Category — Multicultural

The corner of North Sixth and Mount Vernon Streets in San Bernardino is the cradle of the fast-food taco, reports Julia Moskin in the New York Times (5/2/12). There sits the Mitla Cafe, which opened in 1937 and still serves “tacos dorados con carne molida, ‘golden’ tortillas fried to order and folded around a spicy compressed wedge of ground beef, blanketed with iceberg lettuce, chopped tomatoes and shredded Cheddar.” This taco has been on Mitla’s menu as long as anyone can remember and it “very closely resembles the taco served to more than 36 million customers every week at 5,600 Taco Bell locations in the United States.”

This, according to Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA, is no coincidence. Back in 1950, a fellow named Glen Bell opened a hamburger stand “across the street from Mitla.” Glen apparently was jealous of the success of the McDonald brothers, who opened “the first McDonald’s drive-up hamburger stand” in the same neighborhood ten years earlier. Glen “ate often at Mitla and watched long lines form at its walk-up window.” He persuaded Mitla’s owners “to show him how the tacos were made” and “experimented after hours with a tool that would streamline the process of frying the tortillas.”

Glen started serving tacos at his own restaurant, which he re-named Taco Tia, El Taco, and then utlimately, Taco Bell. The Taco Bell website claims that Glen invented the “fast food crunchy taco,” a claim that Gustavo, “perhaps the greatest (and only) living scholar of Mexican-American fast food, disputes.” His book features other stories of white Americans “who managed to capitalize on Mexican food,” as well as at least one Mexican, Mariano Martinez, inventor of the frozen margarita machine. Overall, Taco USA tells the story of “how a few foods (salsa, tacos, chili, tequila) from the complicated and enormous cuisine of Mexico managed to slip into the mainstream of American taste.”

At Cannelle Patisserie in Queens, the clientele and staff are just as diverse as the desserts, reports Rebecca Flint Marx in the New York Times (4/8/12). “Every culture has a favorite dessert,” says Jean-Claude Perennou, the patisserie’s pastry chef. “The North Africans love the napoleons; the French and Asians love the Saint Honore and Paris-Brest; the Spanish speakers love the red velvet cake and the cheesecake.” They all line up, sometimes “20 deep” on a Saturday “in front of glistening pear tarts, golden apple turnovers and piles of … airy croissants.”

Cannelle’s 16-member team is similarly multicultural, hailing “from Bangladesh, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Guyana, Haiti, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam.” Jean-Claude is from Brittany, France, and his business partner, Gnanasampanthan Sabaratnam, is from Sri Lanka. They met in 1996, while working in the Waldorf-Astoria’s kitchen, where Jean-Claude was the executive pastry chef and Gnanasampanthan was a sous-chef.

“If you put 20 French people together, it’s probably going to be chaos,” says Jean-Claude, who says his employees are instead “intrigued” by one another’s culture. Originally, the plan was to open a wholesale bakery, but the partners settled on retail instead, opening their doors in 2007 to an enthusiastic neighborhood reception, particularly the local Breton community. “They were very proud that somebody from Brittany was opening a pastry shop in Queens,” says Jean-Claude. “It fills a good hole in the neighborhood,” says Paul Bannister, a regular. “Everything is exceptional.”

“Tostilocos were conceived across the border 10 years ago, probably in Tijuana,” reports John T. Edge in the New York Times (3/21/12). Basically, Tostilocos is a bag of Tostitos corn chips “topped with, among other items, shaved jicama, pickled pig skins and stumpy tamarind candies.” It actually doesn’t have to be Tostitos chips. “You can use any base,” says Berta Nava, who makes Tostilocos at her family’s snack shop in Escondido, California. “I can do Cheetos, the flaming hot kind, and Churritos, too … I can do anything you want loco.” Street vendors typically just “slit open a bag of chips and ladle on ingredients until the plastic sleeve threatens to collapse.”

Tostilocos are a natural as street food, since “unlike tacos or tamales, Tostilocos require no heat source to cook them or keep them warm. And start-up costs are low. Vendors stock up for the night with 24-packs of snack chips and $10 worth of vegetables and condiments.” Ironically, PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay originally introduced Tostitos in response to a growing American appetite for for “authentic Mexican flavors.” According to Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA, Mexicans soon re-claimed the snack for themselves by changing it. “That’s what people in Mexico do with anything that comes down from somewhere else,” says Gustavo. “We change it, we add more ingredients, more toppings.”

