Cultural Geography #1 - Las Conchas

The concha is crusted with sugar. Pastel crystals that create small crunches(?) onto your teeth, your tongue, the roof of your mouth. And then there’s the butter and the layers of dough. The proper way of eating a concha is by tearing it apart, spilling its sugary shell onto its layered fluff, and into your mouth like plip, plip, plip. La Superior’s dough melts in your mouth - fat layers of yellow bread overwhelming your senses and claiming them, just for a moment, as their own. Conchas eat you, not the other way around.

I grew up visiting La Superior, and Mrs. Chan, the autodidact of all things cultural, was my first mentor. She would spend her own Money to bring theatre troupes to Monroe Elementary where she reigned as its Principal for decades, it seemed. Every Cinco de Mayo, each classroom at Monroe would explode into sugary glee at the sight of a pink pastry box from La Victoria’s Panderia on El Dorado. We’d each get to pick one concha, paid for by none other than Mrs. Chan. I remember the soft off-white ones and how I’d try to peel back the sugar topping with my teeth.

Mrs. Chan. A lesson I took from her is that it’s okay to treat your students - to give back to your school with your own salary. At Delta College, I stocked my workplace with fruit snacks and holiday cookies for my kiddos. They called me their class mom/dad/person, and one comic book-inclined student even went so far as to reference X-Men in calling me their Mr. X, the head of the mutants who were learning to use their powers for good. All this from filling their space - our space - with love. If that meant sugar cookies for Thanksgiving and deep purple gummies for Easter, then so be it.

So, back to La Superior and las conchas. I grew up right by there, and dusted off my rusty old Spanish from high school whenever I went in. Dos pounds de chorizo salvadoreno, por favor, I’d ask the deli person. Salvadorian chorizo has a warmth to it - seeds and aromatic spices escaping from the little pink carnicieria bags and up your nostrils. Little chubs snipped and folded and weighed and handed to you. Anything else? No, es todo, gracias!

One time I had a conversation in Spanglish with the lady at the pastry counter. She recognized me from my visits, and I fumbled a little with the words that don’t flow off my tongue. Do - you - espeak - Spanish? Un poco, I replied. A little. Where’d you learn? She gestured to me, conjuring a school or the neighborhoods that were full of my friends learning English, me a little Spanish, on those long summer sunsets when I’d ride across a map of the United States at Grunsky. Oh, escuela secundaria, I said. Pero me gusta aprender mas. Me-too, she replied. Yo quiero aprender Ingles tambien.

We smiled at each other. Two residents of a multicultural city, two people who could be divided by language but who, in that moment, took the time to make it through to each other.

The sugar on the conchas tasted especially sweet that day.