After we came back to America, I became a nurse practioner and worked in several clinics. One of the rural clinics was a prenatal clinic. This was about twenty years after I’d left Guatemala. A young Mayan Indian woman came into the prenatal clinic. She was nineteen years old, born the year after we’d left. From talking to her, I found out she was from Sololá. I brought the interpreter in, because I only speak a little Spanish and I really wanted to communicate with her in more depth. I asked her if she knew of the soy dairy. She said that she did and had eaten the soy ice cream. I asked, “Have you ever eaten tofu?” She answered, “It is the custom (costumbre) of my people to eat tofu.” I laughed, because it had not been the custom of her people before we got there. That was cool. Her entire life she had seen her people eating tofu.
- Margaret Hamilton
People
- 1990