In Mexico, PepsiCo’s Sabritas unit now “sells shrink-wrapped flats of three-ounce Tostitos bags, emblazoned with serving suggestions for Tostilocos … Sabritas promotes these offerings through efforts that recall Coca-Cola’s mid-20th-century plan to repaint corner stores … as long as the job included a prominent Coca-Cola logo. Today in Mexican border towns, newly painted bodegas (flanked by murals of Tostitos bags bulging with cucumbers, jicama and tamarind candies) advertise themselves as Tosticentros.” Meanwhile, back in America, fancy restaurants such as El Take It Easy in San Diego are creating “Tostilocos-inspired dishes” involving “house-fried tortilla chips, house-made persimmon pickles, roasted peanuts and minced pigs’ ears.”

“Chile is probably as complex as wine grapes,” says Paul Bosland, director of the Chile Pepper Institute in a USA Today piece by Monika Joshi (3/12/12). “You can learn all the different flavors and aromas,” he adds. You can also learn about hot — really hot — as in Moruga Scorpion, which the institute has certified as “the hottest chile pepper in the world.” Previously, the institute had identified Bhut Jolokia as the world’s hottest, and Guinness published it as a fact. But after hundreds of emails from chile mavens claiming there was a hotter chile, a new test was conducted.

The institute first planted “several super-hot varieties” and then “ground-up samples of each … were run through a high-performance liquid chromatography machine that counted capsaicinoids, the heat-causing chemical compound unique to chile peppers. A mathematical formula was then used to generate a number in Scoville heat units (SHU), which translates to heat intensity. The Moruga Scorpion rated up to 2 million SHU, unseating Bhut Jolokia, which can be as hot as 1.58 million SHU.” The test required researchers to wear “gas masks, goggles, full-body Tyvek suits and two layers of latex gloves.”

Even with such protection, the scientists say some of “the Moruga Scorpion’s heat seeped through to their hands.” But this hasn’t stopped chile aficionados from clamoring for products made with the super-hot stuff. John Hard of CaJohns Fiery Foods has made a Holy Jolokia hot sauce, “which he says is the best-selling product in his line of more than 100 varieties.” Food science students at New Mexico State University have “created a brownie mix using the Moruga Scorpion,” called Bhut-Kickin’ Brownies, which has proved popular on campus. Paul Bosland says there’s more to Moruga Scorpion than just “excruciating heat,” noting that it also has “a fruitlike flavor, which makes it a unique sweet-hot combination.”

Over the past 20 years, former handball champion Paul Williams has found racial harmony and community in his favorite game, reports Scott Cacciola in the Wall Street Journal (8/23/11). "You’d see bigotry in different communities as a kid," says Paul. "But the thing is, people respected talent. It didn’t matter what neighborhood you were in — if you could play handball, there was a place for you." Paul found this to be true while growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. As a teenager showing promise on the handball court, he was sponsored by both Jewish clubs and the YMCA. He later turned pro, winning his first national title at 30. With this positive experience in mind, Paul launched the Inner City Handball Association "as a way to foster opportunities for young players."

This was late August, 1991, and as fate would have it, the association’s first tournament was scheduled to take place "in Crown Heights, the Brooklyn neighborhood that just days before had been the scene of one of the city’s worst race riots in decades." Naturally, this gave him pause, but Paul decided to move ahead. "People were like, ‘You’re still going to have a tournament? That’s insane," he recalls. "But when you have a vision about doing something, achieving something, I think you can inspire people to take a hold of that. And for a lot of us, that common bond was handball."

Paul "recognized that people from all walks of life played the sport. It was part of the city’s cultural fabric, transcending ethnic boundaries and color lines. And there was beauty in its simplicity — a slab of concrete and a rubber ball." But the tournament, despite its bad timing, was a success, with "about 30 players from different parts of the city" participating as "hundreds of police officers patrolled the streets … The handball courts became an unlikely refuge, a place for calm and competition." As Kendell Lewis, a player, remembers: "You could tell there was a lot of anger and hate … But once you got on the court, you were only thinking about the game." Twenty years later, the Inner City Handball Association "is still going strong," with tournaments regularly drawing "more than 200 players."

"When you’re a white guy and you’re writing a series of books for African-American teens … it generates a fair amount of questions," says Paul Langan in a New York Times article by Jessica Campbell (3/30/11). Paul is author of the Bluford series, written expressly for "black and Latino urban middle and high school students who are struggling readers." Paul says he understands the skepticism, but feels that even though he’s white, his life experiences allow him "to write stories that kids can relate to."

These stories, which take place at fictional Bluford High School, are about subjects like drug-dealing, teen pregnancy, fighting, guns, theft and so forth. Audra Robb of Columbia University’s Reading & Writing Project, says the series "fills a gaping need," explaining: "It has an appeal to kids who look and live in environments like the Bluford environment … When you can see yourself inside the book that you’re reading, you don’t feel so outside." However, Jane Bean-Folkes, also of Columbia, takes issue with the "mature content and hyperbolic cover images," such as a guy in a do-rag cradling a gun (image).

