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Posts Tagged ‘culture’

Glorious Paper Light Boxes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 20, 2014| 2 Comments »

An early stage in the creation of a Hari & Deepti light box

Do you ever click on the links to the right, in my blog roll? My Dad’s Records, for example, has old blues recordings you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

And This Is Colossal is a constant wonder. Today the art and visual-culture site posted illuminated paper light boxes that have to be seen to be believed.

Says Colossal: “Deepti Nair and Harikrishnan Panicker (known collectively as Hari & Deepti) are an artist couple [originally from India] who create paper cut light boxes. Each diorama is made from layers of cut watercolor paper placed inside a shadow box and is lit from behind with flexible LED light strips. The small visual narratives depicted in each work often play off aspects of light including stars, flames, fireflies, and planets. The couple shares about their work …

‘What amazes us about the paper cut light boxes is the dichotomy of the piece in its lit and unlit state, the contrast is so stark that it has this mystical effect on the viewers.’ ”

More.

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Puerto Rico in the Bronx

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 24, 2014| 2 Comments »

Cynthia-Marie Marmo O’Brien has a nice story at Narratively on a close-knit Latino subculture in the Bronx.

“Generations of Nuyoricans — Puerto Rican New Yorkers — have found familia in a little house on an overgrown patch of the South Bronx,” O’Brien writes. The place is known as La Casita.

She continues, “Today I am relaxing with some of the regulars under the hanging branches of trees separating us from the busy life on the street; they have picked grapes from overhead and are making wine.

“I came here with César Colón-Montijo to experience plena, a musical genre indigenous to Puerto Rico. In his scholarship, Colón-Montijo, an ethnomusicologist who the regulars consider part of la familia, describes plena as a way through the South Bronx’s difficulties. Plena has always been a call-and-response form of song; its origins are usually attributed to striking workers. …

“La casita is the classic liminal space: neither Puerto Rico nor New York; neither a secular sanctuary for all nor a performance place for legends. It is all four. Puerto Rican flags fly and an original album cover of John F. Kennedy’s 1960s speeches is displayed along with other memorabilia. No topic is too big or small for plena’s repertoire; there’s even a plena about JFK. After the city’s Puerto Rican Day Parade every June, the music royalty of the island flock here.”

Read more here and see how people use music to transport themselves to Puerto Rico while still in the Bronx.

Photos: Emon Hassan
Jose Rivera (left) during a jam session at the Casita. On the right, demonstrating how an out-of-tune piano can still make music.

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The Old World Never Died

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 13, 2013| 4 Comments »

Erik is in no danger of giving up Sweden. Today he and Suzanne took my grandson to a Santa Lucia celebration in a friend’s house, and Erik helped with the singing and wore a pointy hat that I never knew was part of the deal. (I always thought the Santa Lucia ceremony was just about a girl with candles in her hair.) Swedish customs are living on in Rhode Island.

In Queens, New York, customs from home countries are not only flourishing but being passed to new generations. I liked a story on the topic by Lynnette Chiu at Narratively.

“As soon as the children conclude their routine,” she writes, “the 300-capacity ballroom echoes with the sound of coins hitting the dance floor. The young boys in lederhosen and girls in scarlet dirndl dresses break formation and a scramble ensues to collect the loose change and dollar bills tossed their way by family and friends. The joy is in the gathering rather than the gains; as per tradition, they obediently deposit their loot in the outstretched aprons of the dance group’s older girls.

“While the movements of Die Erste Gottscheer Tanzgruppe—The First Gottscheer Dance Group—are the occasion of the day, it’s the older generation who are doing most of the afternoon’s dancing. …

“Meticulously set tables accommodate pitchers of Hofbrau, wine bottles and cocktail glasses, leaving the family-style platters of chicken cutlet, pork loin and all the trimmings jostling for real estate. …

“What began as a place to preserve and celebrate Gottscheer culture has now become a go-to locale for other communities in [the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens] to nurture their own traditions. Along with numerous quinceañeras—rite of passage fifteenth birthday parties for Latin American girls—Gottscheer Hall hosts the gatherings of the Ridgewood Nepalese Society, and recently opened its doors to the Ridgewood Market, where artsy vendors hawk vintage wares and DIY baubles.” Read more at Narratively.

