Wladimir Zabaleta: Splashing Caribbean colors on universal art

Wladimir Zabaleta

To have extracted “Las Meninas” by Diego Velázquez from the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, is undoubtedly the most precious gifts that the Venezuelan artist Wladimir Zabaleta, 67, has given the world and especially Latin America.

Velázquez’s eternally famous work, considered one of the symbols of Western painting, was reinvented with the mist of the Caribbean sea and the mischievous brushes of one of Venezuela’s contemporary artists who enjoys a wide international exposure.

“The fascinating thing about the work of Velázquez is its realism. And a realism that is so beautiful that it does not hide the ugliness of the people,” Zabaleta said as he approached a monumental Menina, one of his own, titled “Tribute to Our Lady,” which is perhaps the largest Infanta Margarita (queen’s daughter) ever created. Situated on the north side of Valencia,Venezuela, It was unveiled on Jan. 27 as part of the beginning of a cultural program titled “Ciudad Museo” (City Museum), which uses very large outdoor sculptures to highlight creative talent.

Tribute to Our Lady

“The genius of Velazquez and his infinite genius make you forget for a moment the subjective ugliness of people and you fall in love with painting, with sculpture, with art.”

Zabaleta fixed his gaze for a few moments on his work, then described it as if he were reciting a poem: “She is like a little lantern in a large tunnel of artistic needs,” he said, adding that “only art and education allow us to dream. Although I do not paint dreams, I get inspired by a work to make others dream.”

This virtuoso has developed his artistic talent not only in painting but also in drawing, etching and sculpture. He found places to expand his creative ideas beyond the borders of Venezuela. Thus, France, Spain, Mexico, Italy and the United States, especially New York, have influenced his particular style.

His stay in New York, from 1989 to 1993, is considered by Bélgica Rodríguez in her book, “Zabaleta,” as the “years of prolific pictorial production.” She also said that city offered him a break for his creative needs, allowing “unprecedented existential and artistic experiences.”

Zabaleta said he will continue creating, using his Caribbean palette, “but in an elaborate manner. I do not paint for the sake of painting. I do not create for the mere fact of creating.” He said that “being at the forefront means transforming a spatial object into a symbolic object.”

About Zabaleta

Born in Valencia, Venezuela, on May 12, 1944.

He studied at the Arturo Michelena School of Fine and Applied Arts in Venezuela. He became the school’s director in 1979.

Between 1971 and 1979 he was director of the Carmelo Fernández School of Visual Arts in San Felipe, Venezuela.

In 2009 he received an honorary doctorate in education from the University of Carabobo in Venezuela.

Did you know?

 In Mexico in 2005 the National Symphony Orchestra premiered the suite, “Dos Visiones” (Two Visions). The piece was inspired by the work of the same name, created by Zabaleta.

Later, the Long Beach Museum of Latin American Art in California, acquired the original piece for its permanent collection.

Meeting 'El Ratón Pérez'

When a Hispanic child begins to loose his or her baby teeth, 'El Ratón Pérez', yes,  a mouse steps in. 

His job is similar to that of the Tooth Fairy: He will replace a tiny tooth, which has been placed under a pillow, with a gift; frequently, it is money.

The Latin rodent is not the Hispanic version of the Tooth Fairy. It would be impossible to imagine señor Pérez with a pair of golden wings and a magic wand. This sort of cultural melding is addressed by René Colato Lainez in his book in English, “The Tooth Fairy meets El Ratón Pérez,” which is about this character from childhood.

The intellectual paternity of Ratón Pérez has been conferred to Luis Coloma Roldán, a Spanish priest, writer and journalist who in the late nineteenth century wrote a story for King Alfonso XIII – when Alfonso was just 8 years old. 

The book begins: “The boy king Buby I placed his tooth I under the pillow, as is customary, and waited impatiently for the arrival of the little mouse. He had fallen asleep when a light touch woke him.”

However, some literary experts have suggested that the image of the mouse appeared before the story by Coloma Roldán in 1877, in the book “Stories, prayers, riddles and popular sayings” by Cecilia Francisca Bohl de Faber, whose pseudonym was Fernán Caballero. In the work, Pérez the mouse was married to a little rat named Presumida (“Conceited”).

The character was portrayed in a movie in 2006 directed by Juan Pablo Buscarini and titled “Pérez, the Little Mouse of Your Dreams.” The film, with 3-D animation techniques, portrayed the children’s character in a melodrama with other rodents who are rivals and kidnap Pérez to keep him from his job of collecting teeth.

Today, Hispanic children wait for Ratón Pérez, who according to the legend, arrives wearing a straw hat, sunglasses and gold shoes and with a red knapsack on his back, and then replaces teeth with gifts.

