HOT DOGS, SALTEÑAS, CURANTO, AND FEIJOADA – RODRIGO CULAGOVSKI
"When I was ten years old, your grandfather told me the U.S. wasn't going to be around for very long and we should go see it," is how my mother's story always starts.
"Your grandmother had passed because of the virus," she goes on, "so we sold everything except our old Ford,"—a kind of gasoline-powered automobile—"bought an old taco-trailer, converted it for hot dogs, and hit the road."
"We'd travel for a day or so, then find somewhere to set up shop and start feeding people. At first, we fixed them the way we did in West Virginia,"—one of the States in The United States—" with yellow mustard, chili, and coleslaw, which a lot of people enjoyed, but some would ask for them different, so we started adapting our dogs to each location."
"In the end, we had as many ways of making them as places we'd been to, and a big map that I painted myself, kept it up to date with the states and cities' names and a drawing of what their hot dogs looked like, and we would make and sell all of them."
"We had Chicago dogs, with mustard, relish, onions, tomato, peppers, and pickles. Coney Island dogs, brown mustard, fried onions, and sauerkraut. Sonorans, wrapped in bacon and grilled, with pinto beans, onions, tomatoes, mayonnaise, mustard, and jalapeños. People told us that they felt they could take a small vacation by trying out hot dogs from all over."
Which variations she lists change from telling to telling, but the ending is always the same.
"For a few years, we got to see most of what was still called 'The United States', from Seattle to Miami, New Orleans to New York, and talk to people and learn a little bit about them, even if it was only how they liked their hot dogs."
"Then everything went to hell, one day to the next, and we were lucky to be in Texas, so we left the trailer and the Ford on the side of the road in El Paso, and crossed over to Juárez."
She goes silent at this part, and I never hear how they got to southern Chile all the way from Mexico, or what happened to my grandfather, why he didn't make it. Or who my dad was. Or why he's not around.
And then she's sad for a while.
She still has the hot dog map she made when she was younger than me, it's worn and tattered but has a place of pride in our restaurant's storefront, right below the sign that says "Hot Dogs Estilo Americano", next to the flag she brought with her, which is like the Chilean flag only with more of everything.
We're right on the Avenida, the Main Street of Chiloé City. It's a chaotic mess of buses, e-cars—robot and human-driven—train lines, bikes and scooters of all kinds, and the moving sidewalk.
Millions of people pass in front of our shop every day. And lots of them are hungry.
Some of them ask, pointing at mom's map, "why do you make so many kinds of hot dogs?"
If she's in a good mood and the customer seems to be genuinely curious, she gives them a shortened version of her story, in her halting, ungrammatical Chilean: "Mi padre y yo fuimos… viajando por Estados Unidos… a vender hot dogs…"
The nicer ones stick around and listen to the whole thing. I give them free french-fries without asking.
We're not the only food stall around, of course. Not even the only hot dog stand.
There's a lot of places that offer completos, which is Chilean for really big hot dogs with all kinds of stuff on them but mostly mashed avocados.
But as far as I can tell, we're the only authentic multi-state-U.S.-style hot dogs on the Avenida.
#
I was cleaning the large aluminum containers where we put the fixings. It was my favorite part of the day, closing time, when the rush had died down, the lights all over the City were coming on, but the day's energy was still buzzing.
"Hello?", asked a girl peering in through our double doors.
"Hi! We're closed for the day, but we open tomorrow at seven!"
"No, no, I'm not here to buy food. I'm Sofía, your new neighbor, from the restaurant next door?"
"Oh yeah, right, the empanada place?"
"Well, actually it's salteñas, but I guess you could call them a kind of empanadas? Only from southern Bolivia. And Argentina, too."
"Cool. Are you from Argentina?"
"From Bolivia. La Paz."
"Oh. I heard about what happened there. Sorry."
"Yeah, thanks." She went silent for a moment, the way many people do when they talk about the place they or their family came from.
"My name is Jenny. My family is from the U.S." I offered.
"Were you born there?"
"No, here in Chile. My mother was, though."
"Do you work here always?"
"Yes, I help my mother with the hot dogs."
"I help my family with the salteñas, too. My mom does the dough, my dad makes the fillings. I help make the sauces. My aunt runs the restaurant and the money."
"Are they good?"
"Salteñas? I don't know, I've eaten them since I was born. People seem to like them, I guess."
"Yeah, I have the same problem with hot dogs. Did you move to the City recently?"
"My dad came here last year and helped set up the restaurant with my aunt. We came over a few weeks ago."
"I can tell. You talk differently than most Chilenas."
