Taco Crawl: Experiments in South Brooklyn

Taking a cue from the ever fabulous "pub crawl" or "bar crawl," E and I decided to have a "taco crawl." Sunset Park is full of taco stands, trucks, and restaurants - each with their own flavor or style (cooking traditions from many Mexican states are represented here within a ten block radius) and claim to fame. So we invited some of our favorite friends who also enjoy gustatory delights and exploration to come on the first annual Taco Crawl in Sunset Park.
We began at Tacos Xochimilco, named after an area of Mexico City, south of the city center. Xochimilco (pronounced So-tse-milco in Spanish) means 'a place with flowers' in Nahuatl. We didn't see any flowers, but we did see some great greens: as habitual, our taco odyssey started with green and red salsa.




After some carne asada and al pastor deliciousness, Jahi decided to taste a gordita.
Like a taco pillow, filled with taco delights! Xochimilco had great food, and really spicy salsa, but plan on being there for a minute - worth the wait, but they usually have only one cook and one waitress working. You can find them across from the well-known Tacos Matamoros, at the intersection of 46th and 5th Ave.

After Xochimilco, we headed down to the truck we'd seen often parked outside the Key Foods at Sunset Park. Tacos Bronco - you can find the truck after 8p on 5th Ave at 44th Street. You'll recognize it immediately, because the truck creates a halo of white light into which eager taco-hunters crowd like moths to a flame. The truck is incredibly popular, so they have four guys turning out the goods inside the truck, and two 'handlers' outside it who take orders and pass the steaming plates of luscious tacos to the appropriate consumer. I can't recommend these guys enough - they gave us two free tacos to taste, as well as a cup of soup - they said they didn't recognize us, and thanked us for coming. About ten minutes after we ordered, they began to pass out plates to us. I tried my usual, the enchilada (spicy pork), as well as the al pastor. In a culinary innovative delight, these al pastor tacos - which are cooked with pineapple and thus have a juicy, rather sweet flavor - Tacos Bronco puts chopped fresh pineapple onto the tacos, along with giving you a grilled sweet onion.



Here are foodie friends Chris and Katharine pre-Bronco!

So yummy. And, the sign is correct - each taco a whopping $1.50. Brooklyn is the best.

After Tacos Bronco, it seemed ludicrous to try more tacos, but...we did. Heading down Fifth Avenue, we popped into Tacos California, at 47th and 5th Ave. They have stellar, smoky, melt-in-your-mouth carne asada. They also have creamy, luscious shakes.

This was the only place where the waitstaff only spoke Spanish (the other places showed serious American English influence, unfortunately) but we viewed this (correctly) as a harbinger of the great tastes to come. Our waitress had a great attitude, and helped us order in our fragmented Spanish. So, they get bonus points for her good humor.

By this point, we were averaging about 5 tacos each (you have to taste the different kinds at each place, that's the point!) and were starting to fill up. I remembered that Rico's Tacos has amazing 'tacos arabes' - regular tacos but on a harina-flour tortilla and a special sauce. If I have to describe it in words, it's like a taco fell in love with a falafel sandwich and they made a baby. It's incredible. So we went, attempting the nigh-impossible - but unfortunately Rico's was out of tacos arabes by the time we got there (10pm). Lesson learned: tacos arabes are popular, as is Rico's in general, so get there early! Their "regular" tacos are anything but, by the way - they have amazing, spicy, juicy carne enchilada and al pastor and buche and asada tacos...worth the stop. Find them near the wall mural of a pig smiling, roasting in a pot, and the big tacos sign with the arrow at the intersection of 51st and 5th Ave.

Full, we decided not to get some more tacos, and instead bought some beers and headed back to the apartment to digest. We'll be figuring out sites for next year's crawl, but in the meantime, here are some other places you can go to taste delicious tacos in this neighborhood:

Tacos Matamoros
Downside: lots of us gringos know about this place.
Recommendation: Great tacos al pastor & carne enchilada. They also have margaritas, and delicious nachos. Go on a work day, to avoid the crowds of gringos. The food is a little bit spicier on work days, too...or perhaps that's just the imagination at work.
Located at: 46th and 5th Ave. Look for the neon light that has an outline of the taco and emblazoned with "Hot Taco."

