On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
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A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
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A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
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A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
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A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
On a sidewalk in a middle-class neighborhood of Colima city, the Bejarano family is selling tuba, a refreshing fermented drink made from the fresh, sweet sap of the coconut palm tree.
Sisters Amairani and Karla Bejarano, right, sell tuba on a street in Colima, Mexico.
(Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times)
It is a bright morning, the heat rising with the sun, as drivers pull over and grab cups to go. They ask for tuba compuesta, or “composed,” with muddled red berries and diced apple, giving it an inviting pinkish color. Topped with ice and bits of peanuts, it is a perfect cooler for daily life along the humid Pacific coastline.
“I drink it for tradition, because it is fresh, it has probiotics, for its flavor and its benefits,” said José Maciel, 53, an office worker stopping for a cup. And, he grins, “you can add mezcal or tequila to it, to enjoy the freshness of a warm evening.”
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Tuba, or tubá, is one of many undersung wonders of tiny Colima state, a place that barely makes a blip on most international and even domestic tourists’ radar. But a recent journey showed me that little-known Colima is brimming with fascinating foods and drinks only found here, and has a burgeoning culinary scene.
The beverage’s roots go back to 1565, when the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route began between Mexico and the Philippines, permanently altering both countries’ culinary trajectories. On one end, the route took the avocado and papaya from Mexico to Asia. On the other end, the galleons sent the Asian coconut palm to Mexico.
How is tuba made? It begins with the fronds of the palm tree. Artisans scale the trunks with ropes and spikes to reach the greenish base of each frond. They slice into the skin and hang receptacles to gather the drip of white sap. Soon, this liquid ferments into a tangy beverage with a touch of viscosity, somewhat like Mexico’s pulque. It doesn’t taste like coconut at all, and can also acquire a touch of alcohol if fermented just enough, like tepache or tejuino.
Tuba is experiencing something of a culinary rebirth in Colima in recent years. It is sold on street corners from vendors with large gourds, and also seen mixed with spirits on cocktail menus in upscale restaurants throughout the state.
Sun sets over a Pacific beach in Manzanillo, the major port of Colima.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
If this is the first you’re reading about the drink, you’re likely not alone. Colima suffers from a degree of invisibility. Dominated by the imposing Colima Volcano complex and home to the critical industrial port of Manzanillo, Colima is Mexico’s smallest state by population, with only about 731,000 people.
It also has one of Mexico’s highest homicide rates, as it is wedged between violence-racked Jalisco and Michoacán. According to a May report by news site La Silla Rota, a “pax narca” or negotiated calm exists in Colima among the major crime groups warring for control of the larger neighboring states. Its worse-sounding homicide figures are due to the ratio of deaths in a tiny population of less than a million people.
The contradiction is jarring. Unlike in Jalisco or Michoacán, spectacular gun battles are hardly ever seen in Colima. The streets and highways are not heavily patrolled by military or federal forces. As a visitor, ironically, I felt safer here than I have in multiple visits to Jalisco or Michoacán. Everyday life appears laid-back.
-
Share via
A fervent local culinary movement is brewing, with chef-driven restaurants and traditional regional foods like Colima’s pozole seco, the state’s signature dish of “dry” pozole ingredients without the stock. Colima is home to success stories like Cervecería de Colima, the prizewinning brewery considered among the overall best in Mexico today.
“Colima is a true gem for being so small and so little-known. That’s its virtue,” says chef Nico Mejía, a local star. “We have the sea, the mountains, the rainforest, the lagoons, in close distances on lands that are mineralized by the volcanoes. These create ingredients that are unique to the state.”
“And,” he adds, “its gastronomy is quite honest.”
More than anything, the coconut palm dominates the psyche here. For its fruit, of course, with its prime role in snacks like cocos preparados or in rich guisados and seafood dishes that are known along the whole Pacific coast. Other Pacific states don’t celebrate and obsess over tuba, though, like Colima does.
The Bejarano family notes that people come from all over to taste their stall’s tuba in particular, warning that not all tuba is made with the same precision as theirs. “Some take it frozen to the United States,” says vendor Karla Bejarano.
This arcane drink is a physical manifestation of the long-overlooked foodways shared between Mexico and the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, says Rudy Guevarra Jr., a professor of Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University.
