Two Great Deserts: Sonora and Arabia Deserta
A couple of days ago I finally got around to reading Gary Nabhan’s book Arab/American. I was entranced as Nabhan, best known for his work on the ecology of the Sonoran desert, for foraging, and for support of local foods, explained how he kept finding parallels and resonances between the American southwest and Lebanon/Syria, the home of his ancestors. He muses on the parallels between the desert that spans the US Mexico border and the Arabian desert, with a good many side excursions to the Sahara, tracking sideways into family history, immigration politics, camel whisperers in the US, and frankincense.
Particularly intriguing given my interests (here and here) were the chapters where he explores the influence of Arabia and al-Andalus on the cuisine of the US Southwest and Mexico and the the words, particularly for water technology and plants, that are also common to both places. He mentions in passing that dishes such as mole poblano and chiles en nogada are products of arid Arabia as much as of Mexico, music to my ears. In a move I had not thought of, he links the fruit-based drinks called tesguinos to the tiswin of the Maghreb. And he traces how the word al-Jubb for a covered well ends up in the indigenous American language O’odham as alquives and al-naurah goes through Spanish noria to O’odham no:lik.
All great stuff. And what was thought provoking was that even indigenous American languages include loan words from Arabic. That means, of course, that saying that a certain dish must be an indigenous dish of the New World because it has a name in a New World language won’t work by itself. You have to go further and show that the word is not a loan word that has come in since the Conquest.
Yet from time to time, I felt a bit disoriented by Nabhan’s journey. And I think the reason is this. He is an American tracing his roots. And in that quest, certain distinctions–ones that he is perfectly aware of as a scholar–tend to get overlaid by the dynamic of the story itself. The wave of immigration from the Middle East to the Americas in the early twentieth century, when his ancestors arrived, comes from a different place and a different time from the first wave from the Islamic western Mediterranean of the sixteenth century. That earlier wave included Jews as well as Muslims, many of whom were Spanish or Berber rather than Arab (though the latter term is pretty elastic). The Siwa oasis of the Sahara, which Diana Bujua has written about eloquently here, has striking differences from the Lebanon-Syrian border.
So I’d love to see this first step taken further. Granted that there are both ecological parallels and historic links between the two great deserts (or three if you include the Sahara), are we now in a position to tell a more detailed story about how these have worked to produce the contemporary scene in the arid (and the non arid) regions that stretch from the part of the United States that was once part of Mexico down through Mexico itself?
I haven’t read this book, but I grew up in Tucson. When I visited the Chaco of Bolivia a couple of years ago, I was really struck by the ecological similarities, right down to endemic cacti that look an awful lot like the ones I knew in the Sonoran Desert. Cynthia Radding has done some comparative work on the peoples of the Sonoran desert and the dry scrub of Amazonia.
Thanks for that perspective Brooke. And thanks for alerting me to Cynthia Radding’s work. Comparative colonial frontiers looks right up my street.
Hmm… I had a great Chile en Nogada & Mole Poblano drowend with Tesguino the last time I was in the Sahara. I wait…the Arab world doesn’t have anything like Mole Poblano or Chile en Nogada… and Tejuino and other fermented corn beverages are well documented in the earliest Conquistador chronicles per Sophie Coe.
Hmm, Juan, no one is suggesting that you are going to find contemporary chile en nogada or mole poblano in the Arab world. And as to tesguino, I’d like to see a linguist let loose on this, in fact I’ve written to a friend who might have some ideas.
Actually I’m still waiting for all those thousands of pre-1500 Moles recipes from Central America? Have plenty of early medieval Arabic recipes for sauces containing spice, colour, thickened with ground nuts and/or fruit though.
Meaning “sauce”, the Portuguese word “Molho” (various spellings) turns up though out the Portuguese speaking (or formally speaking) world from Goa to Brazil and in historic cookbooks. As far as I can determine it derives from classical Latin “Mola” (mill stone, “Molaris” is to grind, hence molar teeth etc). Before that it goes back to an Indo-European root for mill. In Croatian mill is “Mlin”, hence “Mlinci” for a type of pasta or “Blin” in Russian for “Pancake” for that matter. As a grindstone is part of the cultural package for human development in Europe, the word associated with it is very deeply rooted.
Is there any overlap of Molho = sauce (Latin roots) and Mole = sauce (Nahuatl roots), do they blend into one another in use or is the use of mole too restricted for that.
Thanks Adam. And couldn’t agree more about the linguistic history. I’ve long thought that the similarities in sound between mole and molho (and other grinding words) at least made life easier in the cross cultural kitchen, and quite possibly point to stronger connections than that.
The two spare turkeys at my parents farm are called “Mole” and “Mlinci” (which is commonly served with turkey at Easter). If I had been more clever I would have called them Molho and Mlinci!
If I were more clever, I would think up a clever reply. What’s sauce for molho is sauce for mlinci?? No, that doesn’t do it. Sauce and meat all mixed up.
Yes I have read Sophie Coes books. Re-reading her book on the history of chocolate might be a worthwhile experience for you, especially the parts about how this ingredient was transformed on contact with a new culture and especially when exported back to the Old World.