Eclipse Mexican
Lots of flavor, but not real spicy. They have a vegetarian menu, and offer definitely gringo Mexican food. Whereas some of these other places have menus on the window, or a cardboard sign, this is a place that is fully clean and you can take your parents there.
Located at: 4th Avenue and 44th

Happy taco-hunting, my friends!

Experiments in Brooklyn - DiFara Pizza!

Di Fara is a pizza legend. It's the kind of place where the service is unbelievably shitty, and the place so run down you can't even throw out your trash - in short, it's not the cleanest place you've ever eaten. It took us twenty minutes to even figure out how to order, the service was so bad. A standard pie is $28, without toppings - individual slices are $5. It's cash only. They can afford to be rude, though - if you're patient enough to actually wait for the pizza, you're happily surprised. There is a slogan on the wall: "Worth the wait!" It's definitely delicious pizza - recommend going on a weekday afternoon if you don't want to wait.



That being said, the crust was magnificent - thin, fully baked, lightly crispy, but not overdone. The cheese was melted, mostly, except for the handful of grated parmesan that DiFara throws over the pizza right when it comes out of the oven, before he cuts fresh basil with scissors onto the steaming, glorious pie. Yes. The end result is delicious - fresh, made just for you, cheesy and crispy but not heavy...we'll be back. When, I'm not sure, but I know we'll be back.

On Samson & Delilah: Indigeneity, Strength, and Community

This month, BAM screened an Australian film called "Samson & Delilah." Because E has automatic radar for anything Australian that comes through NYC, he knew about it, and we went to see this incredible film. It is spellbinding, difficult, and worth the struggle.

Samson and Delilah movie trailer HD from Trinity Films on Vimeo.

Samson & Delilah are two Aboriginal teenagers in a devastated indigenous community outside Alice Springs, Australia. Struggling with family, being a teenager, and negotiating their identities, events transpire that lead them to leave their community and go to the city, Alice Springs. Once there, they are homeless, and unable to understand or negotiate the ways of Australian city life. Delilah undergoes horrifying treatment, and in the end, they leave Alice Springs and go to her family's land, "her country." The tale is heartbreaking, especially because - as we learn only halfway through the film - Samson has a speech deficiency and much of the communication between the two teens is nonverbal. The filmmakers deftly highlight the nuances of nonverbal communication, whether it is Delilah's grandmother's hysterical responses to Samson, or Delilah's own physical reactions to the events that happen to her.

Warwick Thornton, the director, is from Alice Springs and shared in a Q & A after the movie that he felt an obligation to share the struggles of his local community, not to publicize them and cause shame, but just to be able to discuss them openly. For Thornton, film is a way to create community. The filmmakers had a premiere on a football field and bussed in people living in communities outside Alice Springs, feeding them and encouraging them to comment on the film afterwards. Thus, film becomes a way of enacting and living social responsibility, connecting communities, and opening dialogue about the ways that communities can effectively reach out to those struggling within them. Thornton commented that these teens' situation was local, but also global: "There are Samsons and Delilahs on the corners of Brooklyn. Do we notice?" He emphasized the importance of showing kindness and being open, as a community, to the struggles of people that are often marginalized because of how "we" (and here, yes, I am normalizing) perceive them. We see poverty, dirt, prostitution, homelessness, alcohol and drug abuse - not people, like us, in trouble.

Thornton also commented on the title of his film, saying that he had long ascribed the name "Samson" to the male protagonist but had not named the girl. He chose Delilah (or, rather, his wife did...) because of its irony - in this film, Delilah makes Samson stronger, rather than the Biblical story wherein Delilah weakens Samson, stealing his strength. Thornton said that he did this purposefully, to showcase the strength of native women - how they often carry their communities on their backs, building them - and rarely get the credit.

As we walked out, E and my amazing friend Norah were silent. I wanted to be able to have words, but I didn't. The film had stunned us. E commented later that the movie made him want to get more involved in our community (later events in the Southwest further reinforced this desire). Norah noted to me recently, three weeks after the screening, that the movie was still with her.

