz. Juan and his wife Nora were immigrants themselves, having moved from Temuco, Chile, as newlyweds and both certified doctors and pastors. They witnessed the dramatic increase of immigrants in the city who often slept in the streets with no place to go, so they decided to open their church as a refuge.

"It was not comfortable, but it was a place to stay," Martiza said, describing the housing the church provided. Of the 100-something people staying there, only a handful were Protestant Christians, she said. Initially, some of the women who stayed there didn't like her and said she couldn't stay. She begged her husband to go elsewhere with her, anywhere but that church. He encouraged her to try for awhile, and so they ended up staying. Martiza described the women's room as a dark environment. She said that people would get drunk, say horrible things, some women would strip and have shows, and some were prostitutes. Living there was her worst experience since arriving in Argentina.

She cried every day. She missed her children in Peru. A year-and-a-half later, she and her husband saved enough money to return to Peru and bring their children with them to Argentina. But the children would cry every day. The family squished together in one room, when they were used to their 300 square meters home in Peru. Yet for the last ten years, they have been living happily together in a cement house they rent in the city.

Javier described the discrimination that his children experienced at school and he and his wife received at their jobs. The most shocking example of discrimination and mistreatment was Martiza's experience working at a geriatric center. Since her husband worked in the kitchen, he had access to good quality food during the day. But properly feeding those who cared for the elderly was not high on anyone's priority list. Martiza was a caregiver, and she was given leftover food that was put in a blender for a disgusting and unsanitary smoothie mush. During that time, she went days without eating anything but a few oranges.

Today, their youngest son, Jeampierre, is a skateboarding fanatic and began a t-shirt company geared toward the skating crowd. His company is called DreamX, and each shirt has an X on it somewhere. When I asked him why the X is significant, his says its for extreme dreams.

Peruvian Food and Photographer's Fear

I've been in Buenos Aires for a little over three weeks now. I kissed my boyfriend for the first time in 4 1/2 months, turned 21, drank lots of wine, went running and got my boyfriend to run with me, accepted a photography job for no pay, turned down an offer to photograph a wedding in Ushuaia for pay, started photographing with my grandfather's 1972 SRT101 Minolta, and have managed to avoid buying a single piece of clothing. I've also only made one portrait of a Peruvian family for a photography project I'm working on.

I see them almost every day because they run the vegetable stand across from my apartment. I've been making a lot of contacts of people to photograph and interview, most of whom are acquaintances of Juanchi, but have been struggling to make them on my own. I don't mind his help in the least bit, but by going through people he knows, I'm strategically avoiding confronting my fear of approaching people I don't know in hopes of photographing or interviewing them about their immigration experience. A clever, but poor decision.

So I did what any bored photojournalist does when they are ready to talk to someone--I got my cameras, notebook, and went a location where I would have to be a leader in the antisocial movement to miss meeting a potential photo subject. When Juanchi and I arrived at the Peruvian restaurant, I hardly had time to visually confirm the nationality of the waiters and observe the art on the mango-colored wall before I noticed three of Juanchi's four housemates sitting in a corner table. We had just arrived from my place and weren't expecting to see them, and joined them for a lovely time during lunch. Two are from Panamá and the other is from Ecuador. Yet I didn't realize quite how globalized our table was until I asked one of the Panameños, Jan, how "broster" chicken was cooked, and he responded with "Kentucky Fried Chicken." Apparently they have those in Panamá. I asked them if they knew what Kentucky means, and they responded with "the owner's last name," then later decided it was a city in the U.S. At least they got a little closer to the right answer. I explained to them that the KFC in Chapel Hill closed because so many people were protesting it. Or at least that's why I think it closed, after seeing protestors out there one month and the building empty the next.

I ordered grilled chicken with rice, steamed potatoes, and a salad.

Juanchi ordered this:

Which to me, was the obvious star for my next picture. But for him, was a stomach ache as we were strolling around China Town in search for peanut butter, a rare commodity in Argentina.

I didn't photograph any people today. But I did make another contact. I will return to the restaurant on Friday to interview and talk with our waiter, Renaldo. I didn't explain much, but said it was for an artistic-historical project on foreigners in Buenos Aires. So for the next three days, I have interviews lined up with a family, a couple, and the waiter. On the fourth day, Argentina plays Nigeria in the World Cup, and I will be rephotographing the Peruvian family. I thought I had successfully photographed them with my grandfather's Minolta last week, but apparently I hadn't even turned on the camera when I thought I was "making frames." Classic mistake of the digital generation.