Photo: Aaron Adler

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In South Korea, Musicals are Cool

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »

And speaking of Korea, the culture in the south might as well be on the other side of the world from North Korea.

My husband and I, lifetime fans of Broadway musicals, may sometimes feel concerned that the audiences are mostly old folks like us, but in South Korea, musicals are cool. Young people dig them.

Patrick Healy writes for the NY Times, “The packs of young women arrived 90 minutes early for the evening’s show: Murder Ballad, a rock musical that flopped off Broadway in July and then opened here four months later in an all-Korean production.

“They wanted time to shoot smartphone video of Seoul’s newest theater, built inside a shopping mall, and start scoring autographs: of actors, sure, but lighting operators and makeup artists too.

“Or anyone, really, working on American musicals, whose head-spinning popularity here has changed the game for New York producers looking to extend the lives of their shows.

“Seoul has become a boomtown for American musicals, with Korean and Broadway producers tapping into an audience of young women raised on the bombast of Korean pop and the histrionics of television soap operas.”

Bombast and histrionics? Now, wait just a minute, here! Hmmm. I guess musicals can be bombastic, like opera. But the kind I like are more thoughtful and quirky.

Recent shows we enjoyed were Side Show, which I talked about here, and
Brian Crawley and Andrew Lippa’s take on A Little Princess, a story by the author of the Secret Garden.

Come to think of it, both Side Show and A Little Princess had moments of bombast and histrionics. I guess I don’t notice that anymore.

Photo: Lim Hoon
Korean actors in the Seoul production of Wicked.

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Midsommer

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 24, 2013| 4 Comments »

Maria writes, “Some memories from our very traditional midsummer in Dalarna.” That’s in Sweden. Erik or Margareta, care to explain what we see here?

I learned this much on the web:

“Ask a Swede what the most important holiday of the year is and Midsummer will come up as often as Christmas. Get older Swedes talking and their eyes will well up as they reminisce about community spirit, songs, barn dancing and the mystical atmosphere surrounding the Midsummer gatherings of their youth. Sure, there was a lot of drinking, fistfights and frolicking, but everyone shook hands in the end. For younger generations, Midsummer is mainly about heading out to the summer cottage and celebrating with a group of friends or family.” There’s more at the site Sweden.se, here.

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Yarn Bombing a Former Factory Town

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 19, 2013| 2 Comments »

I do love creative stealth projects. This one is not quite stealth because, although the perpetrators act under cover of darkness, they are known — and willing to be interviewed.

Taryn Plumb writes for the Boston Globe about graffiti artists with knitting needles in Ashland, Mass. “Armed with clews of yarn, they transformed a series of utilitarian light posts into colorful, whimsical, eye-luring structures.

“It’s called ‘yarn bombing,’ ‘guerrilla knitting,’ or ‘graffiti knitting’ — wrapping and otherwise decorating everyday structures with yarn under the cover of night. …

“It is a worldwide movement — the first international ‘yarn bombing day’ was observed on June 11, 2011 — that has emerged in the last decade, with elaborate designs hitting bicycles, statues, trees, steps, parking meters, phone booths, and subway interiors, filling potholes, and even draping entire buses and military tanks in various countries.

“In its local application, though, Ashland Creative wasn’t completely rogue. Organizer Andrea Green sought approval from selectmen.”

Plumb explains that the group’s main motive is to help reenergize the downtown as other local community-building initiatives are doing.

“And the response? Curiosity from both adults and kids, the latter of which have named their favorites and been more than happy to explore their texture.

“ ‘People have just been delighted to see the way ordinary functional objects have been transformed into fun, interesting works of art,’ said Green …

“ ‘People often have the perception that art has to be seen in museums,’ Green said, ‘but amateur artists can create it, and it can still entertain.’ ”

More.

Update 2/10/14: Got to add another great yarn-bombing story here, courtesy of Mary Ann.

Photo: Ashland Creative
Ulie Nardone participated in Ashland’s recent Wrap-It Up Art Project.

Update: Beagling sends along this version of yarn bombing.

Photo at the NY Times: Olek
“Charging Bull,” near Wall Street, was covered in crochet by artist Olek in December 2010.

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The Power of One Song

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 10, 2013| Leave a Comment »

This is the story of how a song saved a cultural center in the Catskills.