I am reminded of a story in Paul Rogat Loeb's amazing book "The Impossible Will Take a Little While." In it, Danusha Veronica Goska writes in her essay, "Political Paralysis," about the importance of using the power we have. She writes that we may never know how the small powers we have may change the lives of those around us, if we but exercise them. This movie has inspired me - and I daresay most who see it - to examine their social responsibility - to use the powers we have, whether it is voting, recycling, riding a bike or taking public transportation to reduce the carbon footprint, to feeding the hungry...there are so many ways to make a difference in the world. We cannot expect to change the world through inaction - we must start, even if it feels small, to make some contribution to our communities. We never know where the ripple will end up...and that is the beauty of the thing, that change is electrifying, like a current, like a ripple. Every day is a choice.

To find out when and where the movie is screening near you, check out the film's website here.

On Bullying, Contested Bodies and Marking Difference

Bullying has been much in the news lately, unfortunately. The recent suicides of young students has drawn attention to the dramatic and detestable negative powers of bullies. Many more eloquent than I have commented on this, and expressed many of my sentiments. Notably too Dan Savage has created the It Gets Better Project, as a way to reach out to those who feel marked by their difference and ridiculed for it. Again, I have little to add to those who have already spoken about their sadness, their desire to support those who get bullied and to sit in solidarity with them, and to those who demand this kind of behavior STOP. Immediately.

I went to a talk at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute last week. It was a debate between reputed scholars Saba Mahmood and Joan Scott on secularism, religious liberty, and sex. Mahmood, who you should definitely read if you haven't, argued in her critical work The Politics of Piety that resistance is not the only form of agency. Intervening in scholarly traditions that have painted a person's agency or self-articulation as either succumbing to dominant, normalizing forces versus resisting them, Mahmood argues that this is a simplistic and non-useful way to look at the way agency works. In this talk, Mahmood discussed how often times, discussions of secularism locate themselves on gendered bodies. In plain talk, discussions of the "secular state" versus "freedom of religious expression" show up in fights over abortion, gay marriage, women's reproductive rights, etc. We do not see examples of straight men's bodies, and these mens' control over their own bodies - these discussions don't come up. These bodies are all gendered or non-hetero-male bodies, and control over them becomes an issue: does the government get the final say, or does the religious community? In this formulation, however, women's bodies and those practicing non-heterosexual behaviors are defined as "opposite" the norm - and straight men become the norm. It is precisely this kind of thinking, which manifests itself in othering behavior, that has so insidiously reared its ugly head in the bullying.

How can we accept difference, and hold a community of various different practices, without the fear of that difference? I would call for tolerance, but after reading Wendy Brown's Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, I can no longer advocate for tolerance. I advocate a space where all identities can be respected and shared, even and especially when they conflict. Even in New York, though, a city full of different identities and traditions, I have found troubling encounters with difference. Two nights ago, I got on the R train coming home from the gym after work. The train was full of commuters, so I boarded the train in a crush of people. After I sat down, I looked around and surveyed the car. I didn't immediately notice anything noteworthy, but then I saw a large black lump sitting in the seat across and diagonally from me. It is fairly common to see women wearing hijab or Hasidic dress, but I have never before seen a woman (and here, I am presuming this person was a woman) wearing a full burqa, with a mesh covering over the eyes, either here or in Syria or Tunisia. She wore a full black chador, with a cape covering her form so that I couldn't see her arms, and she had her purse and bags under her cloak. I felt guilty, after all my training in Middle East Studies, that she had been so invisible to me, and that I was so highly aware of her difference. Ashamed of looking at her more than I looked at the other passengers, I tried not to look at her (although I have problems with this, too - I was avoiding her more than I did anyone else on the train, thus treating her differently, further marking her difference). I began to be aware of others' reactions to her, people doing double-takes and staring openly. I wondered if she felt uncomfortable with the attention she garnered; I wondered if she was used to it or liked the extra attention. It has been argued that some Muslims have begun to dress more conservatively, and more "Islamically" (problematic, another post) post 9/11 to assert their identity (ies) in the face of anti-Muslim sentiment and behavior. I wondered if she rode the train often. These thoughts felt distressing - I was imagining her personality because of her dress, defining her on one expression (perhaps chosen, perhaps not) of an identity. I was not seeing her as a whole person. I was essentializing her, and in wondering whether she took the train, I was falling pretty to the idea that the woman in the veil must not know where she's going nor how to negotiate South Brooklyn geography or society. I admit this not because I am proud of it, but because I am deeply ashamed, that after my academic training and after my time in the Middle East, I'd still catch myself thinking this way. It troubles me, because I know better. Period. And I am always frustrated when I play the role of cultural ambassador, advocating for respect and understanding towards Middle Eastern cultures to my fellow Americans who don't know as much about the region as I do, who have never been, who haven't studied Arabic, whose questions make me sad about the lack of knowledge about the world in general and the Middle East in particular. How, then, can I judge these others for mistakes I still myself commit, for ignorance I fall back on when confronted with something, or someone, outside my comfort zone?

