Presenting the new TamalFest DC logo
By hola | Published | No Comments
You might have noticed we have beautiful new TamalFest DC logo—one that that encompasses both the ancient roots and the modern traditions of the tamal.
TamalFest DC is Hola Cultura’s biggest event of the year. It brings together amateur and professional cooks, alike, to showcase their tamal-making traditions and share them with the DC community. It is a succulent and cross-cultural gathering placing the tamal, arguably Mesoamerica’s first ever comfort food, in the limelight of the DC foodie scene.
While we loved the logo and rest of the TamalFest design work created last year by our beloved and much-missed former intern, Edgar Gaona (Big shout out to Edgar!), not everyone felt that last year’s corn-husk wrapped tamal art adequately represented the diversity of tamales that we seek to honor with this annual festival, which is part fiesta and part cultural exchange. So after much debate and discussion about how to visually depict a dish that is sometimes wrapped in cornhusks and sometimes in banana or other leaves, we concluded that there was a need for a more inclusive logo this yar and all of Hola Cultura’s future TamalFests.
As you may know, the tamal is a unifying dish across the Americas. It stretches back in time to around 8000 to 5000 BC. It consists of ‘masa’ dough, typically made of cornmeal or rice flour, filled with vegetables or meat or beans or cheese—or some combination of these ingredients. Once the masa is stuffed and wrapped in cornhusks or leaves, the tamales are then steamed or baked. While some countries call this food a “tamal“, others may call it a hallaca, chuchito, humita, bollo, or pastel dominicano o puertorriqueño.’
Creating a logo that represents this wide variety in what is essentially the same staple dish is a great challenge.
To meet this challenge we brought in Frida Larios, Ambassador for the Latin America Design Ambassadors Council and creator of the multi award-winning New Maya Language pictoglyphs and Animales Interiores series. She bases many of her unique designs on the logographic principles of ancestral Maya hieroglyphs.
“If we stop talking about these stories and myths then little by little they are shut away from us. But if we make them relevant once more, they come back to life. So long as they continue to be brought up in this contemporary context, the references are kept and remembered, not forgotten”—DC artist Frida Larios
From “A Brief History Of Tamales” by Claudia Alarcón
Larios enthusiastically went to work, using the same creative she deploys with all of her clients. First, she embarked on complex historical research of the Maya hieroglyphs. Yes, that’s right! The tamal has been around so long it has it’s own glyph that turns up in ancient pottery and in the Dresden Codex, one of the last remaining ancient Mayan books.
Then she began sketching and brainstorming imagery that incorporates the tamal’s long and powerful past in a beautiful, colorful and modern new interpretations. Larios presented to Hola Cultura several options from which to choose. Our TamalFest Organizing Committee loved them all. We ended up selecting a version with a pictoglyph at the center of the palm representing the tamal with the clear depiction of the outer leaf wrapper, masa and filling of choice.
Larios and our organizing committee selected this version by unanimous consensus. We love it and feel it well represents the essential tamal—whether it goes by that name or another—and honors the history of this ancie—one of the world’s first comfort foods served around the Americas.
We asked Larios what she hopes her logos to transmit. Her response: “To form a bridge between the past and the present. If we stop talking about these stories and myths then little by little they are shut away from us. But if we make them relevant once more, they come back to life. So long as they continue to be brought up in this contemporary context, the references are kept and remembered, not forgotten.”
TamalFest DC 2016 takes place on Sun., Dec. 4, at Bell Multicultural High School in Columbia Heights. Please back our Kickstarter campaign and help make TamalFest DC a reality again this year, while helping to sustain Hola Cultura’s work! https://kck.st/2fu4HhJ
—Lucia Jimenez
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