 

Did you know?

The original manuscript of Luís Coloma Roldán lies in the vault of the library of the Royal Palace in Madrid, Spain.

The Madrid City Council paid tribute to the rodent, installing a commemorative plaque at 8 Arenal Street in Madrid, the location that Coloma Roldán used as the mouse’s home, and including the following text: “Ratón Pérez lived here in a cookie box, according to the story that father Coloma wrote for the child King Alfonso XIII.”

Taking a Siesta

Have you ever felt that lethargy between 1 and 3 in the afternoon? If so, you are not alone. That sleepiness, which cannot overcome even by a cup of Colombian café, has a remedy that was given to us by the Spanish conquistadors: a siesta … a nap.

No doubt, it is an endangered species, and it is virtually unknown to Americans.

The siesta if for some a symbol of laziness, especially in a world that spins at a million miles per hours and where almost everything is operating 24 hours a day.

Did you know?

The word siesta is form the Latin “sexta” for “sixth hour”, meaning six hours after sunrise, or midday.

Photo by Juan Miret

Understanding guacamole: sauce of the gods

Can you imagine some beef tacos smothered in guacamole? Or better yet, dipping some crispy golden tacos into such a green dip, which sometimes hides a burst of spiciness arising from serrano chiles.

Anyway, guacamole has become an ideal sauce for much of the Mexican cuisine.

“Avocado, tomato, onion, salt, cilantro and serrano chile.” Those ingredients and in that order are what Emiliano Gutiérrez, owner of a Mexican restaurant in East Tulsa, says are the elements of what he calls classic guacamole. “Now if you want a version of the original recipe, you can turn the guacamole into a sauce. That one has avocado, serrano chiles, lemon and salt.”

Gutiérrez, a native of Nogales, Mexico, says there cannot be grilled beef without guacamole. “It will be something else; but if you don’t accompany it that way, then you are missing a good part of the dish,” he said as he revealed a few secrets about his sauce.

“If you leave the pit on the plate, it maintains its color longer. Of course, lemon can help out, but it adds a bit of acidity,” he said, adding that “the most important thing is to prepare it when it is going to be used. It should be fresh, and if you have a molcajete, that’s much better.”

Claudia García provides guacamole to six taco vendors in East Tulsa. “My recipe has no avocado, but it is the best guacamole,” said the cook, who is originally from Puebla, Mexico. “This guacamole is based on tomatillos and poblano chiles.”

García’s version takes a little more time than traditional guacamole, but the advantage is that it lasts longer, especially because it doesn’t undergo the oxidation that is typical of avocado.

García says the tomatillos are roasted with the peppers. “Then they are ground.” The flavor arises with the addition of onions, garlic, cilantro, lemon, salt and pepper.

But since tastes vary like day and night, Silvia Leal stepped outside the box and created a recipe for guacamole with crab. “It’s from the family,” said Leal, a cook at a restaurant in Plaza Santa Cecilia in east Tulsa. “It is very tasty because aside from the crab, it has mayonnaise, red pepper and crushed tortilla chips.” Perhaps because she is originally from the coastal city of Acapulco, in Mexico, she added seafood to the classic salsa. “It tastes better like that.”

Sandra Duarte, Leal’s helper, said that in her native state of Jalisco in Mexico, the pacholas, an unusual breaded and fried steak, is served with guacamole. “But with habanero chile,” she said. “So it will be spicy and tasty.”

With avocado, with tomatillos or even with crab, guacamole is already part of the universal cuisine; it is without doubt, a delicious appetizer. It was with good reason, according to pre-Hispanic mythology, that Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god, offered the recipe for guacamole to the Toltecs, who spread it throughout the American territory.

How does one select the perfect avocado?

Since this fruit – yes, technically it is a fruit, although it is not sweet – is at the heart of guacamole, knowing how to choose them is critical.

Bonifacio Hernández, a cook at the Morelos grocery store in southwest of Tulsa, says the fruit should be “at its mature stage, not too green and not too ripe.” To find out, “it must be squeezed. If it is too soft, it is overripe.”

Did you know?

The word guacamole is from the Nahuatl language, derived from the word ahuacatl, meaning avocado, and molli, meaning mole or sauce. The avocado had an erotic significance for the Aztecs, so much so that women could not pick them, because they represented testicles.

Photos by Juan Miret

Splattering flavors: Mancha Manteles, a style of cooking

Hispanic cuisine gives the name “tablecloth stainer” to those dishes whose flavor creates such an extraordinary ecstasy in the diner that it results in spattering of sauce and juice upon anything in the vicinity, including clothes and the tablecloth.

