On Arepas and Whiteness

By Naihobe Gonzalez

My people write poetry about arepas. The Venezuelan writer Francisco Pimentel once wrote: It is necessary to be from our land / To know what the arepa contains. That should tell you everything I want you to know. But I’ll expand.

On Sundays, I often wake up craving an arepa, crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside, a perfect vessel for just about any filling. On those days, I reach for the bright yellow package of corn flour in my pantry. I knead the masa until it feels smooth; slap it between my palms like my grandmother taught me, shaping it into a round disk; lay it gently on a greased griddle hot enough to sizzle; check for its doneness—tap tap tap, like my mother taught me, if it sounds hollow at its center it’s done—and I almost forget the sorrow of losing my motherland.

I am used to scanning the world around me for signs of myself, which is a bit like looking at mirrors but seeing nothing reflected. One day last fall, as I scrolled through the Bon Appétit Instagram feed on my phone, the word arepa jumped out of the blur of curated photos and text. A “holy word,” the Venezuelan poet Juan José Churión called it. The pictured dish was not immediately recognizable (What was that preparation? Those ingredients?) but according to the caption it was indeed an arepa. I examined the photograph and carefully read over the credits: recipe by Sarah Jampel, food styling by Kat Boytsova, and photography by Laura Jean Murray. I read their names in my head in my Spanish-speaking voice, which made them sound as exotic as they felt.

I wanted to see more—of the recipe, of my culture at their hands—so I went to the website. There it was, the sole recipe for arepas, with a short accompanying article. “Once you get the hang of making them, they might be your most ‘impressive’ (shhh) weeknight meal.” Who or what was being shhhed? Ah, the secret being shared between writer and reader was that arepas are actually quick and easy to make; anyone familiar with them would surely be happy but unimpressed with being served arepas for dinner. But no one familiar with them was part of that implicit conversation. So here I am, butting in.

Traditionally, the flour for arepas was made with a giant mortar and pestle, a process known as pilado or piladera. Women (mostly Black and indigenous) spent hours soaking, grinding, cooking, and milling white corn, all by hand. For some, that was the main task that filled their days. The enormous labor required never stopped Venezuelans—or before Venezuela was a country, our pre-Columbian ancestors—from making arepas. The word itself is believed to come from the Cumanagoto, a Caribbean tribe that was all but extinguished by the Spanish. As of the last census, there were 112 native speakers of Cumanagoto remaining. Their dish dates back hundreds of years, long before an Italian explorer wrote about it for the first time in the mid-1500s, so eloquently describing it as a “sort of bread”. We know his name—Galeotto Cei—but not the names of the women who cooked the arepas he wrote about.

Today, we simply add water to Harina P.A.N. and we’ve got masa. Precooked corn flour hit stores in 1960, reducing the time to prepare masa from half a day to under five minutes. Who was responsible for this technological revolution that forever changed the lives of Venezuelans? In 1954, Luis Caballero Mejías was awarded patent number 5176 for “dehydrated corn flour”. Despite getting positive feedback from local areperas, he didn’t have the capital to get his business off the ground and sold the patent to Empresas Polar, a brewing company at the time. Carlos Roubicek, a Czechoslovak immigrant who worked for Polar, said he had already been exploring a similar technology and deserved credit. A century before either of them, a Polish immigrant named Alberto Lutowski had designed a motor-operated mill to automate the production of arepa flour but abandoned the idea due to lack of interest from locals. There may be some debate about which of these men’s names should go down in history books, but none of their identities is lost or ignored.

Polar launched Harina P.A.N. under the slogan “The piladera is over!” The yellow packages that lined store shelves were stamped with the face of a striking woman. Her eyes and hair are dark, her lashes long and curled, her lips red and full, her nose and chin dainty. She wears hoop earrings and a polka-dot handkerchief over her hair. Like the product she represents, she instantly became a Venezuelan cultural icon, an embodiment of our motherland. But in a country where over half of the population is of mixed white, Amerindian, and Black heritage, where the work of making arepas had historically fallen on darker shoulders, her skin is oh so fair. Marko Markoff, the Bulgarian immigrant who designed the logo, said he modeled her after the Portuguese-born entertainer Carmen Miranda, who was known to white audiences around the world as “The Brazilian Bombshell”.

It’s no accident that European immigrants are featured so prominently in this story: Venezuela’s immigration policy was designed to welcome Europeans—and keep out non-whites—for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Venezuelan intellectuals like Alberto Adriani, the son of Italian immigrants himself, argued that Venezuela needed to attract people who would “whiten the country” and “improve the race” to promote its development. Implicit in their theory, of course, were beliefs passed down from colonial days that centered whiteness as the source of goodness. In those days, this included serving bread instead of arepas at meals to communicate belonging in white society. Some whites even believed arepas caused disease. The Black and indigenous servant class, however, continued to prepare arepas, feeding them to the children they cared for when no one else was looking. A gradual shift began. In 1828, the French general Louis Peru de Lacroix wrote that Simón Bolivar—the most lauded Venezuelan in our history—preferred “the corn arepa to the best bread.” As Venezuela became its own country, free from Spanish rule, arepas were the pulsing heart of our new national identity.