Paul got the idea for the series — which now numbers 18 books — after coordinating a summer reading program for teens as part of his job with his uncle’s textbook publishing-house, Townsend Press. The concept was that the books would be written for struggling black and Latino students, at a level they could understand and on subjects they’d want to read about, at a price they could afford ($1). Townsend published the first book in 2001, and has since "sold or donated six million." Scholastic also now publishes the books, priced at $3.99, and has sold two million.

In “High on the Hog,” Jessica B. Harris establishes “a historical context for each development in the evolution of black cuisine,” reports William Grimes in the New York Times (1/9/11). The book, says William, is “a lively if wayward account of how African slaves, thrust into a strange land, carried with them the taste memories, cooking techniques and agricultural practices of their homelands and transformed the way Americans ate.” It’s lively because Jessica punctuates the book with personal stories and populates it with “character and incident,” all within “the larger narrative of slavery, emancipation and the Great Migration.”

It’s a complex and impressive story: “In the South, slave tastes defined the cooking repertory in a wide arc that extended from the rice and seafood belt of the Carolinas to the Creole and Cajun Lands of Louisiana. Elsewhere, blacks brought new flavors and dishes to white America in restaurants and markets, or on the sidewalk from food carts. As the United States expanded westward, they extended their reach, working as cooks on the chuck wagons that accompanied the great cattle drives and on the Pullman cars that carried passengers all the way to California and the Pacific Northwest.”

As a result, “unsuspecting white Americans learned to appreciate African derived spices and pungent flavors, to regard Southern dishes like gumbo and fried chicken and red beans and rice as part of the national heritage, to elevate macaroni and cheese to a place high in hipster heaven.” Along the way, Jessica presents a “cast of characters whose names deserve wider renown,” such as Lena Richard, who had a televised cooking show before Julia Child, and chef James Hemmings (brother of Sally). Most important, she “treats her subject as an evolving story, because “after more than 300 years, black American cuisine is still vital and thriving.”

A pizza chain that caters to Hispanics is expanding its appeal to other demographics, reports Julie Jargon in the Wall Street Journal (12/30/10). Actually, Pizza Patron "didn’t set out to target Hispanics" when founded by Antonio Swad in Dallas in 1986. Antonio, himself, isn’t Hispanic — he’s "of Italian-Lebanese descent." But most of Pizza Patron’s customers "placed orders in Spanish" and Antonio "viewed marketing to Spanish speakers as an opportunity to differentiate the brand." He also added churros and other Latino-influenced specialties to the menu.

Now, however, Pizza Patron, with 100 restaurants and $40 million in revenues, hopes to evolve with its customer base. "There are Hispanics born in the US who have one foot in each culture," says Andrew Gamm, the chain’s marketing director. "They are very into adopting American culture without fully letting go of their Hispanic roots." Meanwhile, Pizza Patron is now attracting "African-American as well as white customers." So, the chain this year "plans to flip-flop its marketing mix by allocating 70 percent of its ad budget to English-language television and 30 percent to Spanish-language media."

English will now also be the dominant language on the menu boards, as well as in its promotional materials. To help bridge the generation gap, Pizza Patron "plans to add more Latin-themed specialty pizzas and to post in-store graphics honoring holidays many Hispanics celebrate." The chain "also is using phrases like ‘bueno, bonito and barato’" to describe the value proposition. "By themselves, these words mean just what they say, but combined, it’s a phrase that only our Hispanic customers would get," says Andrew. "It’s a way we wink at them and say, ‘We get you.’" Pizza Patron plans to open 20 more restaurants this year and 40 in 2012.

A new tracking study reveals insights into Hispanics as shoppers. By Noemi Ricalo. Much has been made about the stunning impact that Census 2010 will have on Hispanic marketing — but what does that mean for serving the Hispanic shopper?

Understanding the Hispanic shopper purchase behaviors, origins and passions is the cost-of-entry with this influential demographic. I have some insider insights and high-level recommendations to share, and will be quizzing you on your Español* later in the article! … read >>

Hispanics and loyalty is more complicated than most marketers realize. By Will Minton. Over the past several years, marketers have shown an increasing interest in understanding the Hispanic consumer in order to leverage the community’s explosive growth and purchasing power (estimated to be $1 trillion).

In our review of available data, there appeared to be an absence of focus in understanding the topic of building retailer and brand loyalty for Hispanic shoppers. We, therefore, conducted primary research at several Hispanic festivals delving specifically into brand and retailer loyalty … read >>