Part 4: East Boston
El Valle De La Sultana Market Photo Collage. Image by Authors.
Nothing exposes you more quickly to another culture than stepping into an ethnic grocery market. From Vietnamese to Ethiopian to Colombian supermarkets, these stores scattered throughout Boston provide such a variety of food products most Boston residents would never see otherwise. For those unfamiliar, the stores offer a fascinating experience across the borders between here and the nations represented, and provide a window into food cultures from abroad. For those of the represented nationality, an ethnic grocery market serves as a life source – a crucial provider of the ingredients needed to prepare dishes from back home.
One of my (Ana’s) favorite things to do in Boston is to take the Blue Line into East Boston and go shopping at one of the Latin markets in the area. Before even getting out of the subway, I can sense the shift in demographic that the train is taking me through. My ears are alert to the Spanish spoken around me as I ride with my fellow Blue Line commuters. East Boston has the highest concentration of immigrants from Latin America of every neighborhood of Boston. In 2019, almost 54% of East Boston’s population was Hispanic or Latino; in comparison, Hispanic and Latinos made up only 19% of all of Boston’s population.[1]
East Boston has served as a landing point for immigrants arriving in Boston since the nineteenth century. Since the late 1900s, the area was settled primarily by Jews, and by the late 1910s East Boston had the largest Jewish community of all of Boston. Italians also settled in East Boston during this time, and they soon became the dominant ethnic group in the area. Immigration rates slowed due to anti-immigration laws passed in the 1920s, and East Boston’s population declined. However, the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 created a new era of migration. This new era welcomed immigrants from diverse places, including Southeast Asia and South America. The largest groups came from Central America and Colombia, where civil wars, violence, and economic unrest pushed thousands away. Soon, East Boston became a haven for Latinos of all nationalities, which is still evident today.[2]
As a Colombian myself, I love visiting East Boston and getting dinner from one of the several Colombian restaurants, eating pan de bonos (cheesy cassava bread) from my favorite Colombian bakery, and shopping for ingredients I can only find in an East Boston grocery market. I usually go to El Valle De La Sultana Market to pick up arequipe (Colombian dulce de leche) to make a special dessert recipe handed down to me from my mom. On one particular visit to El Valle De La Sultana, Carol and I met the owner of the store. Victor is an immigrant from Medellin, Colombia, who has lived in the Boston area for the past 33 years. He migrated here during the period of warfare in Colombia known as La Violencia, which brought widespread violence and devastated the Colombian economy. Medellin, his city of origin, was the city most severely affected by the drug wars.[3]
When Victor first arrived to East Boston, he started out in the restaurant industry, and after almost ten years he opened his first ethnic grocery market in Everett. Not long thereafter, he opened two other stores: this one in East Boston, and one in Somerville. One of the most defining qualities of the East Boston store, as well as his others, is its density – every square inch of space is strategically utilized to display or store products for sale. In studying the East Boston store, I could not imagine being able to fit a single more item. Yet, he tells us, his store in Everett is only slightly larger than this one and is even more packed, with products from other countries such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Brazil. He says it is even more popular than the one in East Boston, with a constant flow of customers and products.
El Valle De La Sultana Market Plan Drawing. Image by Authors.
Victor laments the limited size of his markets; he wishes he could have twice the space so that he could more proudly display the products he sells. He suggests that the space constraints of his stores do not allow for a dignified shopping experience. In addition, these stores are pushed into the outer neighborhoods of Boston where only those who specifically look for the products he sells will ever enter. The stores fulfill a need, but they do not offer a celebratory experience beyond the everyday. He depicts to us his dream of opening a large, beautiful, spacious Latin grocery store – not in one of the outer neighborhoods, but in the middle of Boston. In a location that attracts customers from all ethnic backgrounds, not only Latinos. A store with an abundance of space to proudly display a full array of products from Latin American countries.
While stepping into markets like Victor’s does expose one to the food cultures of a foreign country, they do not truly convey what it would be like to grocery shop in this other country. Victor makes the point by asking me if I’ve ever been to Colombia and shopped at an Éxito or Carulla (Colombian grocery store chains). Yes, I’d visited both stores before, and these shopping experiences are significantly different than shopping at El Valle De La Sultana. They are more like going to a Target or Whole Foods, but filled with Colombian products. Victor asks us to imagine having a store just like that here in Boston. This gets our minds going, and Carol and I begin to imagine what it would look like to have a new sort of food institution in Boston – one that celebrates food from across many different borders and recreates the joy of sharing food from one’s home.
[1] “Boston, Massachusetts,” City-Data (City-Data.com), http://www.city-data.com/city/Boston-Massachusetts.html.
[2] “East Boston,” Global Boston (Boston College Department of History), https://globalboston.bc.edu/index.php/home/immigrant-places/east-boston/.
[3] “Colombians in East Boston,” Global Boston (Boston College Department of History), https://globalboston.bc.edu/index.php/home/immigrant-places/east-boston/colombians-in-east-boston/.