Celia Doesn’t Remember the Last Time She Ate Meat

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Celia López and her family have not eaten rice for three months. The ten dollars she earns every week isn’t enough to buy any. They don’t eat dairy products or eggs either, much less meat, which they haven’t had on the table in no one knows how long. She can’t remember the last time they ate chicken soup or shared a piece of beef. Recently, they ran out of coffee and sugar, and Celia can count on her fingers the days left before they run out of corn.

She can’t count on the ten dollars she usually earns each week. Today there’s money; tomorrow, maybe not. She relies on ingenuity, hard work, and luck to make ends meet: selling hoja de mora (an edible shrub) and vegetable-filled pastries to surrounding communities. On May 2, for example, her family had no money to buy shampoo or other cleaning supplies: “We bathe with laundry soap,” she says. When business is slow, the family relies on the support of relatives.

Celia is 42 years old and the mother of six —five daughters, one son— and works as a farmer, just as her family always has. The $40 USD a month she brings in is barely a quarter of what she needs to cover the cost of a basic food basket, which in rural areas like hers averages $171.07 for a family of 4.26 members. But in Celia’s house, there are seven: four daughters, one son, and a two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, whom she has cared for since December, when her eldest daughter left home. The whole family lives in one makeshift hut constructed from adobe walls, with black plastic and scraps of tin for a roof and siding. The home was built with the help of Celia’s brothers when she moved to the hamlet of El Centro, in the canton of El Jícaro, a rural area 13 kilometers from the municipality of Tacuba, in Ahuachapán. She moved here after she became a widow.

Celia’s husband was killed by gang members on April 2, 2017. He had the misfortune of running into the group of armed men as they were returning from committing another murder, and they shot him as a potential witness. She lived in the community of Los Soriano, one of Tacuba’s many gang-plagued areas, where not a week went by without news of a death, a mass killing, or a shootout between police and gang members. After her husband’s murder, Celia and her brothers fled the village for fear that the gang would come after her family. “Come with us!” Her brothers told her, “We’re not going to leave you alone.”

She never reported the crime to the authorities, also out of fear. “Making accusations won’t bring him back,” she says. “God takes his time, but He doesn’t forget. That’s what I’ve come to accept.” Her youngest daughter was six months old when it happened. Her siblings supported her as best they could, giving her five to ten dollars every two weeks, along with some fruit and a few vegetables from their harvests. But that support came to an end in August 2022 when Celia’s brothers were detained under the state of exception. Now they are in Mariona Prison, awaiting trial. Celia doesn’t know what evidence the government could have to support their accusation that her brothers were gang members or collaborators.

 

 

On May 2, 2023, Celia was unable to recoup her expenses selling hoja de mora, because her clients often don’t have the money to pay her on the spot. She sells her products on the promise that the payments will eventually be delivered. In her pantry, there are five eggs she received as a gift from a relative and some flour for making bread. She also has a couple of potatoes, a carrot, a slice of cabbage, and a plastic bottle containing less than four ounces of oil. These are the ingredients she uses to make the vegetable pastries she sells for 25 cents to her neighbors, and the family doesn’t touch them unless there’s nothing left to eat. “Only when there’s nothing left,” Celia says. For now, she has a handful of corn masa. “When there’s nothing left,” she repeats as she pats and shapes the tortillas with her palms. The 25 tortillas she is making today should be enough to last at least a week.

Cecilia’s family has started skipping meals. Typically, they will eat breakfast and then have a late lunch. This reality has Celia constantly thinking about going to work in Ahuachapán, where she could earn about $200 as a domestic employee and meet the minimum needs of her family. To cover the basic nutrition for her family of seven, Celia would need an average of $281.12, or $40.16 for each family member. “But my daughters always ask me not to leave them, that they’ll help me sell the pastries so I won’t have to leave,” she says.

But Celia doesn’t dare leave her daughters alone; she wants them to finish their studies. Her oldest is 17, the others are 14, 13, and 11, and the youngest is six. Her plan is to farm the land, but lately she’s been too sick to work. This, she says, is why she lost her last corn harvest, because she couldn’t tend her plot due to a period of illness. Instead, she is forced to buy corn, or to wait for someone to give her some as a gift. She didn’t grow beans this year either: the seed packets delivered by the government arrived in September, but the community needed them earlier, to plant in August. This caused crops to fail, and is why Celia decided to save her sack for planting next season. She doesn’t know if the seeds are still good. “I'll try today, now that it’s May, and see if it works,” she says. She has no choice but to leave it all up to chance.

Now, two months later, in July, 2023, Celia says that she planted some of the beans but couldn’t get them to grow, so she’s decided to save them for eating… For when there’s nothing left.