Response to Richard Blanco

Reading this week’s poetry I kept wondering what family meant to the speaker and how he or she define family. For different people family can be and mean different things—family can be close friends, a wider community one is a part of, pets, and intermediate family. I think Richard Blanco’s poetry does a great job at showing the ambiguity of what family is or what it means for the speaker.

One of my favorite pieces was “Mexican Almuerzo in New England” because it tells a tall a mother and son relationship, particularly one who is of Latino/a decent. I looked up the word Almuerzo because I was not sure what the word meant in Spanish, so it translates to “Mexican [Lunch] in New England.”

On the surface the poem is about a mother who is visiting her son (Alfredo) in New England and preparing a traditional Mexican dinner for him. However, if one digs deeper into the piece we can perhaps see that it is a piece about the Mexican culture and the strangeness of making home away home. The speaker does a beautiful job at doing that through imagery of traditional Mexican customs.

Dish by dish she tries to recreate Mexico in her son’s New England Kitchen, taste-testing el mole from the pot, stirring everything: el chorizo-con-papas, el picadillo, el guacamole….As we eat, she apologizes: not as good as at home, pero bueno…it is the best I can do in this strange kitchen which Sele has tried to disguise with papel picadi banners of colored tissue, paper displaying our names in pinata pink, maiz yellow, and Guadalupe green.

This quotation reminded me of the times when my mom and aunts got together in the kitchen to cook for big family events, particularlymy grandma’s birthday. They would try to “re-create” their mother’s traditional Mexican recipes, but could never make it taste the same, and they ould try to decorate the house in traditional Mexican colors, so my grandmother would feel at home.


And in the quote above that is exactly what the mother (Marina) is trying to do for her son—to bring a little of her home (Mexico) to his home in New England. I find it interesting that Sele (who I assume may be the sons wife) decorated the kitchen in with items that seem as if they would be considered Mexican: “disguise with papel picadi banners of colored tissue, paper displaying our names in pinata pink, maiz yellow, and Guadalupe green. I find it interesting because it almost seems as if Sele is trying to embrace the Mexican culture when she herself may not be of Mexican decent.


I love how the poem reads, it is like a narrative, and the combination of Spanish and English works for me. In a way it shows two cultures interconnecting the sons westernized culture and the mother's mexican culture.


I also love the last line of the poem:

Home is a forgotten recipe, a spice we can find nowhere, a taste we can never reproduce.

I like this line a lot because it reminds me of the stories my mother use to tell me of when she first came to the U.S from Mexico. She would always say that California was her home, but it would never compare to the time when she was living in Guladajara. She also said that moving here, made her lose a sense of her culture because life in the U.S was different, and in a way the quote above seems to be indicating a nostalgic feeling of home and never being able to recreate it 100%.

This was by far my favorite poem because I was able to relate to it in many ways!

-Lizzie Chaidez