By Erica Moser
LINCOLN — When artist Ana Flores sips a cafe con leche – for her, Cafe Bustelo espresso with a third of a cup of steamed milk – a piece of her Abuela is there with her.
“Coffee brewing would begin each day with the same regularity of a sun rise, and of the roosters we didn’t have,” she wrote on her blog about the therapeutic experience of coffee with her grandmother in cold New England winters. “She would look out the steamy windows and perhaps imagine the royal palms dancing in the breeze. Abuela would never return to the island but she’d always carry the Cuban landscape inside of her.”
Ana Flores emigrated from Cuba to Connecticut in 1962, when she was six years old, and later moved to Charlestown, but the smell of coffee connects Flores to her homeland and speaks to her immigrant experience.
“Coffee is a very aromatic food and drink that we have,” she said, adding that there’s “often a coffee ritual. It connects you to other memories you have, and also the memory center in the brain and the center for smell in the brain are very closely connected.”
The intersection of coffee, art, smell, memories and the immigrant experience is the basis of her project “Cafe Recuerdos,” a multicolored coffee cart with Cafe Bustelo cans painted to reflect the oral histories of Latino immigrants. Flores and her cart will be at the cafeteria of the Community College of Rhode Island’s Flanagan Campus in Lincoln today and again onWednesday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. She will be serving coffee and engaging with the public.
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