Piragua and Piragua Vendor’s Cart
At a church barbecue today I told a Latino brother from the congregation about my childhood memories eating Carvel ice cream. Mario, a brown skin Honduran American about my age (mid-40s), laughed. “Carvel Ice Cream, that was a suburban thing man! Growing up in the South Bronx [in the 1970s] we never had luxuries like Carvel or Mc Donald’s. Those companies never considered opening franchises in the Bronx, they were too scared. When we thought of Carvel growing up, we thought of about the suburbs, you know Long Island, Westchester, and places like that.” He went on to say, “We had piraguas,” Latin American snow cones. Piragua venders with small carts roamed the streets of the South Bronx and Spanish Harlem selling coconut, lemon, strawberry, passion fruit, mango, pineapple and other flavored snow cones that they made literally from scratch on the spot as they shaved ice from a large block and then flavored it to your personal taste. Cubans called them granizados and Dominicans frio frio. Food and food franchises are indicators of class and ethnicity. Until Mario's comment, I naively assumed that children all over metropolitan New York experienced Carvel ice cream like me. Now it’s clear that Carvel sold franchises to people wealthy and white enough to open stores in white suburban business district in places such as Croton and Hartsdale. Croton did not have piragua vendors and still don’t selling tropically flavored ices. But we had lots of Italians and pizza parlors selling fabulous cherry, coconut, and lemon Italian ices. Thus in short, when you see a Carvel, piragua vendor, or a pizza parlor selling Italian ices, you can pretty much tell the class and ethnicity of the area.
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