Xocolateada - a curious scene...

In a little grotto in El Sereno, an alternative viewpoint is emerging. Indigenous high culture has been given center stage at Xokolatl Café. The message is clear, chocolate has indigenous roots and a future of promise. The promise of chocolate, or to be more precise cacao, lies in the relationship it has to both culture and ecology. Chocolate is in fact part of a culture of ecology, of seeking balance, of harmony. These ancestral conceptions of time and space promise a future. This, unfortunately, may be a concept that is out of sync with Los Angeles and the global economy. The message Xokolatl Café embraces is that another world is possible - a world as diverse as the jungles cacao was born in IF we organize to make it so.

To us, chocolate is not just a candy, a quick sugar fix, or a way to stop the children from crying at the grocery store. Xokolatl is a sacrament to help cure a culture of ignorance and Xokolatl Café is a space in the city of Los Angeles where this can take place--with genuine indigenous recipes and ingredients...and real live Indigenous People!

This blog will complicate and elucidate the depths of Xocoliciousness and of chocolate in general. We hope you enjoy the experience.

Chocolate, you see, has been hijacked.

According to Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe in The True History of Chocolate (2007), Spaniards of the eighteenth century reveled in chocolate drinking in events called chocolatadas. Picture the scene. Grown Spanish men dressed in period Indian garb - loincloths, multi-colored turkey feather headdresses and whatnots, all huddled around a campfire boiling a pot of hot chocolate. The gentile men eagerly take turns spinning the molinillo, a special wooden whisk. Not a woman in sight, the elite males serve each other tiny cups of the frothy chocolate elixir. Whoops and hollers follow each sip culminating in the ritualistic sacrifice - a bloody quasi-ceremony intended to appease the chocolate idols and ensure future merriment.

Actually, the scene depicted by an eighteenth century tile mosaic from Valencia, Spain cited in the Coes' book is much more mundane with the odd exception of the artist's focus upon the chocolate making in an open field. Today, when Americans think chocolate, they may think of Hershey's or Nestle. Even modern Mexicans might confuse Abuelita's Chocolate (a Nestle product) or ChocoMilk for authentic chocolate more so than the chocolate produced by Indigenous cacao farmers in Chiapas.

The men depicted in the Spaniard piece wore clothes of the appropriate period, felt hats, long hair, and multi-colored long coats and pants. While these events known as Chocolatadas, did not mimic indianistic rituals in dress and sacrifice, this would not be too far from the truth today in a time when Euro-American shamans stack followers into an oven and call it a "spiritual warrior retreat". Pseudo-shamans however, are nothing new. In the seminal work, God is Red, Vine Deloria, Jr., describes an early trend in the United States in which Anglo Americans found themselves getting duped by soothsayers out to make a buck by exploiting, and thus desecrating, indigenous ceremony.

In Germany today, full pow-wows are held among descendents of the ‘Aryan’ tribes dressed as Lakota dancers. In Mexico, it is impossible to visit any ancestral cultural site without tripping over European tourists. The fact is Europeans and their descendants love to study us - even as they ignore us, or worse. The fascination with Anahuaca culture is powerful these days and has even been commercialized by Hollywood of late with the distortion of the "Mayan" calendar and the purported end of the world countdown in 2012. This distortion of a sacred concept of time and space is accompanied by a renewed vigor in the, "accepted fiction" of bloody sacrifices and end of world legends.

Not only is the distortion of indigineity, as ridiculous as the scene of the "Indian Chocolate Party" described above, but it is distinctively dangerous as it finds its way into the racist, xenophobic anti-logic of the anti-Mexican extremists dominating immigration policy discussions now calling themselves the “tea party movement”. Oddly, yet another scene of white men dressed up as Indians. These very same tea party extremists may well have the living, breathing Indigenous progenitors of modern democracy banished from the face of the continent – if there weren’t so many of us. (More on indigenous democracy later.)

Chocolate is a means to remember. Not only do the irreproducible chemical properties of cacao such as theobromine help the human organism with the functions of memory – it is itself a stark reminder of what was, as compared to what is. Today, we see through cacao not only what is - but what is possible. Chocolate may have been hijacked, but cacao is still sacred.

Xokolatl Café, a better way to say chocolate.