In watching the other passengers negotiate this woman's presence, I saw some passengers got up and moved to other seats, or passed through the car, tripping on other passengers, as they stared at her. It was an uncomfortable ride, not just because of the MTA's orange plastic seats, but because of the social norms, fear, and tensions that were laid bare. I was uncomfortable with myself, for my marking of this woman's difference, for my reaction, for my lack of being as postcolonial/evolved/understanding/generous as I'd like to be. I did not bully this woman, but I did mark her as different with my behavior, just like everyone else on the train. So I am led to wonder, what can I/we learn from this profound discomfort? Is this discomfort an integral part of accepting an increasingly interconnected world community wherein each person carries many identities that articulate themselves across and into other identities, challenging our easy assumptions about people, the world, the way things are? Perhaps, like adolescence, this strange in-between-ness means that is fertile ground, that there is a space of transitioning, and if we can learn to accept that things are not always the way we imagine them to be, we can see more fully the world around us, holding our experiences with dignity, and without judgment. And that starts with me. I can't control the behavior of others, but I can work on my own.

I realize this little post will not convince swarms of people to change their behavior, especially since someone far more famous asked the same question I am posing many years ago. In honor of John Lennon's 70th birthday, I will end this post by asking you to:

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world


PS: Another great book on difference and the modern era is Rabbi Jonathan Sack's The Dignity of Difference.

Toby's Public House: The Public of South Slope, Brooklyn

I biked past Toby's Public House on the way home from the Y the other day - I know, how stereotypically Brooklyn am I? Stay with me, though, because it's really exciting to find great places in the South Slope and Sunset Park. There are quite a few new places cropping up, rendering the gentrification visible.

So I tried Toby's Public House, which is altogether charming. It's a very New York/East Coast style bar, with exposed brick, brass fittings on the bar with the mirrored mantle, and lots of long wooden tables. Above the bar, individual biersteins with numbers written on the bottoms in grease-pencil hang on hooks, reachable with the bartenders hook. This is a place for locals, which, if you didn't get that from the biersteins, you would have figured it out when the bartender and the waitresses knew many of the patrons by name. The whole place had a very intimate vibe, from the open space to the open kitchen area where you can watch the cooks preparing your pizza and tossing it into the coal oven in the corner.

We ate and drank - justified by the fact that we have to really sample this place, right?

The manicotti appetizer:

I didn't manage to get pictures of the other courses because they disappeared so quickly: the arugula & parmesan salad, the coal oven Del Macellaio pizza, and tiramisu. All delicious: especially the pizza and the tiramisu, oh the tiramisu!

Highly recommend, & can't wait to go back.
Check out their website and menu here.
6th Ave @ 21st Street, South Slope, Bklyn, NY

Strains of the Old and the New: the NMAI in DC

The above panel is displayed in the entryway to the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington DC. From this first indication, the visitor realizes that the museum will point to a more holistic understanding of culture. I've read a bit of the criticism and controversy about the museum, from the embarrassing displays of racism and blatant ignorance, to concerns about the museum's claim to representing indigenous cultures of an entire hemisphere, a rather extensive mandate. The museum has symbolic significance with its location on the National Mall, which is of paramount importance to long marginalized Native cultures.


From the more traditional displays of beadwork to explanations of hybridized celebrations like Dia de Los Muertos, the museum's display and structure begins on the fourth floor after visitors enter through a cavernous lobby that is structurally beautiful, with concentric circles on the ceiling - it's reminiscent of the Guggenheim. I was directed to start on the 4th floor and work my way down. The fourth floor contains the "Our Universes" and "Our Peoples" exhibitions. These focus on the living cultures in the Western hemisphere today.