Dennis Gaffney writes for the NY Times that at a recent celebration of success,  “Jay Ungar, a fiddler wearing a black vest and hiking boots, and his wife, Molly Mason, playing guitar, stood on a stage in a barnlike performance hall that did not exist a year ago. ‘Can you stand to hear this tune one more time?’ he asked the audience. …

“The tune is ‘Ashokan Farewell,’ the bittersweet lament familiar to millions as the theme song that the filmmaker Ken Burns used for the emotional crescendos of his Civil War series. But most do not know that Mr. Ungar’s moving hymn helped save the Catskill place that inspired the song, resulting in the Ashokan Center, a $7.25 million campus here dedicated to traditional music, Catskill history, environmental education, and local arts and crafts. …

“Many still assume that Mr. Ungar wrote ‘Ashokan Farewell’ with the Civil War in mind. But he wrote it on a September morning in 1982, after the end of his third Ashokan summer music and dance camp on this property, which the State University of New York at New Paltz owned and had used since 1967 as a field campus for environmental education.

“ ‘I left on a cloud of utopian euphoria,’ Mr. Ungar said of that summer. ‘You try to keep it alive, but it evaporates.’ ”

The song went on to have a life of its own, and Ungar even performed it at the White House. NY Gov. Pataki had heard it, too, and when a dismayed Unger contacted him about the pending sale of the Ashokan Center in Olivebridge,  the governor took action.

Soon a lot of people were on board, with the wistful song always at the heart of their efforts.

Writes Gaffney, “Mr. Ungar has come to believe that his song, like a traditional hymn, evokes much more than loss. In the mid-1990s, he got an e-mail from a man in Africa who said he was driving in his car when he heard ‘Ashokan Farewell’ on the radio. ‘He started crying uncontrollably and he had to pull off the road,’ Mr. Ungar recalled. ‘He said that in his culture, after the age of 10, men don’t cry, but he needed to cry.’ ”

More.

Photo: Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Jay Ungar and Molly Mason playing “Ashokan Farewell” at the Ashokan Center.

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Daily Life in North Korea

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2013| 4 Comments »

After seeing a beautifully composed NY Times photo of people walking by bluish and rose-colored buildings in a nearly empty North Korea street, I began following the photographer on twitter, .

David Guttenfelder is one of the few Western photographers in North Korea. He was there when former Secretary of State Madeline Albright met with the previous ruler, Kim Jung Il. He takes pictures for media outlets and for his own amusement. His Instagram pictures of “artifacts” like a frilly computer screen cover and visitor handbooks can be hilarious or creepy.

Nina Porzucki had a lovely piece about Guttenfelder at Public Radio International’s “The World,” here. If you go to the PRI site, you have your choice of reading the transcript or listening to the report via SoundCloud.

The photographer tells Porzucki, “Over the years, every time I’ve gone back I’ve had more access, I’ve seen more. I’ve actually met people, I’ve seen real things.

“And I had this transformation. I kind of feel like that’s what I’m trying to do with my photography, is to take people who see my pictures through the same process. When they opened up the 3G local network and suddenly I could post pictures or tweet from the streets, from North Korea, that was more revolutionary than it would be anywhere else in the world, for sure. It’s sort of anything goes. I can just stop and take pictures of all these little mundane things in life that aren’t really so-called ‘newsworthy.’

“These are the things you run past on your way to covering the news. You know, a picture of bar snacks or a little yellow computer cover over a computer terminal, and none of them are great pictures the way photographers describe great pictures, ‘Oh, that’s a great picture.’ …

“It has as big of an impact probably as my professional daily newspaper work does. … I know that I’m not photographing anywhere near everything that’s going on in the country, especially the darkest things. But this is a long-term project, and we’re pushing to do as much as we can. If I’m not there, the only pictures that we’re getting out of Korea are distributed by Korean Central News Agency, where propagandist is not a dirty word.” More.

Photo of North Korea: David Guttenfelder, AP

 

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Saving Mali’s Priceless Manuscripts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 30, 2013| Leave a Comment »

When I got my current job, I went through the human resources “onboarding” with a young man from Mali. Even though he went back to Africa a couple years ago, we keep in touch. Naturally, I was worried when radicals took over Timbuktu, Mali, for a while. Fortunately, Mamoudou wasn’t living in Mali at the time, although he says Guinea is not that much safer.

