08/22/2026
The origins of food tells the story others try to erase. "...eating the tuber and the fruit that traveled the identical route my two bloodlines did, in opposite moral directions."
Thank you, Author Alisa Valdes (Rodriguez)
The Potato Remembers What Spain Erased
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez for THE PUGILIST
Aug 19, 2026
In Madrid, the national dish is a quechua-language confession almost no one tries to understand.
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Today, I ate a tortilla. No, silly. Not that kind of tortilla. A tortilla Española. Since moving to Spain from the United States of America a month ago, I’ve been assured by no shortage of people that this, the Spanish tortilla, a thick omelette made with stacks of thinly-sliced potatoes cooked in olive oil and held together with whisked eggs, is a Spanish “classic.” I’ve also been assured that my new favorite breakfast meal, pan con tomate — toasted rustic, crusty bread with pureed tomato, olive oil and salt (and sometimes fresh garlic) — is also a class dish of Spain.
I took a cab today with a Peruvian driver. We talked a bit as he steered us through Madrid, about what Spain has been like for us both, as immigrants from the Americas and, more specifically, from parts of the Americas that were colonized first by Spain. “They really seem to think they invented the potato here,” I said, watching his eyes in the rearview mirror. He cut me a quick, amused look, and raised one eyebrow.
“They don’t teach their children the truth about what they did in America,” he said, meaning all of the Americas. “They’re still teaching their kids that they’re superior to us.”
My cab driver is from the Andes, where the potato originated. His ancestors cultivated it, just as they cultivated tomatoes, for thousands of years before they ended up the star ingredients of dishes Spaniards insist are their classics. The potato grew for millennia in the cold highlands of what’s now Peru, near what would become Potosí. The tomato came to the mesoamerica Aztecs from the Andes, too, as trade, long before Spain arrived. The Aztecs cultivated the savory red fruit. The potato and the tomato crossed the Atlantic in the hold of a ship, riding the same trade route as the silver Spain also insisted was its own. And today, incredibly, Spain is still acting like all three just came to them all on their own, or only through Spanish efforts —Spain, eating its own arrival myth and tasting nothing but itself.
An artist’s rendition of chinampa farming in the Aztec empire
The words on the menus still carry the receipts, though most Spaniards might not realize it. Tomate comes from the Aztec Nahuatl word tomatl. Patata is a linguistic collision — Quechua papa fused with Taíno batata — two indigenous American tongues braided into a single Castilian noun. Pimentón, the paprika that colors chorizo and defines half of what registers to the world as Spanish flavor, is ground from American peppers. And the chocolate everyone drinks with their churros? The word is from the Nahuatl xocolatl, which means “bitter water.” That most popular treat came to Spain up the same gangway. The New World rewrote the Spanish plate so thoroughly that the plate now reads as eternally Iberian to people here, and the etymology sits there like a birth certificate no one bothers to open.
I am a strange person to be doing this tasting, and I know it. My mother’s line of Spaniards goes back more than thirteen generations in New Mexico. One line reaches to the Oñate expedition of 1598 — the conquest arriving at my own ancestral doorstep with the sword and the notarized land grant. Three of our direct ancestors were on that expedition. Another line is indigenous New Mexican, the people that expedition came to convert, r**e, steal from, enslave and kill. I am the Columbian Exchange with a body, sitting in the metropole, eating the tuber and the fruit that traveled the identical route my two bloodlines did, in opposite moral directions. The tortilla is a confession that no one in this bar reads as one.
Spain has begun to fast-track citizenship for immigrants from the Spanish colonial disapora in the Americas, expanding the nation’s own understanding of its own history, slowly.
But now that Madrid is home to more than 1 million immigrants from the Americas, it’s going to start getting harder for this city to continue to delude itself about who, exactly, paid for all their beautiful palaces and gardens around here, and who cultivated, through advanced science and farming techniques, “their” proudest national dishes.
Naturalization is a kind of amnesia. A food becomes “timelessly Iberian” precisely by forgetting how it arrived — the origin worn smooth by daily use until the word stops meaning anything but lunch. And the forgetting is not random. It always follows the money.
Consider Potosí. The silver mountain of the Andes financed the Spanish empire for two centuries, its ore hauled out on the backs of Indigenous mita enslaved laborers and, when too many of them had been killed, Spain enslaved millions of Africans and brought them to the Americas. Few U.S. Americans realize this, but Spain pioneered the African slave trade. England copied them. Most of the African slave trade took place south of what’s now the United States.
The potato grew in the same cold air where millions of indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans died at the hands of Spain, in the same highlands, feeding the same people whose lungs the mines consumed. The silver got shipped to fund the crown. The potato got shipped to feed the poor of Europe, where it eventually became the humblest, most domestic food imaginable — the thing a grandmother fries on a Sunday. One traveled as plunder and is remembered, when it is remembered at all, as glory. The other traveled as a botanical curiosity and is remembered as heritage. Both came from the same mountain, carried by the same ships, wrung from the same conquered ground. Only one of them still shows up on the national plate every single day, and it is the one that has been most completely stripped of where it came from.
But empire does this. Empire honors the crop and erases the labor. It keeps the flavor and passive-voices the provenance into “the Age of Discovery,” “the encounter with the New World” — language as bloodless and capricious as wind.
In 2019, Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, sent a letter to King Felipe VI and to Pope Francis asking Spain to apologize for the abuses of the conquest. Spain rejected it with, in its own phrasing, all firmness, and offered the line that has become the template for European colonial deflection everywhere: deeds of five hundred years ago cannot be judged by the criteria of today. Madrid regretted, mostly, that the letter had been made public.
The refusal hardened into ritual. When Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum took office in October 2024, she left Spain’s King Felipe off the guest list for her inauguration, citing his silence on that letter. Spain called the exclusion unacceptable and stayed away at every level. A sitting monarch, uninvited to a former colony’s swearing-in, over a sorry he would not say. This was two years ago, folks.
And then, slowly, the choreography of the almost-apology began. In October 2025, at the opening of an exhibition of Indigenous Mexican art in Madrid, Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, spoke of pain and injustice toward Indigenous peoples, and said it was only fair to recognize it and to regret it. Around the same exhibition, the King himself, studying the art, allowed that there had been much abuse during the conquest, and that some of it, measured by present values, could not make Spaniards proud. Sheinbaum received these as gestures — reconciliation of a kind — while noting, precisely, that it was not everything one would have wanted.
Regret. Recognition. Pain acknowledged. Every emotion in the neighborhood of an apology, orbiting the thing itself, never landing on it. The crown will grant that abuse occurred, in the abstract, in the passive, as something that happened rather than something anyone did. What the crown will not say is the sentence with a subject and a verb: we did this, and we are sorry. And I will grant the complication honestly, because the record deserves it — this is not a settled question even in Mexico, where surveys have found more citizens opposed to demanding a Spanish apology than in favor of it, and where historians point to formal reconciliations in 1836 and 1910 as apologies already made. The demand is contested. The refusal is not. Spain has decided, across governments of every stripe, that the word costs more than it is willing to pay.
The one honest witness
Here is the strange grace of it. The food is the only participant in this whole arrangement that has not lied. Food bears witness, one of the many subversive ways, often concocted in the kitchen under the hands of women, that the conquered outlast their conquerers.
The potato still answers to a Quechua-Taíno name. The tomato still carries its Nahuatl in the first syllable. The pepper in the pimentón still crossed an ocean it did not ask to cross. These crops make no argument and offer no defense of empire, and precisely because they are mute they cannot deflect. They are the receipt the empire kept by accident, folded into the most intimate act a culture performs, which is to feed itself and call the food its own.
