What's Up?
SalviSoul is a cookbook! But, it's also more than that...
SalviSoul documents the foodways of Salvadoran cuisine and also documents the stories of women who migrated from El Salvador to the United States.
These women are mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters and hermanas who have nurtured the second generation of Salvadoran people in the United States with food and who have also, perhaps without realizing, taken the role of preserving culture for the future U.S. born "Salvis". Along with food, the traditions of storytelling have been passed down at the dinner table. Their stories of perseverance, struggle, sacrifice, love and victory have also been our nourishment.
Life & Work
Bio:
Karla T. Vasquez is the creator of SalviSoul, a food justice advocate, a food historian and a proponent for healthy food accessibility in low-income communities. Karla holds a degree in Journalism and completed her culinary training at The New School of Cooking. She specializes in community building, nutrition education, and food history. Karla has worked with Hunger Action Los Angeles, Los Angeles Food Policy Council, VELA, The Edible Apartment, Champions for Change, With Love Market and Cafe and other social justice organizations where she has used her skills to organize outreach efforts, manage projects and lead community health initiatives.
Karla has contributed to Eater L.A., L.A. Taco, We Are Cocina, and other publications. She's been interviewed by KCRW Good Food, Vice Munchies, ABC & and has been featured in Fierce by Mitu, and Zocalo Public Square. Most recently she was the LA Food Bowl Festival Event Coordinator at the Los Angeles Times.
Her initial inspiration for SalviSoul was to honor the lives of the women in her family.
Lessons/Workshops:
Learn Salvadoran recipes, food history and food storytelling with SalviSoul founder, chef, food writer, and recipe developer Karla T. Vasquez!
What you’ll receive:
Attendees will receive a shopping list of the equipment and ingredients as soon as tickets are purchased. On the day of the class students will also receive a Zoom link with the recipe one hour before class to join our virtual classroom. A link to download the class video will be available to students up to 5 days after the class.
How the classes work:
I will be cooking side-by-side with you as we go through each step of the recipe. You want to be relaxed and ready to cook (or watch) when the class starts. Class attendees are encouraged to ask questions often as well as have the opportunity to ask me to troubleshoot any cooking issues that may come up. I want you to feel confident before we move on to the next step! If you would prefer to just sit-in and watch me cook, that is totally fine as well!
All purchases final. Class size is limited to 50 students or households.
Interested in a private class?
Please email me at [email protected].
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).