Because of Mamoudou, I continue to follow the Mali news, and was especially interested in a link at the Arts Journal blog today: “Mali’s Underground Railroad: How Timbuktu’s Ancient Manuscripts Were Smuggled To Safety.”

Writes Sudarsan Raghavan of the Washington Post, “It was 7 o’clock on a hot night in August, and Hassine Traore was nervous. Behind him were 10 donkeys, each strapped with two large rice bags filled with ancient manuscripts. The bags were covered in plastic to shield them from a light rain.”

Radicals had taken over Timbuktu four months earlier and “had demolished the tombs of Sufi saints. They had beaten up women for not covering their faces and flogged men for smoking or drinking. They most certainly would have burned the manuscripts — nearly 300,000 pages on a variety of subjects, including the teachings of Islam, law, medicine, mathematics and astronomy — housed in public and private libraries across the city.”The scholarly documents depicted Islam as a historically moderate and intellectual religion and were considered cultural treasures  …

“A secret operation had been set in motion … It included donkeys, safe houses and smugglers, all deployed to protect the manuscripts by sneaking them out of town.

“This is the story of how nearly all the documents were saved, based on interviews with an unlikely cast of characters who detailed their roles for the first time. They included Traore, a 30-year-old part-time janitor, and his grandfather, a guard. …

“The New York-based Ford Foundation, the German and Dutch governments, and an Islamic center in Dubai provided most of the funds for the operation, which cost about $1 million.

“ ‘We took a big risk to save our heritage,’ said Abdel Kader Haidara, a prominent preservationist who once loaned 16th- and 18th-century manuscripts from his family’s private collection to the Library of Congress. ‘This is not only the city’s heritage, it is the heritage of all humanity.’ ”

There are heroes everywhere, keeping a low profile. And I am also pretty impressed with the funders, springing into action like that.

More here.
Map: National Geographic

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Art for Art’s Sake

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on May 1, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Getty Images

I have been as keen as anyone to talk about the arts in terms of their economic contributions to communities. (You have to defend the arts in the language people understand.) But in the end, a focus on economic return is limiting. There are other values on the spectrum from “art for art’s sake” to “art for the economy’s sake.”

How about art for wonder’s sake, joy’s sake, self-expression’s sake, mystery’s sake — for the sake of just seeing what comes out and where it leads?

Over in Scotland, Tiffany Jenkins of The Scotsman is having a fit about Maria Miller, the Scottish Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Sport?!), who expressed her own take on the arts in a recent speech.

Says Jenkins, “The speech began with the right noises – ‘culture educates, entertains and it enriches’ – but quickly took a wrong turn, concentrating on what culture can ‘deliver,’ specifically for the economy, using sentences such as: ‘It allows us to build international relationships, forging a foundation for the trade deals of tomorrow.’ ”

Uh-oh.

“It matters,” writes Jenkins, “because of what happened with the funding body Creative Scotland, where there was a major negative reaction … in part due to an agenda that instructed the arts to be about the economy …

“To her credit Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet secretary for culture and external affairs for Scotland, was reported on Twitter responding to Miller’s speech stating: ‘The Scottish Government does not see arts and culture as a commodity.’ …

“That the arts are central to the economy is not an isolated idea, or a new one. … [But] it is a philistine approach that misses the value and point of culture. It is true that the Edinburgh festivals, for example, bring a strong financial return. … But even in this case, the financial return is not the best thing about the festivals – or why people come back every year to perform or to watch. They do it because they love it, enjoy it and are driven to participate in something meaningful. …

“Let us not forget the economic climate in which the Arts Council was established. This was a period in the 1940s, after a devastating war, when Britain was in a dire financial situation. The funding body was set up not to use the arts to get the country out of the economic crisis, in the blunt instrumental terms they are discussed today, but to stimulate ‘the best’ work.

“Economist John Maynard Keynes, the council’s first chairman, wanted to bring forth a ‘creative renaissance’ that was artist led, and acted at ‘arm’s length’ from the government, a vision that I would have no trouble with if it were realized today.” But it isn’t, complains Jenkins. Many of her concerns are pretty universal.  More.

