CAFÉ PART TWO

Feliz cumpleaños, Abuelita. You would have been 99 today. Thinking of you.

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This was supposed to be a post about coffee: a post about my thoughts and opinions about the brand of coffee. In particular, it was supposed to be a post about the coffee mi abuela drank every single day of her life. It was supposed to be an experience that made me feel closer to her and to the stories I hear about her that are centered around coffee.

This post, however, will be not be about those things. Not entirely. It will be much bigger than I ever anticipated it would be.

Not going to lie: Café Bustelo is a good, dark coffee. But that’s not the essence of this post.

A hand holding a TV remote. The remote is pointed at a TV. Image from Pexels.

This change in thought process started last weekend, my partner and I were scrolling around Disney+, trying to find something to watch, and when we were looking up TV series, the show Rolie Polie Olie came up. I tugged on his sleeve and pointed at the screen. “I haven’t seen that show in forever! Have you ever seen it?” I asked.

He had, so we watched two episodes and had a laugh about the cheesy, old-timey, hyper appropriate dialogue of the characters. We gaped in amazement at how bad CGI was 20 years ago, even though it didn’t feel like that long ago. It got us to talking about other shows we grew up watching. Shows that came up were LazyTown, CatDog, and That’s so Raven. For the length of our conversation, we were teleported back in time to when things were comparatively easier than they are now as adults with full-time jobs.

I reflected on how many of these conversations I’ve had with others, and when my parents talk to childhood friends or siblings, they have this same nostalgia come to them too.

So, there’s a word for this: collective memory. Depending on who you ask, it can also be referred to as cultural or social memory, and is defined as “shared recollection: mental representations of past events that are common to members of a social group,” (American Psychological Association).

A white coffee mug on a wooden table, black coffee being poured into it. From Pexels.

A couple days later, I plopped down onto my couch and wrapped myself in a gray fleece blanket. I started outlining a blog post about how much I enjoyed Café Bustelo, but the words weren’t flowing. At all. Before, it had been so easy to compare to the other three coffees in my post here, but this post wasn’t happening at all.

When I get stuck in my writing, I tend to drift off, my eyes landing on random objects around me as I play different scenarios in my head. At some point, my eyes fixed on the coffee table where a book sat: My Broken Language by Quiara Alegría Hudes (10/10 recommend purchasing this book).

I had just finished the book recently, and loved it. I’d felt a sense of awe and mysticism, at the book’s end especially. I really appreciated reading a perspective about growing up and navigating diaspora in a neighborhood surrounded by people that experienced similar things as a culture. As most of you know, this isn’t a perspective I had growing up. And that strong sense of community is a perspective I enjoy reading and learning about. Hudes’s words lit a fire in me to keep exploring my Latinx diaspora journey. It kept inspired to continue working on Strangers and my upcoming poetry collection.

When something moves me deeply, I tend to keep it on the coffee table, not the shelf.

A teal coffee mug resting on books on a wooden coffee table. From Pexels.

Feeling like I had nothing to lose, since no writing as getting accomplished, I picked up the book and went to the places I’d bookmarked, including a passage where Hudes’s family drank Café Bustelo. Rereading that passage, I couldn’t help but smile. Café Bustelo was something I recognized. It’s something I can experience today that mi abuela experienced her whole life. It’s a memory of her and the community her and my dad were a part of. The texture of the almost black grounds vacuum sealed into the bright yellow package hasn’t changed despite the time since her passing. If I wanted to, I could close my eyes and pretend that I’m sitting at the table in her kitchen, across from her, enjoying the peace of an early fall morning.

But I’m not here to kid myself: I know the only way to know mi abuela is in dreams and my imagination. I know the memories I speak of aren’t mine, that the customs lost to me aren’t ones I can just learn on YouTube or buy at a bodega (if we even had any nearby). But with Café Bustelo, I have something tangible that the Latinx community has collectively recognized and remembered all this time.

Despite everything I was never taught and never got to be a part of, my connection to the Latinx community is, in some ways, literally a carafe and mug away. And that brings me a lot of comfort.

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