The Boys from Peru

Produce Market on Main Avenue, Norwalk

This tale of discovery begins with a hot pepper on the sidewalk. I was having some work done on my car at the AAMCO on Main Street in Norwalk. What I thought would be a 20 minute job was moving into its second hour. I couldn’t take another minute of the St. Patrick’s Day parade on the waiting room TV so I went off in search of coffee. I hadn’t walked more than half a block when I saw it, lying in the sunshine on the pavement in front of a service station: shiny and bright green and, on closer inspection, definitely not a shamrock.

Road food
By coincidence, I needed a jalapeno pepper for the beans and rice I was planning to make that evening. This one could not have been in better shape. Sure, I wondered how it got there. But you know how easy it is to concoct explanations for even the most implausible circumstances: I just figured this must have dropped out of someone’s shopping bag — leaving aside the fact that I was not exactly in a shopping district, and that gas stations don’t normally carry fresh produce (not in this country, anyway). In any event, ignoring the advice I used to receive on a regular basis growing up in Manhattan about not picking up stuff from the street, I put the pepper into my pocket and continued on my way.

In a featureless strip mall that was only partially occupied, I passed an open doorway. A neat display of oranges caught my eye. An imposing pyramid of very large cans of Bush’s Best white hominy filled the shop window.

I turned around and peeked in the door, thinking that perhaps this was a temporary warehouse.

But it was far too clean and well-lit for that. The first thing I noticed, right under the oranges, was a blue 1 lb. box of Sweet Tamarind. I don’t know about you, but this is not an everyday item in the stores where I shop. I walked down the aisle past a handsome display of produce — broccoli with tight florets, bunches of carrots and celery, shiny eggplants, radish and asparagus, chayote, tomatillo, everything expertly arranged, looking just-picked. Roaming around the small but well-organized store, I saw yuca, jicama, whole fresh coconut, sweet plantain and a stack of aloe vera leaves, ready for juicing.

Forbidden Fruit

But that was only the beginning. In the back of the store I found whole and grated cotija cheese, four or more varieties of packaged tortillas, sweet corn arepas, pure manteca (pork fat), chorizo and other sausages, including several types of salami. Across the aisle were free standing shelves filled with packages, jars and cans of items I had for the most part never seen before. An even more telling indication of their Latino authenticity is that not too many of them came up on page 1 of a Google search.  The discoveries included tender cactus, guava, yucca aloe, mountain papaya, pechiche (a kind of wild cherry eaten in Ecuador), fernaldia (a plant whose flowers and buds are eaten in Guatemala and El Salvador) and an Andean tuber called olluco. One innocent-looking item — the sweetly-named Hawthorn Apple, packed in a jar with syrup

– turns out to have an infamous claim to fame. The key ingredient in a Mexican holiday punch, the tejocote is so indispensable — and it was once so unavailable north of the border — that between 2002 – 2006 it was the raw fruit most frequently seized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Smuggling, Interdiction and Trade Compliance program, according to the Los Angeles Times (http://bit.ly/aZOTmf). *

The shopkeepers who have assembled this rich and beguiling collection are two cousins, Luis Gabriel and Juan Sanchez. They opened their plainly-named “Produce Market” in November of 2009. Luis and Juan arrived here 9 years ago from Peru. Luis’s mother owns a small produce stand in Lima, so he grew up in the business. He and Juan worked at the Rowayton Market and then at Whole Foods in Greenwich, and the visual appeal of their tidy store shows that they learned their lessons well. Something else they learned is what it’s like to leave home in search of a new life — knowledge they share with more than a few of their customers. According to data collected by the Pew Hispanic Center (http://pewhispanic.org/), there were 47 million Hispanics living in the U.S. in 2008, and of those, 424,000 were in Connecticut.

New Lives
It seems a safe bet that a store so well-stocked will attract a following, but I wanted to know more about where — and who — the

customers might be.  It’s difficult to find statistics that look at Hispanic populations by counties or smaller units, so I turned to my friend Beatriz for insight. She came to the U.S. from Colombia in 1986 following a harrowing incident involving the kidnapping of her father. He was able to return to his family, but only after agreeing to a ransom that comprised most of what he owned, including horses, cows and other animals, fruit trees and a large coffee plantation. Beatriz confirmed that the main concentrations of Latinos live in the larger cities along the coast between Stamford and New Haven, and also in Hartford. In Fairfield County, she says, South Norwalk is heavily Mexican, whereas Peruvians and Ecuadorianos tend to live in Stamford. There is a good-sized Colombian community in South Norwalk, and an even larger one in Stamford (but when Beatriz wants to buy Colombian food she heads to Queens, NY).

Of course there are other Hispanic groups in Fairfield County — no disrespect intended; these are simply the ones Beatriz mentioned (the others tracked by Pew include Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, Guatemalans and Hondurans). There are other important urban centers, too, like Danbury. Beatriz told me that a lot of the Latinos who move to Connecticut are coming from other parts of the U.S., and in particular Texas and California. They journey north for a better life style, better jobs and better education for their children, she says. The Pew data do show that between 2000 and 2008, the Hispanic population of Connecticut increased 28%, but it’s not possible to say how much of that increase reflects “new arrivals” and how much reflects “transfers” from other parts of the U.S.

Comfort Food
Superficial as it was, my research changed the way I thought about the items sold at Juan’s and Luis’s store, and taught me something about the power of brands. Case in point: Produce Market stocks Premium Saltine crackers, identical to what I see in my Anglo store but in Spanish (e.g., Galletas de Soda PREMIUM). The package reminded me of the almost absurd rush of relief I felt when, shortly after leaving the U.S. to live in Zurich, Switzerland, I found Bounty paper towel in the supermarket, offering a direct connection to the way of life I thought I had left behind. Indeed, exotic though they may be to me, to Latinos, the fruits, vegetables, biscuits, snacks, sauces and other items on the shelves of the Produce Market are reminders of the ordinary and the everyday; they are familiar friends from home.

To the proprietors of Produce Market, they are something else as well. I asked Luis at one point what had made him decide to leave his native land and come here. He answered with more patience than my naïve question deserved: “Poor people come to this country,” he said simply, “for opportunity.” For these two gentlemen from Peru, owning their own store is a dream come true — and only the beginning, at that. Now that he has a store, I asked Luis, what’s next for you guys? Like a native son, he answered: more stores!

I’m looking forward to learning more about the foods of foodways of Produce Market. All I’ve sampled so far is the Pico de Gallo that Luis and Juan make in the store. I can tell you that it’s wonderfully clean-flavored and fresh-tasting with heat that’s strong but not excessive.

For more information on Hispanic business culture in Fairfield County and particularly in Stamford, consult this article published recently by the Fairfield County Business Journal.

P.S. All those years of inner city brainwashing finally got the best of me. The jalapenos at the Produce Market were every bit the equal of the one I’d found on the pavement, so I bought a nice clean new one and used it instead, saving the pepper I found on the street for the photo at the top of the page.

*The raw fruit is banned in the U.S. not because it has psychotropic properties, but because it often harbors pernicious parasites. In 2006, tejocote in cans and jars was removed from the contraband list.

Produce Market
235 Main Avenue
Norwalk, CT  06851