It’s an argument we will never hear the end of, having been debated in every generation. I am coming down firmly on the side of “yes, and…”

In other words, the arts can be great for the economy, but that is just the tiniest part of why they are great.

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A Multicultural St. Mark’s Passion

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 27, 2013| 2 Comments »

I liked this National Public Radio story on a Jewish South American composer creating a St. Mark’s Passion that uses many ethnic styles and has enthusiastic urban kids in the chorus.

Anastasia Tsioulcas writes, “Salsa rhythms, Brazilian martial arts and a Jewish prayer of mourning: It’s not exactly what you would expect from a classical composer’s setting of the Gospel according to St. Mark. But that’s exactly what Argentine Jewish composer Osvaldo Golijov, a MacArthur ‘genius,’ did when he was asked to write a choral work based on one of the gospels, in a hugely acclaimed piece that’s been presented around the globe …

” ‘I never expected a Passion to have this funk and Spanish and everything inside it. I never thought I would be able to sing them,’ says Andrew Farella, a 16-year-old bass in the chorus. He and his friend Jerry Ortiz, another 16-year-old bass, say they’re thrilled to hear all these different kinds of music within Golijov’s work — ones they know well from their own lives.

” ‘I’m actually very excited to do this piece, me being from the Latin culture,’ says Ortiz, who is Dominican and Puerto Rican. ‘Everything that’s in here is based on my culture, my background. So I can feel the music when we sing it. I was kind of surprised to hear African and also Indian stuff. But he talked about how in Latin America we come from three places. There’s our white side, our Native American side and there’s our African side. And that’s basically what La Pasión is — coming from those three to combine into one, the Holy Trinity.’ ”

Follow this link to read more and hear the music.

Something different for Easter.

Photo: Chris Lee/Carnegie Hall
A coach and high school students work on Osvaldo Golijov’s Passion According to St. Mark with the composer (right) in November 2012.

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Refugees Learn to Cope with Snow

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 25, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Portland, Maine, has a reputation for being welcoming to immigrants and refugees. As a result, newcomers have been giving back, taking seriously their training in how to start a business, for example, hiring people, and boosting the city’s economy.

In this story by Jess Bidgood at the NY Times, we learn about Portland’s “class intended to help immigrants from warm countries cope with the cold.”

Bidgood writes about newcomers “squeezed into a plain conference room at the city’s center for refugee services … to be schooled in a central piece of Portland’s cultural curriculum for its growing population of new arrivals, many of whom are asylum-seekers from Central Africa: the art of handling a Maine winter.

“The instructor, Simeon Alloding, a human services counselor here, sat at the front of the room, ticking off winter’s many perils as clip art images of a penguin and an elephant decked out for cold weather hovered in a PowerPoint presentation behind him. ‘Everyone here has fallen, right?’ Mr. Alloding asked as he began a discussion on how to navigate the city’s icy sidewalks. ‘You don’t walk too fast, you don’t take long steps.’ …

“On this slushy morning, there were more attendees than could possibly find seating, and late arrivals clustered around the entrances to the room, many still wrapped in winter coats and hats despite the stifling heat of the room.”

The refugees help each other with translation, but some questions are hard to answer, like how to know what tomorrow’s weather might be.

“Miguel Chimukeno, from Angola, rose to ask a question in Portuguese, which another student translated to French, which the French interpreter, Eric Ndayizi, posed to Mr. Alloding.

“ ‘He’s low income — zero income — and you said they should watch TV and know some information. How does he get TV?’ Mr. Ndayizi asked.

“ ‘There’s nobody that’s going to issue out TV’s,’ Mr. Alloding said. ‘My only suggestion is that you talk to your neighbors.’ ”

More.

Photo: Craig Dilger for The New York Times

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Loyal League of Yiddish Sons of Erin

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 20, 2013| Leave a Comment »

In case you missed it (ICYMI, as they say on twitter), National Public Radio had a delightful story about Irish Jews last weekend:

“St. Patrick’s Day in New York now means parades and green beer. But 50 years ago, it also meant green matzo balls at the annual banquet of the Loyal League of Yiddish Sons of Erin. The league was a fraternal organization of Irish-born Jews.

