Explaining choripán is simple: it is the great Argentine sandwich. I don’t hesitate writing that sentence one bit and I sincerely believe that no one would dare debate that this sausage cooked over a wood fire and presented in its entirety, or butterflied up the middle (although this technique ruins our great culinary achievement by drying it out and leaving it with nothing but the taste of coals), squeezed between two pieces of bread painted with chimichurri and topped with salsa criolla is basically a national emblem.
Mariano Cauro writes in Gourmet Philosophy (2017) that the choripán isn’t just a marker of national identity but also a “victory against Sartrean nausea”, a concept I couldn’t grasp until I moved to Buenos Aires, which is where Cauro wrote from. When you arrive in the metropolis, especially coming from a small town in the middle of the country, just like the book that Cauro takes inspiration from, at a minimum you feel overwhelmed and alone. Everything around you is obscene. Tall towers like bars in a jail cell surround you, and people walk hurriedly to nowhere like horses wearing blinders. Yet amongst the chaos you give yourself into a choripán on a Monday afternoon without having to look for it, and a revolution against automatism occurs with each bite.
Coming from a small town isn’t the same as coming from another universe. Revolution and victory came in other forms like in the aftermath of the dance party I went to every Thursday. My friends and I would leave the house under the guise of a pajama party, which was the biggest and most innocent lie we could think of. At five o’clock in the morning when the bakeries were beginning to open, the traffic cops arrived at their posts and we had to leave the club on the motorcycle my friend got for her quince, her Latin sweet sixteen, with a choripán in one hand and a melon filled with wine in the other, skirting around the cop cars because if we were forced to take a breathalyzer the scariest part wasn’t the result but the chancletazo that was waiting for us afterward.
The choripán both ruptures and unites: It breaks the mandate of the ‘proper’ woman when she sits and opens her legs to take her first bite. It breaks the hunger of the kids who usually reject whatever food their mothers prepare, except for the Sunday chori they eat while running around the patio at the family barbecue. It breaks the hierarchy of the construction site when the engineer scarfs down the ‘chori de obra’, a Friday afternoon tradition, that the workers prepare with the same skill that they’ll later use to build a house. And this is where the choripán and Peronism meet: they destroy the status quo.
Peronism, unlike a sandwich, isn’t as easy to explain. There are no cliff notes for the sum of its parts because at its core it is a movement of the masses and it is within that shift (Verón) that the Peronist consciousness forms: To be a Peronist is to be in constant movement. A simplistic explanation of the Movimiento Peronista is to say that it is a social restructuring that began under General Juan Domingo Perón in the 1940s and continues today. An emotional explanation is to say that Peronism is the Argentinian political party that pursues social justice. Both definitions are true and incomplete, and thus, unfair. But how does one explain a feeling?
Without a doubt, Peronism is a movement in constant contradiction and discomfort, just like the choripán that breaks down limitations: To say that the choripán is just a sandwich is to say that Peronism is just a political party. It isn’t just unjust, it is insufficient. Peronism is an identity: Belonging to the movement is to recognize within oneself the constant need to make sure that everyone is doing well, even in moments of discomfort, like eating a choripán on the boardwalk with your tie thrown over your shoulder, legs spread apart, your head confronting the wind so your hair doesn’t get in your food. It is here that we have the second meeting point: el savoir faire. Choripán and Peronism demand an intrinsic understanding of owning one’s pleasure.
Peronism and pleasure: pizza and champagne
In the social imaginary, Peronism and pleasure are united. In Peronist tradition, much like Catholic tradition, the goal is to have a good time: The devoted rest assured that their ‘G*d State’ will always look out for their best interests. Our sense of pleasure also has an element of hedonism: Immediate pleasure that doesn’t spare future consequences. The 1990s was an era of maximum Peronist hedonism: Pizza and champagne, or the ascension of the professional middle class (pizza) to the upper classes (champagne). A government of ‘new rich’ auctioned off our country to the highest bidder. Life was one big party. This is also Peronism.
Why do I get stuck on this contradiction? Firstly, it’s important in understanding a movement to emphasize the contradictions that are fundamental to its existence. Peronism cannot exist without contradictions: This G*d State is human, and thus, it falls easily for temptation. Secondly, contradictions keep us alive: We constantly shift to become better versions of ourselves. The idea of a movement that constantly falls from and returns to power, with the hope of being better the next time, makes me wonder how we need to return to pleasure now. The danger of pleasure, of having a good time, is that we are always hovering on the border of pleasure at the cost of others. Questioning our pleasure, our quick joys, is a way to question neoliberalism, that North American snake that descends on the Global South with the cruel intention of breaking our communities. And here lies the return of the choripán, the return of grease running down your fingers is also to turn our backs on the American Dream, that individualistic dream that only a few can have a good time, only the ones that ‘deserve’ it. And there is the contradiction.
We must ask ourselves how we will return to the choripán without empowering the soy and meat lobbies to make today’s food at the cost of our future. Questioning what we eat and how we celebrate today is to construct a future where the good times never stop. In this period of hedonism, like in any celebration in excess, we exhaust the Earth and the possibilities of its production. The farmlands in the country’s interior abandoned agricultural diversity to align itself with the safe business that soy promises, and the small ranches transformed into giant warehouses that stack animals one on top of another and torture them for our pleasure—it is what it is.