The displays are structured to highlight the contributions of community curators, including portraits and video, and focusing on individual tribes. The overall result is that visitors understand that Native Americans are diverse, with different languages and traditions in various tribes that live in many parts of the hemisphere, and that they are alive today. Notably, many of the portraits and videos feature Native Americans wearing everyday clothes - the museum does not give the visitor easy, Orientalizing pictures of Native Americans wearing beads and headdresses and other visual clues that blur temporal boundaries, allowing Native Americans to be isolated and held in the past and prevented from being contemporary. Simultaneously, the museum does present historical traditions and artifacts from native communities' history, attempting to show Native Americans as contemporary contributors drawing from centuries of history, community, and artistic traditions.


The displays are beautiful and sleek, and I found the view from reverse equally beautiful, with the shadows of the objects shining through the linen screens and the glass in geometric constellations. Representation is always through a glass, darkly.

Displays of objects are shown with seeming binaries: guns (instruments of dispossession and resistance), bibles (dispossession and resilience) and treaties (dispossession and survival) are shown as both instruments employed against Native Americans in the Americas, but also utilized by Native Americans creatively and aggressively in their own right. These dichotomies are not proposed as strict binaries that are unresolvable, but to show the complex social results of acts meant to affect certain consequences but indubitably and inevitably caused others. This graceful and simultaneous duality reminds me of the work of Saba Mahmood, who argues in The Politics of Piety that resistance is not the only form of agency. Her critical intervention here is to give voice, agency, and nuance to the complexities of individual acts in a postcolonial setting. We must be aware that the story is never just one or two sides, but multiple, and look for the nuances of intersecting realities and potentialities.



A community will always make something their own, including these Bibles which were translated into many languages and decorated according to individual bands' aesthetic traditions. The arrowheads displayed (see below) were also arranged in a visually interesting and challenging way - rather than being seen as implements of death and destruction, they are arranged in curving waves to resemble the ocean. Taken from afar, they look like swarms of birds, swirling eddies of water, or Hokusai's The Wave. We are pushed to see familiar objects in new contexts that uncover their beauty.




On the third floor, the exhibition "Our Lives" included several alcoves examining the lives and recent histories of several specific tribes. This included the Yakama Nation in Washington, to which my cousin Arthur belongs.



The museum thus far had focused on quotidian objects from the histories of several bands, as well as representative artifacts from the history of European intervention and colonization of the Americas. Now, with this theoretical grounding, I continued in to the contemporary art exhibition. The exhibition "Vantage Point" showcases the museum's acquisitions of contemporary Native American art. I particularly enjoyed Marie Watt's In the Garden (Corn, Beans, Squash), a warm pink patchwork of wool pieces in geometric shapes tumbling through the center of the piece. I enjoy art incorporating textiles, such as the work of Ghada Amer. Lorenzo Clayton's Richard's 3rd Hand #16 also caught my eye with his deft usage of muted earth tones and the piece's incorporation of furniture. Nadia Myre's series Indian Act blends text with craft, using white beads to replace letters on a page of text, choosing to highlight the smallness of these letters by surrounding the white beads with red. This color inversion too is striking - white beads in a red background, covering or juxtaposed next to black letters on a white page.

The exhibition also included skate art, showing the deck with graffiti-like pop art. It struck me as a shame that this deck would face the ground and not be seen.

The exhibition "Up Where We Belong" focused on the little-lauded but often well-known contributions of Native Americans to popular music, from the blues (Mildred Bailey, Oscar Pettiford) to Link Wray, Redbone & Buffy Sainte-Marie. It was interesting to see the evolution of music in the United States, and have the contributions of Native Americans highlighted. This is another example of the museum's foregrounding of Native Americans' contemporary contributions.


As I walked back to the train station to return to NY, I noticed the inscription above Union Station. While I agree with the quotation's insight that traveling requires and inspires a certain knowledge, the first part of the comment shows the ubiquitous, treacherous nature of colonialism. It still, literally, shines down upon us, in our nation's capital - the behavior is inscribed in our monuments, watching over us on a daily basis. We are far from free of this dangerous mentality. Which is why the NMAI is necessary, the way it is. The institution shouldn't have to argue that Native Americans are still alive - shouldn't have to represent everyone. But for now, that's the reality, and the museums gracefully straddles its compromises.