“The major migration of Jews to Ireland started in the 1880s and ’90s, says Hasia Diner, who teaches history and Judaic studies at New York University. Thousands moved [to Ireland], primarily from Lithuania. …

” ‘Then the Irish Jews, as Jews historically did, they went to where there were better economic opportunities,’ Diner says.

“A lot of Irish Jews found those opportunities in New York. Like many immigrant groups, they kept their culture alive in the New World. And in the early 1960s, they formed the Yiddish Sons of Erin.

“According to member Rosalyn Klein, the whole thing started as a joke. … A restaurant took out a newspaper ad for a meeting of Irish Jews. Klein thinks they didn’t really expect people, but a lot of them showed up.

” ‘And most of them had lived in Dublin, so it was kind of this mishpocha getting together again,’ she says.”

For many years after, a big Jewish St. Patrick’s Day celebration was held in New York and was de rigeur for politicians and celebrities.

More here.

Photo: SmittenKitchen.com.
This is a normal matzo ball. I couldn’t find a green one.

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Malian Musicians Defend Culture

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 17, 2013| 2 Comments »

As Jane once observed, Suzanne’s Mom’s blog likes making connections between random unconnected matters.

This entry makes at least three connections, starting with a Malian colleague at work and ending with a biographer friend who was mentioned in a murder mystery.

To begin at the beginning, I joined my current organization about seven years ago and was “onboarded” with a young guy from Mali. Although he moved back to Africa after five years, we keep in touch, and naturally I have been distressed by the recent trouble in his homeland.

That is why an article by music critic Jim Fusilli in the the Wall Street Journal caught my eye. “To the musicians from Mali [in Paris], the attempt by terrorists associated with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) to suppress music in their country’s north goes beyond politics and religion: It’s an offense to the soul of the nation, where music is more than entertainment, it’s essential to life.”

Fusilli says the musicians are “leveraging their international reputations as creators of the country’s often-inspired music, which ranges from brooding, spiritually minded tunes played on traditional African instruments to a fiery fusion of Afrobeat, rock, R&B and indigenous sounds. It’s a melting pot that absorbs the music of other cultures without losing its native identity.

“On her next album, ‘Beautiful Africa’ (Nonesuch), out in the U.S. on April 9, the singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré sends a message of support to Mali’s women. In Bambara, English and French, she sings: ‘I want to hear your laughter. I admire your courage. I miss your smile.’ ” More.

Now, as it happens, Jim Fusilli, in addition to being a music critic, wrote a mystery series that I gobbled up, and in one novel I noted that the hero was reading a biography by a friend of mine. The biography was of John Quincy Adams, and when I told author Paul C. Nagel, he was delighted that JQA had made it into a mystery story.

So when I read that Fusilli would be at Kate’s Mystery Books, I squeezed through the holiday mystery-buying crowd and gave him Paul’s e-mail. And thus they were in touch.

And thus a colleague from Mali connects to the biographer of John Quincy Adams.

Photograph of Rokia Traoré:  http://www.africanmusiciansprofiles.com/

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Tortillas for Somalians

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I liked this multicultural story by Fernanda Santos in the NY Times. It demonstrates that people from different cultures can adapt to one another’s foods and customs very nicely in the U.S. melting pot.

It is all happening at the Ranch Market in Phoenix.

“Tortillas are a Mexican staple of transnational appeal here, bridging divisions carved by Arizona’s tough stance on immigration and reaching far beyond Latin American borders.

“The factory, at the Ranch Market store on North 16th Street, employs a pair of Iraqi refugees to whom flour tortillas have become a replacement for the flat bread known as khubz. There are also Cubans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and, of course, Mexicans manning the machines like the rounder, which turns the masa into balls that are then pressed and cooked in 500-degree ovens at a rate of eight dozen disks a minute.

“Refugees from Somalia buy Ranch Market tortillas as a substitute for a pancake-like bread called canjeelo. Koreans have taken to using them to wrap pieces of spicy barbecued pork, like a taco. Foodies like them because they are the closest thing to an authentic tortilla that they can find at a supermarket here.”

Read more here.

Photograph: Joshua Lott for The New York Times
The Ranch Market on North 16th Street in Phoenix churns out eight dozen tortillas a minute, cooked in 500-degree ovens.

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