These mancha manteles or stainers of tablecloths are more than just recipes, they are “a style of cooking.

A real mancha manteles should cover three of the senses and thus please our memory; thus the sumptuous dish should fully satisfy one’s sight, smell and – obviously – taste.

Others, perhaps more purists as to the way one should cook a “tablecloth stainer,” turn to complicated dishes.

That is how Héctor Zagal Arreguín tells it in an article published in 2010 in the Mexican magazine “Istmo.” 

A mancha manteles “borrows the fruits from the chile en nogada (chiles in walnut sauce) and absorbs them into its reddish and spicy sauce,” he says. “Pieces of pork swim about unbothered around pieces of apple and pear. I do not know if, as in the case of mole, it was nuns who were the wise creators of the mancha manteles, or if it was due to patriotic maidens, as in the case of the chiles en nogada – green, white and red, the national colors.”

Zagal Arreguín is emphatic when explaining that the food is not a plain meal. Mexican and Hispanic cuisine is not a sea of destructive flavors composed of chili, mixed in with beans and tortillas, but a way of seeing life. It is a challenge to the courtly rules that come to us from the Spanish colony and that is why today we have our tablecloth-staining meals.

We have them because our kitchen is a hearth full of eccentricities and explosion of flavors, where staining a tablecloth with a food is a compliment to tasty cooking. “Among the griddles and pans lies the secret word of Mexican cuisine: mancha manteles,” says Zagal Arreguín.

Reviving the mancha manteles

In 2010, when Mexico was celebrating its 200 years of independence and 100 years of since its revolution, the Cloister of Sor Juana put out a call seeking people to reinvent a Mexican recipe for use in the celebratory menu.

A Mexican culinary group known as Lienzo Culinario decided to participate in the category of soups with a mancha manteles version, a stew based on chiles and beef, with a deep chocolate flavor, served with white and yellow sweet potatoes, and garnished with fried plantains and julienne strips of fried yellow sweet potato and ancho chile.

The inspiration for this soup comes from the timeless mancha manteles and has a bibliographic reference in the recipes of Doña Dominga de Guzman, a Mexican housewife who for 50 years collected her family’s recipes.

Photo by Juan Miret

The universal remedy, right?

Flu or cold? Vicks VapoRub. Muscle pain? Vicks VapoRub. Headache? Vicks VapoRub. Cough? Vicks VapoRub. Insect bite? Vicks VapoRub. And the list goes one, because for most Hispanic, that topical ointment of eucalyptus, menthol and camphor is a sort of divine elixir. It is the panacea for many problems and pains.

Many may remember la abuelita rubbing Vicks VapoRub, with its unmistakable odor, on the chest of her nietos.

Others add a few teaspoons of the ointment in hot water, so that the patient might inhale the medicinal aromas. And of course, there were always a back massage to ease the muscle aches brought on by a cold.

Some people, being more daring, followed rituals to stop a cough. Such a magical cure penetrated via the feel, which had to be rubbed with Vicks VapoRub, then socks were slipped on, followed by sleep. Some say that this allows one to enjoy a peaceful night without coughing.

This miraculous jar of salve will continue to be found in the Hispanic first-aid kits ... because it is the universal remedy, right?

Important note

This article provides general information and it not intended to be a medical guide. Any kind type of treatment should be prescribed by a specialist.

The ‘Nopal’ Cactus: symbol of Mexican cuisine

The pleasurable mole poblano, the irreplaceable tortillas and the universally enjoyed pico de gallo salsa are just a tiny sampling of Mexican cuisine, which in 2010 was included by UNESCO on the list of the Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

That explosion of strong, intense and spicy flavors is unequivocal proof of cultural blending and the mixture of pre-Hispanic traditions with those of the Spanish colony. But where Mexico has broken the mold – or perhaps the pot – is in the use of nopales, a type of cactus also known as prickly pear and in Spanish as cactus, tuna o chumbera.

It seems almost an absurd ingredient for cooking – but for the culinary creativity of the Mexicans, who have made the cactus a plant of life, with almost mythological roots, given that when it dries, it generates a new one. The nopal even appears as a symbol in Mexico’s national emblem.

Tips for cooking nopales

Ideally it is best to boil the nopales in a copper pot, adding, in addition to water, salt to taste. Cooking takes about 10 minutes after the first boil, or until they are tender. They are then drained and rinsed with cold water.

If a copper pot is not handy, then a pinch of baking soda should be added when it boils.

To keep a slimy texture from developing on the nopalitos while boiling, add the skins of a couple of green tomatoes.

To slice nopales into julienne slices, first cut in half vertically, then slice those halves horizontally.