Home Food It’s an old apartment building, and she lives on the first floor. You can already smell it: the prickles of safety, of something good. She opens the door, and past the wire windows and the typical immigrant household lace curtain, you can hear the warm sizzle of her stove. Right there, in the border between her small kitchen and her smaller living room, Elsy lines up the many handmade cheese, zucchini or chicharrón pupusas ready to be cooked. For a moment, you feel like you’ve returned to a hominess you didn’t know you ached for. Elsy’s is only one of many small home businesses hidden around Mountain View, California, that has popped up from the economic hardship of the COVID pandemic, catering to the taste buds of people willing to explore different flavors or to those who are nostalgic for them. Even though there has always been a demand for food from Latino countries—so much so that it seems to have become just as American as the stereotypical hamburger—people like Elsy still live hidden in the cracks of the city. Salvadoran immigrants, specifically, tend to experience more erasure because of the Mexican-dominant view of the word “immigrant” (Ochoa). Home food businesses like Elsy’s are a solution to this problem because they give voice and strength to the
Salvadoran community through sharing their culture and allowing access to socioeconomic security.
Historical Struggles One of the most important aspects of
this issue has to do with the history of Salvadoran food, and therefore Salvadoran migration, to the United States. From its roots, Salvadoran food history begins with the Pipil tribe, which are descendants of the Aztecs (Chan), who created the pupusa. This dish and its culture survived for centuries more, through Spanish conquerors and through the birth of the United States and its later involvement in Latin American countries. But the emergence of Salvadoran identity in the United States would not begin until many decades later, when the Salvadoran Civil War began. As the violence exploded and the situation deteriorated, the Salvadoran Civil War succeeded in “catapulting the country from its proverbial obscurity into daily headline news” (Machuca). This would be the first time that Salvadorans’ lives became visible to a wide, unknowing US population, and this event would