For 250 years, between 1565 and 1815, the famous galleon fleet left the port of Manila for the port of Acapulco and back, traveling for months over the treacherous ocean while carrying a lucrative flow of foods, silver, fabrics and culinary traditions. Its final port of call before reaching Acapulco was Colima. The route also brought artisans, laborers and slaves to the Spanish colony. These travelers were commonly referred to as “Indios chinos” in the colonial caste structure, though historians say the majority were Filipino.
“They were both colonized by Spain, and they were both dealing with the horrors of colonization,” Guevarra says of Filipinos and Indigenous Mexicans, who “shared their knowledge with each other, and were engaged in resistance together. And then there was the sharing of ancestral knowledge, which became part of both countries.”
Jorge Velazco Rocha runs an artisanal project of distilling tuba to make palm liquor at his roadside tavern near the town of Comala.
(Daniel Hernandez/Los Angeles Times)
The galleon also brought a critical technical secret. According to Paulina Machuca, a historian at El Colegio de Michoacán and a leading figure in the study of the era, the galleons introduced Mexicans to Asian distillation methods, which relied on natural materials rather than the more commonly known Arabic copper-still method that arrived through Europe.
“When I started studying this, I didn’t know that tuba was a Filipino word, or that palapa was a Filipino word, and few others knew it,” Machuca says. “The Filipino influence is incredibly strong, and maybe we haven’t fully conceptualized the scope of its historical importance … for this part of Mexico.”
The influence and ethnicities blended in discreetly over the centuries, Guevarra says. “But that idea and knowledge of their ancestors and where they come from was never lost.”
Tuba is actually the base of an even rarer drink, the alcoholic “vino de cocos” distillate. This is essentially the Philippines’ lambanog, tuba distilled, with a high alcohol proof and a bite like rustic sugarcane alcohol. In Mexico, the Spanish crown eventually banned vino de cocos (anything in the colonial era that made you drunk was referred to as a “wine”), and it was considered extinct. Until now.
Holding a glass jug, Jorge Velazco Rocha crouches before a contraption of wooden barrels stacked in cascading fashion at his roadside tavern along the scrubby flanks of the Volcán de Colima. He is waiting to catch a clear liquid trickling from a spout near the bottom.
“This is the ‘vino de cocos’ of ancient Mexico,” says Velazco, a 76-year-old scholar and entrepreneur. “This is the first time anyone in Mexico has made this in centuries.”
Velazco’s claim is impossible to verify, though he believes he is single-handedly reviving the practice of making palm liquor out of tuba in Mexico. His modern vino de cocos may not exactly be the sort of spirit you’d want to sip at leisure, like mezcal or tequila. Yet it’s a worthy historical curiosity and another example of Colima’s unique charms.
Of course, as with all things Mexico, the foods of Colima can be found in Los Angeles. Incredibly, even tuba.
Raspados Nayarit is an unassuming storefront on Broadway in Lincoln Heights, situated across from Lincoln High School. The name of the business, referring to a different Pacific state, was inherited. Rodrigo Carmona, who runs the juice and snack spot with his wife and son, simply kept it.
“The Colima people get jealous,” Carmona says. “But that’s the name that we built.”
Their storefront may be the only place in Los Angeles County that serves tuba, which they import frozen. The family says that 80% to 90% of their clientele are people originally from the state who are seeking a taste of home. The Colima-style antojitos by matriarch Maria del Refugio Morquecho are also a draw.
Rodrigo Carmona, Maria del Refugio Morquecho, and their son Uriel Carmona, are the family behind Raspados Nayarit, the only place in Los Angeles that serves imported tuba, a fermented drink from Colima state.
(Karen Mariana Cardenas Ceballos/De Los)
Many come in for a little taste of tuba, she says. “From what I understand, it’s very good for energy, and for the kidneys.”
Tuba “is an art form,” Carmona says. “Not all tuba is the same. It comes down to each tubero and their approach.”
When Raspados Nayarit serves its tuba compuesta — vibrant pink, chilled and topped with diced apples and peanuts — it is a reminder of home for Colimenses. But it is also potent proof of the depth and complexity of the Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles. Just about anything you can get in Mexico, in theory, you can get in L.A.
When I drink it here, the tuba at Raspados Nayarit also reminds me of my own journey to Colima: the looming power of the volcano, a tostada of pozole seco, and the warmth of a sunset over Manzanillo‘s coast.
