Pintadillo con primitivo: women who preserve black tradition in Caquetá

The hands of professors Mireya Emperatriz, Eyda, and María Hilda shred a pintadillo to make a bacalao desmechado (shredded codfish) dish. In Chocó, where the recipe originates, it’s made with tuna. Here, in Florencia, Caquetá, they use pintadillo, a speckled river fish, because the sea and tuna are far away. The pintadillo has more bones to remove, but its flavor has an earthy, almost sweet quality that pairs well with the recipe. Around the pots, they talk about the best achiote, the primitivo plantain also called píldoro in the Pacific, and the women who taught them how to make coconut rice. The younger women are learning and asking questions. At the tables outside, the elders wait, seated. They all belong to the Red de Mujeres Afroamazónicas – Ubuntu Foundation, an organization of Afro-Colombian women living in the department of Caquetá. They come from San José, San Vicente del Caguán, Curillo, Puerto Rico, and El Paujil and have gathered here, in this city surrounded by the jungle, to talk about home gardens and Black cuisine.

Yohaysa tells me that the Afro-descendant population arrived in the department in several waves. The first was in the late 1950s, seeking land to work. The second wave, in the 1970s, was colonization sponsored by the Agrarian Reform Institute, INCORA. In the 1980s, the third wave began, which they call the academic wave. At that time in Caquetá, coca and, to a lesser extent, rubber and livestock, were such good business that few wanted to dedicate their lives to other arts and trades. A farmer who grew coca tells Diario de Paz that, during the boom, they paid about $15,000 pesos for a kilo of coca leaf; much more once they learned to process it into coca paste and began to participate in some sections of its transport. A teacher earned $11,250 a month. The same could be made with coca in days. For this reason, there was a shortage of school teachers in the department. The rumor spread through families and acquaintances and reached the Pacific Coast and the teacher training schools of Chocó. Teachers came from there. Yohaysa is the daughter of one of them.

With the help of the Caquetá Educators’ Housing Association, the teachers built the Yapurá neighborhood in Florencia. It is now a quiet network of hot streets, interrupted by a park or a stream with exuberant vegetation. The bromeliads perched on the trees are a reminder that the city was once the Amazon jungle and that the jungle is like a crouching animal that always threatens to reclaim its domain. In the middle of one of those blocks that reaches the park is the house of the Red de Mujeres Afroamazónicas – Ubuntu Foundation, with a colorful mural of a Black woman painted on the facade.

Lenis, Mireya, and Yohaysa in front of the FREMA headquarters, in the Yapurá neighborhood of Florencia.

The first floor has an ethnic food restaurant, exquisitely decorated in pinks and greens, and an exhibition of ancestral drinks from the Pacific. The second is the meeting space for the Foundation’s activities. FREMA, Yohaysa says, is a child they gave birth to in 2019. At the time, there were Afro-descendant organizations in the department, but most were led by men. There was no organization of women for Black women. In their first meetings, they talked about self-recognition, safeguarding, and the exchange of knowledge, traditional medicine, and midwifery. Later, they added work on reading and the Harambee library, specializing in Black literature, and other training spaces in politics, cooking, Black aesthetics, and popular communication. The story of the Foundation’s creation is interrupted in the recording by the affectionate greetings and laughter of Yohaysa’s companions. She had just arrived in Florencia after a trip for her other job, at a humanitarian organization, and they hadn’t seen her for days. It’s easy to tell that they love her, and I think that part of what they have recovered is this: a home to meet with neighbors and their daughters, a place to love each other.

The Recipes

First, the fish, whether pintadillo or tuna, is cooked in a small amount of water with rooftop herbs: thyme, bay leaf, and cimarrón cilantro planted in home gardens, which is stronger and has thicker leaves than common cilantro. Meanwhile, in another pot, a stew of tomato, bell pepper, with onion, garlic, and annatto is prepared. Once the fish is boiled, it is shredded and combined with the stew. It is served with primitivos, those small green plantains. I read in a news story from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that it is the most produced banana variety in Caquetá, that it is typical of the traditional peasant diet of the Amazon foothills and that they have tried to encourage its cultivation to replace coca. The teachers put the whole primitivos into the boiling water, unpeeled, and after a few minutes, the skin opened up like a flower.

Shredded codfish with primitivos. FREMA recovers and reclaims the ancestral knowledge of Afro-Amazonian cuisine.

We arrived at the workshop invited by “Profe” Mireya, as everyone calls her, the pillar on which the foundation is built. I would like to tell her whole story: the theft of her father that led her to Caquetá and left her there without telling anyone, the host families, the night high school classes after working during the day cleaning houses and taking care of children, the course to enter the teaching profession, the students who asked her for help when paramilitary leaders came looking for them. The most important thing, in any case, is that she was a teacher for 35 years in the rural district of Campolejano in Solita, Caquetá. She always liked community work, she tells me. “Upstream and downstream, that’s what I like.” Upon retiring, she accompanied schools in Putumayo and discovered that some only had latrines. She managed to get the Colombian Flower Exporters Association to donate enough to build the bathrooms. When they were going to build them, they realized that the classroom had to be moved because the river was going to wash it away, so they did. She says she always had an “angel” and that’s why things work out for her, but it’s also because of her audacity and joyful persistence. Now she works at FREMA. She wants the traditions of her ancestors to stop being lost. It is not an exercise in nostalgia, or not just that, but of resilience. From there, they resist the injustice against women and Afro-descendants, which seems to always reinvent itself.

Caquetá is recognized as an indigenous department, but Black people also live there.

One of the youngest participants in the cooking workshop is Mercy Ivonne Ararad. She tells us that, despite being the daughter of a Black man, she did not know his traditions until now. No one had told her. This happens frequently in Caquetá. It is partly due to hidden racism, partly to migration and the passage of time. “There is a void in families, but organizations come to complement it,” says Mireya. At FREMA, for example, they also teach how to love and care for curly hair. When she returns to Puerto Rico, her rural community, Mercy is going to try to start an Afro dance group again. Dancing is her favorite thing, along with pasta and seafood casserole.

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Elda María Quiñones Angulo, whom everyone calls “La tía” (The aunt), is an 82-year-old midwife from the banks of the Caquetá River. She has brought dozens of children into the world and knows the secrets of chilangua and pronto alivio, escancel, moringa, and cargadita. She knows how to cure “mal aire” (bad air) and “espanto” (fright), how to make plants grow, how to make food last, how to tie the umbilical cord so it doesn’t bleed. She says that the worst destruction of the countryside is coca, because people got used to having money in their pockets and no longer plant. Now, they buy plantains at the supermarket. The fumigations left the earth without blood, someone else said, “and if it has no blood, it has no life to give.” They also forgot, they say, the network of mutual support they brought with them from the Pacific upon arrival. Before, “if someone hunted, every house would get a piece of the prey.”

On the way from the center to Yapurá, the taxi drivers told us that coca is not selling and that businesses were empty at Christmas. I read recently that, faced with the crisis, a resurgence of other illegal businesses was expected. I thought about what they told us, “there is something essential that many have forgotten,” and I thought about the women who still remember it.

Notebook with typical Pacific recipes written by the women of the foundation.

This article is part of the special #TejidoVivo, a product of a journalistic alliance between the Dejusticia study center and El Espectador.