"Is that so? Well, you sound a little bit gringa, but I'm much too polite to mention it."
We stared at each other for a few beats.
Then burst out laughing at the same time.
I had a new best friend.
#
Sofía was fifteen years old, like me, and worked most evenings after school at the Carrito de Salteñas, which, despite its name, was not a food cart but a restaurant like ours.
Her aunt had named it after her mother's (actual) food cart which she used to push around central La Paz, selling the treats she'd learned to make from her mother (Sofía's great-grandmother) who was originally from Potosí, which is a city in Bolivia. Or was. Not sure.
We don't talk a lot about the past.
There's too much going on around us, here, now.
Did I mention we live in Chiloé City, on an island a few kilometers off the coast of southern Chile? And it's the last big city left on the planet, and millions of people have come here from all over the world? Because most of the rest of the planet is kind of a shit-hole right now? Sorry.
"What's your favorite thing about the City?", Sofía asked me one Saturday morning, in the lull after opening up the restaurants but before clients started showing up.
"I don't know, everything? The people, the buildings, the way there's water everywhere. I haven't gotten to see it all as much as I'd like to, though. My mother's always working, and I don't have any other relatives or friends to go with."
"My parents are really busy, too, getting the restaurant going."
"Maybe we could see the City together?"
So, we did.
#
Sofía's parents were a little nervous about us going out alone, so we told them we were just going for walks around our neighborhood. They seemed to believe it.
My mom wasn't a big fan of "that Bolivian girl and her family" but usually didn't ask me too many questions about what I got up to, so I didn't have to lie to her too.
At first, we stuck close to the Sidewalk, which is easy because it's just a single curvy line that goes from the north of the island all the way to the southern tip so we couldn't get lost. Since we're in school we have student passes and can ride wherever we want. And it is, in my opinion, the best way to travel through the City, as you can see everything move past and over and around you as you stand up straight in the middle of the moving strip.
One week we went to Dalcahue and the Cocinería, which looks like a giant upturned boat and is full of food stalls. Sofía had never had curanto.
"This is awesome!", she said between mouthfuls of pork and fish and seafood, "what are these potato pancake things?"
"Chapaleles!"
We both agreed that curanto with chapaleles was better than hot dogs or salteñas, and also to never, ever, admit this fact to our mothers.
Next, we went down to the southern tip, Quellón, with the cool fashion stores and art galleries and people playing music on the street. Sofía bought a floppy hat, I got a t-shirt with the logo of my favorite band, Beduinos Estéreo, on it.
We got off the main Avenue the week after that, and took one of the snake-trains to the Cucao neighborhood, on the Pacific side, and watched the ocean try to jump the seawalls. I'm pretty sure I saw a whale.
Sometimes we'd just get on the Sidewalk and pick a random station to get off at and saunter around like tourists.
And we were tourists, in a way.
Sofía had just moved here, so for her, it was all new.
And even though I was born in the City, my mother raised me as a kind of foreigner.
She always spoke English to me. I'd had to learn Spanish from our neighbor, Mrs. Echeñique—who took care of me when my mother was out working and I was too young to go with her—and from my phone.
My mother always spoke of the Chilenos like they were different from us, even though I'm a Chilena. I felt left out, like an outsider, with no family here except my mother.
I guess that's why it was so easy to become friends with Sofía.
We'd walk around, imagining living in one of the kilometer-high wooden skyscrapers around the Avenida, or in the bubble-villas that floated above them. If we were feeling more realistic, it would be the pyramids the well-off but not rich lived in or the palafitos built on stilts over the water.
Sometimes we'd go to one of the parks they'd left when they built up the City over the island, with thousand-year-old native forests and cold grey beaches, or swimming in little secret lakes in the middle of a commercial or business area.
And everywhere we went, there were different people. Lots of native Chileans, of course, with their loud voices and saying cachaí at the end of every sentence, which Sofía thought was hilarious but said she was too embarrassed to explain why.
But also people from all over Latin America, like Sofía's family.
Others came from the former U.S., like mine, and were really happy to meet me because I spoke English and understood some of their stories about the old country.
They'd ask "where are your folks from?"
"From West Virginia, ma'am, it's a pleasure to meet you," I'd answer, in English and with all the grace and manners my mother had drilled into me since the day I started talking.
They'd clap their hands and laugh. If they had a store they'd sometimes give us some small present, maybe a handkerchief or a snow-globe, or free food if they ran a restaurant.
I didn't do it for that though. I just liked to see them smile.