When my mother and I moved to the suburbs of Atlanta in 1995, we were labeled Hispanic, an identity we had never considered, and found ourselves ticking off this enormous box that had been designed to conveniently comprise multiple countries and continents. Yet the main source of “Hispanic” culture around us was Mexican, with different words, music, and foods than we were used to. In the early days of making arepas here, we tested out other types of corn flours like Maseca that were more readily available than Harina P.A.N., but they yielded something different that wasn’t ours. That something didn’t taste of Sunday brunches with my grandfather or rushed school lunches or secret midnight snacks. So we drove far and wide in search of so-called ethnic stores that might sell Harina P.A.N. until we finally found the familiar yellow package on a dusty bottom shelf. A small, working mirror. Those were the days when my mother pawned her car title to cover both gas and rent, but going without arepas was not an option. We were a minority within a minority trying to hold on to who we were, learning English and all the unsaid dynamics of Southern culture while we stuffed our arepas with Mexican queso fresco and thought of the home we’d lost.

Now those yellow packages of Harina P.A.N. with the smiling woman are sold in more than 60 countries. In the United States, the packaging is written in English, Spanish, and French, in that order. It is even hawked as a health food—naturally fat and gluten-free! You can buy it online at Target, Walmart, and Amazon, where the product description promises arepas are “perfect to prepare as a substitute for bread.” But they are a substitute for nothing to me—their value is inherent rather than relative; it does not depend on the assessment of an external gaze.

It’s a costly convenience we’ve gained, this new widespread availability. Twenty years after my family moved to the United States, Polar opened an Harina P.A.N. processing plant here to meet the demand of a growing diaspora. The Texas town where they set up shop is notorious for a large sign that read: “Welcome to Greenville, The Blackest Land, The Whitest People.” (The sign was revised to read “The Greatest People” in 1968, as townspeople argued that was the intended meaning anyway.) In 2015, the same year the plant in Greenville was inaugurated, a truck transporting Harina P.A.N. flipped over in the middle of a Venezuelan highway. White corn flour dusted the asphalt like a surreal Caribbean snowfall. Dozens of people swarmed the truck, stepping over the driver’s corpse to scoop up packages of Harina P.A.N. in their arms. Some looked at his dead body, others looked away. The scene was an illustration of the desperation of people struggling to feed themselves and their children. It was an illustration of a “humanitarian crisis”, a shorthand term for a complex catastrophe that is still unfolding.

My own family is now broken up across multiple continents, forming a fragile, thinly stretched web. Siblings and cousins who grew up playing together keep in touch with the help of social media. We ship basic necessities to our relatives who remain in Venezuela—like diapers, coffee, and lollipops for my 100-year-old grandfather who is still holding on to life in a dying country—and FaceTime with them when the internet there is working well enough. When we say goodbye, we smile and pretend we’re okay even though we have no idea when or if we’ll see each other again.

You may have seen headlines about the crisis in Venezuela as you scrolled through your news feeds, lingering a little longer on the tragedies that hit a little closer to home. You may have even heard these facts: By 2019, Venezuelans reported losing an average of 24 pounds—about 11 packages worth of Harina P.A.N., or over 200 arepas. Millions had already fled abroad, becoming the second-largest displaced population in the world, after Syrians. Over 400,000 of us now live in the United States as your neighbors, and countless more of us are scattered around the globe, exiled from a country we increasingly struggle to recognize. What do these facts make you feel? For me, it’s grief. For a second time, I lost the country where I was born.

Skipping down to the comments section on the Bon Appétit webpage, I saw that I was not the only one feeling unsettled by their recipe. From reader M. Belen: “I don’t want to preach about the purity of arepas, but I feel like the flavor profile and cooking method is so far off that to call this an arepa would be a disservice…Next time just check in with a Venezuelan or a Colombian.” I felt like I was making eye contact with this reader—we saw each other and nodded across a virtual space. We could have had our own implicit conversation, but I wanted to bring you into the fold. You see, when I saw that Instagram post for the first time, I felt momentary pride. The mirror was reflecting something back, and even if that something looked a little warped, it was being shown not just to me, but to a whole new group of people who only ever see a part of me. But that pride was quickly extinguished by indignation upon realizing the dish had been adapted so liberally by people with little knowledge of it. Venezuelans were at risk of starvation in the very moment a professionally styled and photographed arepa—our humble food, a gift from our ancestors—appeared in a fancy magazine without context or care.

You didn’t know, of course (and how could you, when you hadn’t bothered to ask?). But what you treat so lightly often weighs on others with heft accumulated over centuries, digging into wounds still raw. Don’t you see, as you write and brag about these dishes, how they came to be available to you? Slavery, colonialism, war, oppression, famine. Human suffering, in all its forms, is the core reason why people—and their food—leave home. The mass displacement of my people is deeply painful, but it means our culture is rapidly spreading. It means you might notice a new Venezuelan restaurant in your city (though depending on where you are, it might be given a more accessible label like “Latin”). It means our food might start appearing in your magazines and social media feeds. It means you might see whiteness taking over and erasing others, as it tends to do. But let me once again borrow words from the poet Francisco Pimental:

What foreign man who does not know

How we speak here, could believe

That inside an arepa

A woman can comfortably fit?

Naihobe Gonzalez (@nai__gonzalez) is a Venezuelan-American writer in Oakland, California. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, The Believer, Waxwing, The Offing, The Acentos Review, and more. Her writing has received support from VONA, Writing by Writers, the Writers Grotto, the Kearny Street Workshop, and Tin House. She has a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University and conducts policy research when she’s not writing.