Kultura highlights: Rachel Lucero
I spoke with Rachel Lucero - the Filipino-American cooking queen behind "The Sago Show" - on how she uses food to help navigate her Filipino-American identity.
Pinoy highlights is a mini section on KULTURA where I interview Filipino and Filipino-American artists, content creators, designers, and writers who inspire me. I write about who they are and what they do, and how that intersects with cultural identity; as well as share my appreciation and support, to empower other Filipino creatives like myself.
Last year, I wrote a story on the generational differences and their perspectives on the anti-Asian hate crimes that surged the nation during peak COVID-19 pandemic. I spoke with a wide range of Filipino-Americans, from a student to a registered nurse in California, and a content creator based in the Bay Area. All had different and interesting insights when I asked about their “Filipino-ness” and how they see it and defined it in light of the atrocities we saw in our community.
I reached out once again to Rachel Lucero, the Filipino-American queen behind the Bay Area-based “The Sago Show”, to discuss more about her Filipino cultural identity and the concept behind her series. I’ve been watching and following her videos, all of which are tutorials on making traditional and modern Filipino food, with voiceovers of the historical and cultural significance of the dish she is making. There was one particular reel I loved, where she is seen in the process of making champorado, a Filipino delicacy that is rice porridge mixed with cacao. The dish is typically sweet, where you can either mix it with sugar or condensed milk. In the background, she is giving a brief history of cacao in the Philippines, and how it was introduced through Spain in the 17th century when they wanted to grow cacaos in the Philippines because of their ideal conditions.
I’ve always thought that food was such a universal language - it a necessity! Through “The Sago Show”, Rachel learns more about her identity and cultural history through cooking. “I think for a lot of people, it is an access point to our own culture; something that makes us feel comforted and connected.” she told me over Zoom, her hair slightly tousled as it’s almost 9 a.m. in the West coast. Like me, she never learned how to cook traditional Filipino food - she told me a story of how she was given an instruction card to a recipe for adobo, but it had very little information. No measurements of ingredients or specific instructions. “I laughed because, you know, I immediately had to call my mom and ask her for more guided directions!”, she chuckled.
I explained a similar anecdote, in which I was trying to make tinola: My dad - who runs an online tindahan where he sells Filipino imports like spices, sauces, canned goods, snacks and bags of crisps like Boy Bawang and Regent’s Cheese Rings - gave me several packs of tinola mixes and canned tuna when I was leaving to go back to New York City from Florida over the holidays. I had all the ingredients I thought I needed: spinach, squash, garlic and onion, and chicken. But I forgot the one ingredient that tied everything together which was the ginger and bok choy.
I always feel that there’s a disconnect between Filipino-Americans and their roots, which we can see just from this example of my anecdote. “There are so many traditions that would be passed down orally or you would soak them up from being together and potentially cooking together. And I thought about that versus me standing alone in my apartment, staring at this picture of a recipe card that I don’t have full instructions for.” Rachel told me after she heard my story. Because of the diaspora and how Filipinos are moving outside of the Philippines towards the west, the term “Filipino-American” can mean an array of things - there is no singular definition that defines them.
“I likely have a really, really different perspective than perhaps someone who was born in the Philippines […] or someone that grew up in an area where there were a lot more Filipino communities.” she explained, after I asked her the difficult and confrontational question of ‘how do you define Filipino-American?’. Asking yourself why this question is important is another part of the journey into navigating your cultural identity, especially since a majority of Filipinos are multiracial with a rich ancestral background (if you see a brown-skinned individual with straight black hair and almond eyes, with a Chinese middle name and Spanish surname, you can probably guess they’re Filipino). Rachel answered elegantly on the importance of thinking about cultural identity: “I think that identity can lead us to action and resistance. Because, for me, as I learned more about Filipino history then and what’s happening now, it really drives me to question why am I here? Why were there so many of us in a situation that we had to leave, or they had to leave, in order to pursue their livelihood?”. She described the experience of being Filipino-American in the diaspora as “living in the belly of the beast”.
This ultimately goes back to the Philippines’ abhorrent past with colonialism - is there something missing we’re trying to seek out by dispersing across the globe, far away from our homeland? That’s a discussion for another time, but through the eyes of Rachel Lucero, she seeks to find these answers through food and cooking in “The Sago Show”.
If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend checking out her website and Instagram to watch her reels and videos, learn more about the history of the Philippines and its cuisine, and discover the art of cooking traditional Filipino food!
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