Some people said they were from "the E.U." which I think was like the U.S., only in Europe. And so many other places with names like Thailand and Senegal and Kazakhstan.
It felt like the whole world was alive somewhere in Chiloé.
#
"I want to get a better phone," Sofía said to me as soon as we'd set out that Sunday afternoon.
"Well, yeah, but they're super expensive," I answered.
"The official, brand-name ones are. But a kid at my school told me where to buy good, cheap ones."
"What, like stolen?"
"No, no, not stolen. Just not made by any big companies. Made by, you know, people who are good at making things. 'Makers'."
"That sounds cool. Do they work with the CitySystem?"
"Yeah, they do," she continued, "they take the chip from your old phone and put it in the new one, then do a thing so the System thinks it's still your original phone. And they work as well as brand-new current year model phones, but cost like one-third of the price."
"Do you have enough money?"
"I still have what my aunt gave me for my birthday. She said 'a fifteen-year-old woman knows better than me what she should buy for herself'."
"She's not wrong. So, do you want to go buy one?"
"There's just one detail: they don't sell them here in the normal city, it's up in one of the hill-towns."
"The hill-towns? With all the drugs, gangs and like, murder and stuff?"
"He says it's not like that. It's just a place some people live. Poor people, mostly, but not necessarily criminals."
"Did your friend buy one, did he go to the hill-town?"
"No, but his cousin did and said it was fine."
"I don't know, Sofi, sounds a little bit risky just to get a new phone."
"But you know how crappy mine is, the battery lasts less than two hours! And I can't ask my parents for a new one."
It's true, her phone was pretty bad. "Alright, let's go, but if it looks scary or weird we turn around and walk, OK?"
"We turn around and run, I promise!"
#
We took the Sidewalk to the Rauco station and got off, then walked along a street that sloped up as we got farther from the waterfront and the Avenida.
It was a residential area, with lots of trees and big houses. It was in fact a lot nicer than where we lived.
"This isn't so bad. Are you sure we're going in the right direction?"
"My friend told me it was like this. It's in the middle of a rich neighborhood."
The houses got bigger and had more obvious guards as the road started climbing the hillside, with sharp curves every two-hundred meters or so. Even the trees looked more expensive, somehow.
A rail ran alongside the road. A small open-seat train passed us with people who looked like tourists in it.
After about half an hour, we saw the entrance to the hill-town. A narrow dirt road branched off from a curve in the regular street and went through an arch made out of hand-laid bricks with a wall stretching out on each side. The arch had a rusty metal sign over it that said "Comunidad Ecológica de Nalhuitad".
"Turn around or go in?" I asked Sofía.
There were two men with what might have been a kind of uniform, one on each side of the arch, sitting on logs and poking at their phones. They didn't even look up as we walked through.
The other side was like stepping into a different city or country.
The dirt road stretched on, twisting and curving with the slope of the hill. In places, you couldn't tell where the road ended and the weeds and plants around it began.
The houses on each side were small and built close together. They used materials you didn't see down in our part of the City. Some were made out of bricks like the arch, only not as neat, with cement streaking down uneven rows. Some looked like they were made out of dirt and mud and straw. Others were just plastic shipping containers stacked on top of each other, with doors cut out with blowtorches and improvised stairs and balconies attached with wires and globs of epoxy. Some were all of the above mashed together.
Animals were everywhere—dogs, chickens, ducks, cats, and even pigs. I'd never seen a live pig before.
There were people around going about their business, buying things from one of the many stores and food stalls along the main road, or from people who'd laid out blankets with what looked like random things—old toys, broken guitars, unidentifiable clothes, hats, knives, pans, and were those actual guns?
Young men and women were sitting in small groups, talking, smoking, and drinking. Most of them were wearing Trauko Football Club gear, with green and orange stripes.
Some of them looked at us—they could tell we were outsiders.
"So, um, do we run yet?" I asked Sofía.
"No, not yet, let's see if anybody knows where the phone place is."
Sofía is shorter and skinnier than me and talks in a softer voice, but she's also much braver.
"Excuse me, do you know where I can find Heitor Santos?" she asked a woman selling parabolic antennas from a flat pushcart with metal wheels.
"The phone guy?" the woman asked, looking both of us up and down.
"Yes! The phone guy. Do you know where we can find him?"
"He's probably up in his workshop. Go down the road, past that place where that store burned down, all the way down there, see it? Then go up those stairs, the painted ones, and make a left on some smaller steps, the ones with a rooster, then go up those. Stay on them, don't go off on any of the roads or stairs they cross. After about ten minutes, it's the small red house with a blue door on the right."
