The Cooking Pot – A Weapon of Resistance

The Quechua, another Indigenous group we could spend a whole semester on! I really enjoyed this week’s readings, especially the “Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism” because it introduced a new concept for me, the commons, and confused me enough to research this idea further to better wrap my head around it. My biggest take away in this reading is that shared spaces include a shared knowledge that requires a community to maintain (and build) that knowledge. I look forward to our class discussion about this reading to see what you folks think about this concept as well.

Something that’s been ruminating around in my head during this course is the use of the cooking pot. There are obvious uses for it – cooking, washing clothes, means of commerce etc. But what stands out to me to most, especially this week, is how the cooking pot has become a weapon of the resistance. Globalization, neoliberalism, social reform, class rights and fights for equality all intersect with Indigenous peoples’ foodways. I guess that’s sort of the point in this class, right? How to widen our perspective when studying Latin America to include the variety of ways Indigenous experiences has evolved over time. Take for instance, the community fighting for their water in the film “Hija de la Laguna”. The lake is their waterway and, in some ways, their last connection to the survival of their histories. What I mean to say is that as extractive industries continue to impede on their ancestral land, their ability to survive and maintain the same lifeways of their ancestors is threatened. That is, in essence, the point of the film. The family structure is broken, their self-sufficiency is diminished and they are forced into a battle for human rights against a machine of lawyers and bulldozers.

So, what about the cooking pot?

In the film, the community rallies together around the lake to protect it from being mined. Upon their arrival, they set up camp with a makeshift kitchen to feed their community through the protest. The protestors knew the police would come attack their food line first so they maintained a protective circle around it to resist the police’s efforts to destroy it. This stood out to me because this police tactic theoretically agrees that sustenance is vital to the community which is ironic because they want to take away the most essential part of their lives, their waterway.

In “Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism” we learn about how women defend nature’s commons and stand against the destruction of the environment in grassroots movements. Women set up comedores populares in their neighborhoods to help feed the community and women brought their cooking pots to the piquetes, to protest and ensure the roadblocks are held. This is also a specific form of protest that dates back to medieval times. The cacerolazo movement of banging pots and pans has taken shape as an international symbol of solidarity. In Chile, pots and pans were used to bring attention to the shortage of food in 1971 and in support of the student protest in 2011. In 2001, Argentines took to the street to protest the economic crisis, corrupt leadership and the brutal violence occurring daily. And in 2019, Puerto Rico came in full force, my aunt included, and called for the removal corrupt Governor Ricardo Rosselló by banging pots and singing for over 15 days outside his mansion. These are just a few examples of how cooking pots are being used, still, to symbolize decades (or better centuries) of inequalities piled on the marginalized and Indigenous communities in Latin America. The noise generated from the pots unifies the community and reinforces their message, they can never be silenced even if the officials won’t hear their voices.

As we wrap up this course, I look forward to hearing your connection with the cooking pot and what it symbolizes for the Indigenous group you studied or better yet, what it means to you.

I will leave you here with some videos of cacerolazo demonstrations and a song by Ana Tijoux, appropriately titled, Cacerolazo. This song was written in response to over 30 years of violences towards the Chileans and Indigenous communities and is set to the sounds of banging pots and pans.

LYRICS