My Own Private Avocado

I love avocados now. Hated them with a passion when I was younger. Actually, the same thing could be said for beets. Ironically, the story of how this hatred came about has a lot to do with my mother. Big ass surprise there.

For those of you who do not already know, I am Guatemalan. I grew up in the United States, but we did eat some Guatemalan foods growing up. Avocados were not, in the 80s, the food staple they are now. Avocado everything was not the norm. I think if it wasn’t for the fact that we lived across the street from a health food store, it would have been harder to find them in our New England town when I was growing up.

The most popular way to eat avocados, as we all know, is guacamole. Well, I am not sure what exactly it was about the way my mother made guacamole that I did not like. Was it the color? The lumpy texture? The ingredients? Did I just assume it was going to be gross because I didn’t trust her to not lie to me when she said something tasted good, but it was obviously going to be an acquired taste? Probably. However, the fact was that as much as we had guacamole in our diet, I was not going to eat it if it was part of the meal. Which was hard when it was the entire meal. Tostadas are a very popular Guatemalan staple meal. And tostadas are famously just guacamole spread on a fried tortilla. They are also served as a triplet, one tostada has sauce, and the other tostada has refried black beans, aka frijoles volteados. So if this were dinner, I would only eat the sauce and beans.

This wariness over avocados persisted until I was about 12. I would avoid them in all forms, chopped, sliced, but especially guacamole. Wasn’t going to touch the stuff. Then one day, I was in New York. I don’t remember for what, it might have been the 4th of July. And we were at a barbecue party. The difference was that it was fancy. It was friends of my ex-stepmother, and she was a lawyer. She and my dad had been invited to their place for a fancy party, with fancy people (the majority of whom were not people of color, if you catch my drift) and fancy food. Well, one of the fancy dishes they had was guacamole served on this platter with some tortilla chips.

I had made a friend at this party. She was my age, and we were running around having a good time, as 12-year-old girls are wont to do, and we got hungry. So we hit the food table, and she served herself a plate with guacamole and some chips, among other things. I asked her, is that any good? And she was like, yeah, it’s my favorite. I was curious. Because she was very white, and I was very not. I was like: What does she like about it that I don’t? So I gave it a try. And lo and behold, it was amazing. I was internally pissed off. Because I could have been enjoying this all the time, and instead had been pawning off my guacamole onto my brother because I was scared to eat it.

I returned home to my mother in Connecticut, a changed person. She made a big deal the first time I ate the guacamole she served me after that, wanting to know why I was eating it now after refusing for so long, but I refused to give her the satisfaction of admitting she was right and that avocados are the best.