I hoped Sofía could remember all that.
We thanked her and walked deeper into the hill-town. I couldn't resist the urge to look back at the arch that led to the normal street, to the Avenida and our homes. Even though we were only a few hundred meters in, it looked far away and lonely.
"This reminds me of La Paz," Sofía said.
"Really, this is what it looked like?" I gestured around us.
"Not really, the houses and hills and trees and plants are different. I mean, in La Paz, the rich people and the middle-class people lived in the lower and flatter parts of the valleys, in a 'normal' city with cement and streetlights and cars. The poor people built their houses out of whatever materials they could find, on the hills, with dirt roads and stairs. This reminds me of that. I guess Chiloé City isn't so different from Bolivia." She was a little sad again like she always was when she spoke about her birthplace.
We reached the stairs. Each step had a small mural painted on its vertical side. If you crouched down a bit they joined together to make one big illustration, with fantasy animals that looked like they were running up and down the steps.
We climbed up for a few minutes until we found the second set of stairs, with a small concrete bird in the middle of its first riser. The steps were narrower, not more than a meter at their widest, and twisted and turned around the huge trees that seemed to be everywhere in this part of the hills.
The houses here were smaller, less formal, and closer together than those on the main road. It was also darker and more humid. And lonelier. It looked like a great place to get mugged.
You could hear packs of dogs barking nearby.
"Do we run now, Sofi?" I asked in a quiet voice.
"No, Jenny. We're following the lady's instructions, everything's ok."
We walked up the new steps for a while—ten minutes, maybe longer. Many smaller stairs branched out from the one we were on—sometimes I wasn't sure which ones were our steps and which ones the branches—but Sofía always picked one confidently.
We found a small red house.
Sofía knocked on its sky-blue door and said, "Hello, we're looking for Heitor?"
And knocked again.
And a third time.
The door flew open, pushing Sofía back, and a large, shirtless man stuck his head out yelling in a language we didn't understand. He had a large and colorful gun in his hand.
"Do we run now?" I asked but it wasn't really necessary as we'd both spun around and were jumping down the steps as fast as we could.
#
Here's the thing about strange, winding, hillside stairs: they look different when you're climbing up them carefully than when you're running down two or three steps at the time. What had been the obvious path to choose on our way up was not so obvious anymore.
After a few minutes of this, we couldn't hear the shirtless man still stomping after us or yelling but we were good and lost and once we'd started running it didn't feel right to stop.
At one point we went through a semi-covered market—right down the middle, weaving a path around stacks of clothes and old interfaces and screens, saying "sorry" every five seconds to the people we startled.
The steps became paths and then small alleys with dense vegetation on each side. Strange-looking houses appeared at the end of some side-alleys, with round organic geometries that seemed to grow out of the hillside. They had grass growing on their roofs. One had a goat—also a first for me—on its roof, eating the grass.
And there were the smells of cooking everywhere, some we recognized, others we didn't, but all reminding us it would be lunchtime soon.
At one point, the path led us onto somebody's roof and we had to jump a wooden fence and down a ladder so we could get back on a more down-to-earth route.
We finally stumbled out into a sort of public square cut into the hillside. It had a stone floor and brick buildings that looked like restaurants or bars around three of its sides and a view out over the City on the fourth one.
We still fully expected the shirtless gun-bearing man to rush in and kill us at any moment, but we were too tired to keep running.
We stopped running and walked up to the open side of the square.
It had a fancy-looking railing, with animal shapes made out of metal wire that reminded me of the ones painted on the first set of stairs we'd taken. Leaning up against it as we caught our breath, we could see a large part of Chiloé City opening up below us, down the forested hills, across the Avenue with its skyscrapers and pyramids and smaller buildings in their shadow, and to its eastern edge, with mainland Chile in the background across the water.
It was such an amazing view that we forgot to be scared.
And since we forgot to be scared, we forgot to make sure nobody snuck up on us.
We each felt a hand on our shoulder and screamed at the same time.
The shirtless man had found us.
#
—
#
The good news was, he'd found time to put on a shirt and left his gun at home.
The bad news was he didn't seem to speak any Spanish. I tried English, but no luck. Sofía knew some basic Aymara, but that didn't seem to work either.
He kept yelling at us in whatever language he spoke. You could make out words, but not really any sentences or what he was talking about.
The other good news was that it didn't look like he was going to murder us any time soon.
He didn't even seem to be angry at us, not really, more like he was trying to get a point across.
And he wasn't yelling, I realized. He was just a really big and loud person, and he seemed frustrated that we didn't understand him.
