Planting new roots with Platanos

There are many ways to find a way home — Dorothy had ruby slippers, Edmonton artist Michelle Campos Castillo has green plantains. An homage to her cultural heritage and the many communities that call north east Edmonton home, Platanos now graces the newly opened Belvedere station.

“Food is important to our well-being. Outside of the necessity of eating, it is a reminder of ​‘home’ or where we come from. It’s something I turn to when I need to be grounded and remember who I am.”

Born in El Salvador, Campos Castillo and her family arrived in the early 1990s, and Edmonton’s north end quickly became home for the youngster. She picked up English quickly while eagerly absorbing new experiences, places, friends, and cultural mores. ​“Looking back, I was so young. The rest of my family had a better sense of who they were. They were always able to hold on to parts of the culture whereas I was floating around for a long time in terms of who I was and who I wanted to be.”

An integral part of the immigrant experience, food is one of the first things sought out in a new place as part of maintaining identity, but as a community becomes more diverse, the need to substitute ingredients becomes less. ​“Food was a huge adjustment and a source of shame because mine didn’t look like the perfect cut up little sandwiches everyone else had. My mum would send me to school with beans and plantains or rice and I just wanted a meatloaf sandwich.”

Campos Castillo says her success at integrating into ​“Canadian” culture had a price – in her early twenties, she was disconnected, alone, and just eating ​‘random things.” A phone call with her mother changed that. ​“She told me to cook a pot of beans. I was a bit broke and beans are super cheap. I don’t know what it was – the experience of cooking something I grew up with or a DNA thing, but [the beans] awakened memories and feelings that brought a sense of comfort to my body; it’s comfort food that is meant to nourish on so many levels.”

The green banana-like food is part of many cuisines – African, Asian, Caribbean, Latin American. ​“You notice the overlap of cultures and their markers more, which is why I chose the plantain as my inspiration. We’re all living outside our home regions and it’s so beautiful how these things bring us together. I wanted to honour that.”

Creating Platanos was a homecoming she says, ​“Part of my journey of learning how to live between cultures is finding my way back to those cultural markers that I ignored for the sake of surviving. There’s a big cultural push with people younger than me who are honouring their cities and the things they grew up with. I am inspired by that pride because for so long I did not carry that with me. Platanos is part of paying homage to that.”