When a taste of home is the best gift at Christmas

In a small living room on the Northwest Side, a mildly contentious debate unfolds: Isn’t a Venezuelan hallaca basically the same thing as a Mexican tamale?

“An hallaca is an hallaca,” said Maria Carolina Guilarte in Spanish, “and a tamal is a tamal.”

Guilarte is assembling the foodstuff in question at her makeshift assembly line, set up across a long table that extends from her kitchen. Hallacas, a popular Christmas dish among Venezuelans, are made of corn dough mixed with chicken or beef and rolled with peppers, capers, raisins and olives into banana leaves. Every family has its own recipe.

She explained how she mixed the dough and how she uses achiote, a nutty and peppery spice, for texture and color. Then Guilarte spread the dough on the leaf, massaging it slowly.

Nearly 8 million people have fled Venezuela since President Nicolás Maduro took office in 2013. About four years ago, Guilarte became one of them, amid a yearslong economic collapse. Thousands of recent migrants from Venezuela, including her two children, now call Chicago home.

In Venezuela, Guilarte was a dentist. But here, she has started a catering business using recipes handed down from her mother and aunts. She recalled how her large family would come together to make hallacas: Younger children cleaned the leaves, teenagers chopped the vegetables. Once you turn 40, she said, you saute the ingredients and put the hallacas together.

Away from her homeland, Guilarte mostly makes the hallacas by herself. A friend, also from Venezuela, sits on the couch. Guilarte’s teenage kids pop in and out of the room.

Guilarte said many Venezuelans who still remain in their country won’t have enough food to celebrate the holidays. She described memories of her family gatherings during Christmases in a more prosperous Venezuela, some 20 years ago, when people could afford to buy all the ingredients and supermarkets sold plenty of goods.

But don’t get Guilarte started about where arepas come from. With all due respect, she said, the arepa, the flat cornmeal patty widely considered the signature culinary contribution of Colombia, is in fact Venezuelan.

Adriana Cardona-Maguigad covers immigration for WBEZ. Follow her on X @AdrianaCardMag.