A young woman, about our age, came out of one of the restaurants around the square and called out to him in his language. We didn't understand any of it, but did recognize his name, "Heitor".
Once he'd calmed down, she came up to us.
"Sorry for my big brother, he was startled when you knocked on his door and, well, he's always been loud. I'm Letícia."
"But he had a gun!" I was still not ready to calm down all the way.
She turned and talked to him, then laughed. "He says it's not a gun, it's a soldering iron, he was working when you knocked on his door and stuck out his head to see who it was. Also, he says you dropped your phone when you ran away, and the screen broke but if you want he can fix it for you, or make you a new one if you have time to wait."
She gestured at Heitor and he pulled out Sofía's phone from his back pocket. It had a wide and deep crack down its main screen. "That's why he was trying to catch up with you and asking you to stop. Why were you running in the first place? The hill-town is tricky, you might have gotten lost or had some sort of accident." She wasn't mocking us, you could tell she was actually concerned.
Mortified doesn't begin to define how I felt, and I could tell by the look on her face Sofía wasn't taking it much better.
"Because we thought he was a shirtless serial killer?" I answered sheepishly, then told her the whole thing.
Letícia laughed for a long time then translated our story to Heitor who laughed too. It wasn't a mean laugh, though, and in the end, all four of us were giggling together.
"Please tell him we're sorry for bothering him. We just came because a friend told us your brother could sell us a hand-made phone." She translated for us.
"He says, no problem, he'll make your phone, and even give you the family discount because he thinks you're funny. He works fast, why don't you come to our place while you wait. On Sundays my mom makes feijoada, are you hungry?"
"Always!" said Sofía.
#
—
#
Letícia took us into one of the restaurants around the square, where her mother had a large metal pot boiling on a wood fire. She served us dishes of black beans, pork, ribs, and sausage floating in a thick dark-purple broth. Sofía told me she liked it better than curanto. Personally, I thought both dishes were about equally incredible.
Letícia kept us company the whole time, telling us stories of her family in Brazil and their voyage to Chile in her melodic Spanish. You could tell they'd had some hard times, but she had a way of making everything funny and exciting.
Her mother didn't speak much Spanish, like her brother, but came by every quarter-hour or so to make sure our dishes were full, hand out orange wedges, and smile at us.
After a few hours of this, Heitor came back. He brought Sofía's new phone and it looked like nothing either of us had ever seen, sleek and techie but also a little bit menacing, like some kind of insect. It was beautiful.
He took her old one and did something so it spit out a long white translucent cylinder which he then inserted into the new phone. It lit up and connected to the CitySystem. Messages from Sofía's mom and my mother (how'd she get Sofía's address?) scrolled up the screen like they were in a hurry to get out of each other's way.
Oh, shit (sorry).
I hadn't brought my phone at all—because: prejudice, see above—and Sofía's had stopped working when she dropped it. We'd been offline for hours when we were supposed to have just been walking around our neighborhood.
Letícia explained a short simple route to get out of the hill-town. We hugged and thanked her, promised to come back soon, then hugged Heitor, who seemed a bit embarrassed, and their Mom, who hugged us back as if we were long-lost relatives.
When we got home our own two mothers—who were not in the mood for hugs—were sitting outside their restaurants, united in their disapproval and stern looks.
We told them the whole story and promptly got punished. I was grounded for six weeks, no going out at all except to school and to work. Sofía got the same plus she wasn't allowed to use her new phone for those same six weeks.
It was okay, in the end, though.
We carried out our prison sentence together, in each other's restaurants. We made friends with a kid who worked in a nearby store that sold books, the physical kind, and he took pity on our misfortune and kept bringing us comic books and hanging out to read with us. We didn't really miss going out into the City that much.
Our mothers had bonded over how terrible their wayward daughters were and started spending their downtime sitting at a card table on the street, drinking coffee, swapping stories of their past lives in Bolivia and the U.S., and complaining about the Chilenos and their weird culinary preferences.
Once we were set free, we managed to convince our mothers it was safe and went back to the hill-town, to see Letícia, Heitor, and their mom and to have Heitor make me a new phone as well.
The two of them don't come down into the City much, but we're trying to convince them to go to Dalcahue with us and try the curanto and maybe, just maybe, come back to our neighborhood and try salteñas and the only authentic multi-state-U.S.-style hot dogs on the Avenida.
RODRIGO CULAGOVSKI trained as an architect but works as a web developer. He's lived and worked in Chile, the U.S., and Germany. He currently teaches a Strategic Design workshop at Universidad Católica in Chile.