Zaida Cotes of Clan Ipuana
A day at Ranchería Guaymaral on Colombia’s La Guajira peninsula.
“My name is Zaida Cotes of the clan Ipuana,” says the iconic Wayúu cook as we enter her kitchen at Ranchería Guaymaral in the arid Colombian peninsula of La Guajira. “I’m traditional cook and I love the kitchen. Cooking is a passion for me. My time in the kitchen begins at 4:30 in the morning, giving love to the kitchen.”
She is the mother of 11 children, 7 girls and 4 boys she goes on to explain. Several of them, as well as grandchildren, still live with her at the ranchería, a cluster of rural homes anchored by a central communal kitchen, which is standard of most Wayúu settlements.
“Our ancestral food is a food that is very healthy,” she proclaims as we discuss the ingredients she cooks with. “We reach our 70s or 80s by ourselves. Not for valuing what we don’t have.”
La Guajira was long isolated off from the rest of Colombia. The Spanish never conquered the Wayúu and evangelization didn’t begin to occur until the early 20th century. Still, the highway never reached the region until the 1970s, so the Wayúu were mostly left to themselves until then and their traditional food is relatively still intact.
Goat, introduced 500 years ago, is an important piece of their cuisine, as the goat auction and slaughterhouse in Riohacha suggests, and Zaida uses every part of the animal. The largest cuts are grilled over wood fires, while the innards and entrails are used to make friche, where they are boiled and then fried in their own fat.
Corn, especially the reddish purple criolla corn, also called maíz chichiguare, maíz cariaco or sometimes the generic maíz morado, as well as white and yellow varieties, are toasted and eaten; ground and used for arepas, bollos (tamales) and mazamorras (porridges); or fermented to make chicha. There’s the bright red fruit of the dagger cactus (Stenocereus griseus), iguaraya, guamacho (Pereskia guamacho), jobo (Spondias mombin) and guácimo (Guazuma ulmifolia), which are eaten fresh, squeezed into juices or fermented into chicha, while the seeds of a legume called pülantana make a coffee-like drink without the caffeine. They hunt are rabbits and iguanas. Collect coconuts and grow ahuyama, or squash, and purple beans they call kapeshuna. Closer to the coast they fish and collect small fish called cachirra when the water from salt lagoons they live in evaporates. Everything Zaida cooks is mostly without condiments of any sort, aside of a little salt and wild herbs, yet it’s delicious and full of flavor.
Zaida’s kitchen is a voice for the abundance when working with the desert, not against it. It seems counterintuitive that this arid ecosystem should have such diversity of ingredients, but La Guajira is indeed rich. While its gastronomy is certainly lacking in many things, what can be created with what it does contain needs recognized, researched and colossally encouraged. This is a region where thousands die each year from unpredictable climactic conditions, such as droughts that can last for years. While I was there a period of unprecedented rainfall had just occurred, turning the desert humid. Zaida said she lost 40 goats because of it. That’s not a small amount for a rural homestead, yet she and her family are more resilient than most.
In my opinion, the best cooks are the ones most in tune with the natural world around them. They are cognizant of seasonal shifts, as many are, but they are also acutely aware of the forces behind them. Zaida and her family are immersed in their ecosystem. They aren’t just living in it, but a part of it.
Take her method for making corn flour, for example. It is something I’ve never seen or considered. She doesn’t heat it in a dry pan or nixtamalize it. She takes a pot and heats up sand.
“Not just any sand will do,” she explains. It’s sand that has been dug up from the bottom of the río Ranchería. It has to be this sand. Other sand doesn’t work. It’s hard to understand why by just looking at it, but I know that there is probably some mineral balance in river sand that makes the difference when she adds the kernels of maíz chichiguare. As she stirs the corn with a large spoon made from totumo wood it becomes toasted by the soft heat of the sand and not by the sharp heat from touching the pan. The sand cooks it, while keeping it from burning and better expressing the multitudes of flavors contained within, as I tasted with her arepa de chichiguare, or a soup where she mixed it with ahuyama and goat milk.
Zaida’s integration with the landscape goes well beyond just cooking, however. It’s every aspect of her life. If you spend time with her, you’ll likely meet Nila, her sahino, or collared peccary, that the family took in years ago. It follows us around and wants petted like dog. She’s fond of rolling to her side and gets tummy rubs with feet. It’s been with her for decades. There’s also a young tigrillo that lost its mother that runs around like a common house cat, not to mention colorful parrots that chat away on fences and try to snatch some of the food.
Visitors ask her how she can live with wild animals? She replies: “How do we know we’re not the wild ones?”