I tested my mom’s bistec encebollado using what I know so far, and my palate caught two things immediately. It needs just a tiny bit less vinegar, and I may be missing adobo. I have to call my aunt in case she knows whether my mom used it in hers.

So, this is not the final recipe. It is the version I am testing now. The one I’m sharing while I continue asking questions, adjusting measurements, and trying again.

This process is difficult. There are moments when I wish I could simply call my mom and ask exactly what she did. But it is also exhilarating when something gets closer, when one bite gives me a new clue, or when a family member remembers a detail I didn’t know to ask about before.

Recreating these recipes is not clean or linear. It is testing, tasting, learning, calling my family, and returning right back to the kitchen.

This bistec was delicious. It just wasn’t hers yet. So, I’m going back to the drawing board.

Any different ingredients in your recipe? ...

My parents migrated from Puerto Rico to New York, where I was born. They crossed water, not an international border. I say this as a daughter of the diaspora, not as an islander, and I do not pretend those experiences are interchangeable. The island and diaspora have been shaped by the same colonial relationship but in very different ways, and I am very well aware of this.

Moreover, I want to be clear that Puerto Rican food is distinctly Puerto Rican. I am not arguing that it should be absorbed into a generic American identity. I am asking why, inside the United States, it is treated as though it arrived with foreigners.

Congress made Puerto Ricans statutory U.S. citizens in 1917. The Supreme Court had already described Puerto Rico as “foreign in a domestic sense,” under U.S. sovereignty, but not fully incorporated into the country. That contradiction followed Puerto Ricans to the mainland and still haunts us to this day.

Too often, unfamiliarity is mistaken for foreignness. What I believe someone really means is not, “This food is foreign.” It is, “I did not grow up with it, and I have mistaken my experience for someone else’s.”

Puerto Rican food does not become less Puerto Rican because U.S. citizens brought it to New York or anywhere else in the country, for that matter. Recognizing it within American life does not erase the island’s identity. It simply refuses the hypocrisy of invoking our citizenship when useful while treating our culture as foreign when we show up as ourselves.

And our right to show up as ourselves is the part I’m not willing to let go of.

Sources / further reading:
Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History Since 1898 by Dr. César J. Ayala and Dr. Rafael Bernabe
 
The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World by José Trías Monge.
 
Puerto Rico: A National History by Dr. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution by Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, editors ...