Cities and Mountains

It's been a while since I traveled in Latin America. I'm remedying that to a certain degree over the next couple of days in Monterrey in northeastern Mexico. 

My first memory of Latin America was descending into the São Paulo airport in the early evening over the low mountains that surround the city, marveling at the clusters of favellas that stretch up the hillsides. Since then, I've come to appreciate the ways in which urban areas and mountains seem to collide in so much of Latin America. Bogota and Medellín, Colombia; Santiago, Chile, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Guatemala City, and Quito, Ecuador all come immediately to mind. Perhaps I've simply missed similar landscapes in other regions, but I think that there is something about this admixture in Central and South America. 

Cerro de la Silla (from Wikipedia)

Monterrey is another one of those cities. It is dominated by soaring sierras, with the city clustering along a valley and up the hillsides. The most impressive is the Cerro de la Silla (Saddle Mountain). The home where I am staying sits on one of those hillsides with a rather spectacular view of the mountains and the skyscrapers downtown. This afternoon, as we drove from town up the hill, one of these soaring mountains was draped with a cloud-tablecloth not unlike what I've seen in Cape Town (ok, so there's a non-Latin American city that has an incontestable urban-mountain mash up). Stunning. 

Monterrey is a bustling, orderly city, Mexico's third largest. It has long been known as a center of business and innovation, strategically placed on the trade routes between Texas and Mexico City. You see this in the soaring skyscrapers of company headquarters (some of the country's largest companies are headquartered here). You also see it in some of the beautiful public art, including a large factory complex that has been very artfully turned into a sprawling public park with a broad artificial canal. The old downtown -- the barrio antigua -- is filled with a grid of narrow streets with low-slung buildings, markets, and churches. Some of the oldest Protestant churches in Mexico are located in Monterrey, including the Baptist church, which dates to 1864. 

The view from my room 

This is only my third visit to Mexico, and all of my visits have been short. Yet I continue to sense that this country, perhaps simply due to its proximity, is one of the most misunderstood. While I think that there's a growing disconnect between what I hear in US news and what I see in the rest of the world, this contrast seems especially stark in Mexico. This is the kind of vast, complex, diverse country that you could devote a life to, and still walk away befuddled. 

Dining in Monterrey

In recent years, the authentic taco, with its soft, warm corn shell, some meat filling, garnish of crunchy vegetables, and sauce, has become more common in the United States. I recently had a taco from a food truck in Grand Rapids that rivaled anything I've had in Mexico. Granted, that particular memorable taco was Korean-themed and garnished with homemade kimchi, but it still had the soft, bitey wonderfulness that characterizes a genuine taco, albeit a bit globalized. And speaking of globalization, I do still have a soft spot for those North American hard-shelled tacos with red sauce, enjoying them as a culinary tradition all their own…

A real Mexican chips-and-salsa

There is no escaping the tortilla at the center of Mexican cuisine. Made of corn masa or wheat flour, they appear at most every meal in some form. The dining table is always graced by at least a couple of kinds of salsa as well, generally freshly made and of varying spiciness. 

My lunch yesterday was in a decades-old large restaurant in the center of Monterrey that prides itself on having been open continuously for 50 years (it is open 24/7). After convincing my hosts that I really do eat spicy food, I ordered enchiladas en mole. This dish is composed of chicken wrapped in tortillas, smothered in a thick and spicy brown sauce. While there are more recipes for mole than stars in the sky, most brown moles seem to share a kind of spicy denseness that comes in some recipes from the combination of several kinds of ground, dried chiles and a bit of chocolate. In reality, this particular mole was not all that spicy (or, to be honest, all that tasty). 

Cobrito - on the right side

One of the local specialties in Monterrey is a dish called cabrito. Cabrito means, literally, baby goat. Cabrito must be prepared from a goat less than three years old, which is the age when most goats begin to eat grass (or so I am told!). The meat is smoked and served with tortillas, fresh onions, tomatoes, lettuce, and chiles, cooked onions, and a variety of sauces. Pieces are wrapped up in a tortilla. While I am not certain that I'd add it to my daily diet (largely because I struggle with the idea of eating baby animals), it was a mighty tasty piece of meat. 

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this dish is its historical origins in Jewish (!) cooking. Prior to the Inquisition in Spain, Jews composed a sizable minority. A few of these came to New Spain, including several prominent families that came to Nuevo Léon in the late 16th century. Although Judaism was banned in the Spanish Empire by this time, a number of these families remained "crypto-Jews" for centuries, secretly practicing the faith of their ancestors. This has apparently influenced the cuisine of Nuevo Léon, in both the presence of cabrito and the absence of pork from most local cooking. 

Few things testify more to globalization than food, whether Jewish-inspired smoked goat in northeast Mexico or Korean-themed tacos in Grand Rapids.