The poet Elena Anníbali writes in La sospecha: “now I drive up the 36 and all you hear / is the rustles of soy / the planes filled with roundup / that moves with the sound of an old zeppelin / radiating a sunflower fog that drags / the same wind that whistles in the ruined villages / I don’t know if this is the spoil / the rot.” In the cornfields where we used to get lost chasing partridges, today we walk through the mess of a party that only a few enjoyed. And we have to clean up. This isn’t my call to veganism, necessarily, but to another type of consumption, one that considers the entire process that having an animal atop our table implies.
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Choripán and the people’s party
The history of Argentina is filled with twists and turns. There is a moment in particular at the beginning of the 19th century when the gauchos of the grasslands begin to build “Argentine tradition” with the gathering at its epicenter. Normally, people gathered around a game of cards, a round of yerba mate, and obviously, an asado. Slaughtering an animal is a job that requires time and people. The ritual of the asado was born o make that task more pleasant.
The first thing eaten is the matambre, which got its name, ‘kill hunger’, because its purpose was to distract the stomach while the rest of the cow was cooked. It is the first layer of meat to be removed before cutting into the ribs, thin and often chewy but most importantly, quick to cook. Although today chorizo is eaten during the asado, it used to be saved for the future—the reward for a long day's work. The leftovers of the slaughter were combined with spices and stuffed into the intestines which were hung in the kitchen so that in the days that followed the ritual of meat could continue. Knowing how to enjoy, ultimately, is about knowing how to wait. That is the way Peronism has always worked: A period of Peronism is always followed by a period of anti-Peronism in government. Peronism and choripán are both a challenge in patience—to celebrate you must wait for the right moment.
The farm belts of today no longer resemble those of the early 19th century, and not just because it has been pushed aside for soybeans and feedlots, but because amongst these twists and turns we have adopted the traditions of the second wave of western European immigrants that arrived a hundred years later. These new inhabitants brought similar traditions as if all rural civilizations live the same regardless of their spot on the map or distance between one another. That conviviality has allowed generations like mine, who have never slaughtered an animal and buy meat packed in plastic and styrofoam from the supermarket, to continue the ritual. In this Peronism and choripán are similar: Pleasure is passed from mouth to mouth. What some call doctrine is an education of the gathering. Peronism, much like an asado, is the perfect space to communicate and think about a different future.
We must ask ourselves: What does a Peronist do as they wait to return to power? In physics, energy never sits at zero. The mass of energy waits to be used in the future and sustains itself at a minimum so that when the time comes, it has the necessary strength to turn the wheel. The same thing happens in Peronism: Even when they do not sit at a place of power, they keep the fight for social rights alive by occupying every free space so that the Right cannot advance. On days that it rains, an audio clip of President Cristina Fernández circulates. In her characteristic tone, she laments: Today we can’t have choripán because it is raining out. In Argentina, even the extremist understands that sunny days are Peronist days, and everything else is anti. Clear skies and warm weather invite a celebration, the union of people, which is exactly what Peronism is about: To desire the gathering.
I remember being five years old and accompanying my mother to our delegation’s community center to eat chicken and rice and listen to the adults debate how to stimulate the return of local consumption. It was 1996 or 1997, the height of selling out our country. The biggest worry at our community center was getting people to consume what their neighbors produced, not just to keep producers afloat but so that the whole community remained unified and active. In my small town in the center of the province of Córdoba, we always ate chicken and rice because that is what our members produced—the rice farmer brought rice, the chicken farmer brought chicken, and whoever owned a vegetable stand at the market brought produce. With a little contribution from everyone, we made a big pot of food.
The only time that the meal was different was when we traveled to the capital to attend a big protest. At a protest, there is no time to sit, set the table with silverware, and share a meal because the Sartrean rhythm of the city doesn’t allow you to stop for a single second to greet your neighbor. Choripán is the best option: the sandwich that dirties your hands with grease, just like the hands that produce it and the hands that will eat it—greasy laborer, greasy Peronist, greasy cabecita negra. The perfect sustenance and pleasure for staying on your feet for hours on end or whatever it takes to walk from the Congress to the Presidential Palace surrounded by the sounds of fireworks, voices that demand change or let out screams of celebration, and people who gather and hug, however they can, a world where if we don’t invent something to break the norm, we set ourselves up to be consumed by it.
This is what our food rituals are about: Gathering with others and creating a moment that breaks the routine of our days, and in that crosshair is where the Movimiento Peronista and the choripán are the same things. Both call for celebration, for collective pleasure. Carou explains “the street choripán is a momentary triumph of the multitudes over civilization”. Like the cabecita negra that cools themself off by dipping their feet into the public fountain, the choripán comes to plant the seeds of chaos.
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Editor’s note: we chose not to translate cabecita negra, literally ‘blackhead’, as it is a culturally specific derogatory term used by rightwing Antiperonists to describe Peronists, particularly of indigenous descent.
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Clara Inés. Recovered cook, poet, editor, and co-founder of independent publishers Elemento Disruptivo and Trench Editora. Born in the Buenos Aires suburbs and raised in Córdoba. She loves to study and abandon majors: she has studied Paleontology, Combined Arts, Literary Editing, and French. She is currently studying Art Criticism. She is always down to eat chipa.
La Delmas. Illustrator and NFT artist. She was born and raised in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. She is 100% inspired by her family origins and customs and a lover of homemade food and good meals. Find her on Instagram.
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