Echoes of Ingredient #3 | Carmen Tereza Vazquez

11.06.2026

Carmen Teresa Vázquez is a bisabuelita (great-grandmother), curandera, and medicine woman descended from the Anahuak cultural traditions of Mexico. A keeper of knowledge transmitted through female lineages for generations, she combines Indigenous medicinal traditions with practices of herbalism, healing, and food preparation.

“Running hands through the braids” is the Indigenous method used to remove cactus spines from the hands. For this episode of Echoes of Ingredients, Carmen Teresa Vázquez presents a research journey through the histories, medicinal uses, recipes, and imaginaries surrounding the nopal cactus (Opuntia ficus-indica), known in Italy through its colonial name, fico d’India.

More than an ingredient, the nopal appears as a living archive. Introduced across the Mediterranean through colonial routes and deeply rooted in Indigenous food cultures of the Americas, the cactus embodies intertwined histories of extraction, resilience, migration, and ecological adaptation. Carmen Teresa’s research explores its multiple uses — from cooking and preservation techniques to medicinal applications and communal preparation rituals.

Through collective cooking, recipes, and oral storytelling, the workshop reflects on how food can function simultaneously as nourishment, medicine, and cultural memory. Rather than approaching the ingredient as a fixed culinary object, the project activates the nopal as a relational ecosystem connecting bodies, territories, and ancestral knowledge across geographies.

This event is curated by Valerio Del Baglivo as part of Echoes of Ingredients, a series of collective cooking sessions exploring how the histories of trade, empire, colonialism, and migration resonate through the trajectories of a single ingredient or recipe — and what these resonances can teach us about liberation, imagination, and empowerment.