Pupusas with a Side of Pizza in Upstate New York
In downtown Ithaca, New York, on the corner of Cayuga and Green Street, across from a Sunoco gas station, a wooden green sign announces a small restaurant, “Pizza Aroma.” A smaller, less noticeable one hangs in the window, emboldened on printer paper:
“We serve Latin Cuisine. Nos servimos comida latina!”
Even from the sidewalk, you are hit with a tangy, glutinous scent — what is, unmistakably, a pizza aroma. It takes on a mythical, stupefying quality. With a faint tug from the gas station, it beckons you inside, and there you are, contemplating a menu ranging from the Italian-American staple to the pupusas, synonymous with El Salvador.
Outside, curious locals sit at the two cafe tables, often without pizza in front of them, staring at the passersby of the busy intersection or engaging with the folks at the Sunoco. The scene is a distinctly Ithacan Boulevard Saint-Germain, frequented by aging hippies, with Pizza Aroma the focal point, its Arc de Triomphe. With pollo guisado.
The bilingual eatery almost begs for questions to be asked of it: How did this strange intersection of culinary cultures occur? You can get Salvadoran food in rural, small-town Ithaca? With a side of pizza?
Then you meet Mauricio.
Mauricio Rosa, 60, the owner of Pizza Aroma, has lived in Ithaca for over 30 years. Often the only one working in the shop, he boasts a shapely mustache and sports mostly polo shirts. His voice is surprisingly low, but booming, and he has an uncharacteristically quiet demeanor for the owner of a pizza joint. With an exasperated sigh, Rosa will tell you that he is an immigrant from El Salvador.
What he means is, there aren’t many El Salvadorans in Ithaca. According to archivists at The History Center in Tompkins County, NY, the population of Salvadoran people who immigrate to the Finger Lakes region is incredibly small. However, the Finger Lakes region has a rich immigrant population, with the highest percentage in New York of naturalized immigrants at 57%, according to a report by the Office of The State of New York Comptroller in November 2016.
Immigrants make up roughly 6.2% of the population in the Finger Lakes, which is low compared to port cities like New York City, where the immigrant population is 40%.
As of 2019, the Salvadoran population in New York City is more than 180,000, or less than 1%. According to Pew Research, the majority of Salvadoran immigrants live in three states: California, Texas and New York.
However, the number of immigrants in the Finger Lakes is remarkably high considering its remoteness from the nearest major port city-- roughly 222 miles-- perhaps a reflection of its relative proximity to the Canadian border, 246 miles, plus its agricultural bounty.
Still, some of the delicacies served at Pizza Aroma are shocking to find in Ithaca: pollo guisado, pupusas, albondigas and more. El Salvador, a Central American country of less than 6.5 million and roughly the size of Massachusetts, has few representatives here, and even fewer business owners.
According to 2019 Census data, of roughly 100,000 people living in Tompkins County, NY, approximately 12.9% are foreign born, with 5.4% of the total population identifying as Hipanic or Latino.
Roughly 44% of foreign-born Salvadorans have been in the U.S. for over 22 years, and 33% of foreign-born Salvadorans are U.S. citizens. Though there are an estimated 2.3 million total U.S. residents of Salvadoran origin, making them the third largest population (tied with Cubans) of Hispanic origin living in the United States, they remain largely unaccounted for in Tompkins County public records. While Rosa fits these statistics exactly, his residence in Tompkins County sets him apart.
“As far as I know, my family are some of the only Salvadoran people here. We are rare,” says Rosa.
Rosa’s harrowing journey to become the business owner he is now is not only one of triumph, but of assimilation. The unexpected marriage of cultures at his restaurant does not just mean that he has beat all odds. He says he cannot get away from the loss. It follows him. Though he and his business have been celebrated and adopted in this community, he says, he still feels like an island sometimes. As a representative of a missing culture, “it can be incredibly lonely.” No matter how long he has lived in the U.S., his hybridity, and the hybridity of the business, are not always amusing or beautiful to him as it is to his adorers.
“Though I am proud, sometimes I still feel pain,” he adds.
Pizza Aroma and its owner are a reminder that, in any community, there are immigrants who have abandoned part of themselves and filled it with something they discern as distinctly American. For Rosa, it’s pizza. Sometimes, the things he left behind when he immigrated come back into his life in beautiful ways, like serving pupusas. Other times, his past is like a pesadilla, a nightmare that he cannot speak of.
When Rosa speaks, he keeps careful eye contact, though he occasionally glances at the clock, which is flanked by the art on the walls. Of course, there are placards which cite Pizza Aroma as the “6- Time Best Pizza in Ithaca,” by The Best of Ithaca Awards, most recently in 2012.
There are also notably three tourism posters of the Finger Lakes, New York City, and San Salvador, the Salvadoran capital. The photos have that teal-tinged, sunstripped quality that always magically occurs in New York delis.
Rosa is reticent when it comes to his personal history, and he often recounts it with a degree of exasperation, like he’s reading a bill out loud, until you start asking him questions.
He was born in 1961 in a small village in the eastern region of El Salvador.
“My best childhood memories were working the land with my father, following him around as a child,” he recounts, “We would work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and it wasn’t easy, but I was just so happy. That was definitely the best part of life.”
His family grew corn, sugar cane, rice, and beans until 1979, when the civil war forced them to flee. “I remember my father waking me up, and saying, ‘We have to leave everything, the house, everything,’ and so we did.”
The family lived in the small city of San Sebastián for a couple years to survive. He never went back to his farm.
The Salvadoran Civil War was fought between the military-led Revolutionary Government Junta (Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno, JRG), which was made up of three successive dictatorships, and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a left-wing group of junior officers.
The war began on October 15, 1979, the military launched a coup, forcing President Carlos Humberto Romero to resign and go into exile. The conflict continued for over twelve years, officially ending on January 16, 1992.
As immigration scholar María Cristina García states in her 2006 book, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, The United States and Canada, the war was exacerbated by US-trained and backed battalions, which recruited child soldiers, terrorized the prominent Catholig clergy, and committed other human rights violations.
Dr. Raymond Craib, an expert in Latin American studies and a professor of history at Cornell University, as well as Rosa’s next door neighbor remarked, “The Salvadoran Civil War was definitely extended by U.S. forces, namely the Reagan administration, which doubled down and made it impossible to reach a kind of negotiated peace. Central America became a kind of place where US foreign policy could hit the ground running. It was a showpiece.”
Dr. Craib maintains that while the atrocities of the war were partially caused by a buildup of violent destruction of union organizing, as well as the influx of fleeing Nicaraguan national guardsmen into El Salvador, they were augmented by a “ruthless” U.S. military force, which justified its involvement by overstating the perceived involvement of the Soviet Union. He adds that he is trying to conduct more research as more documents become available through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), but has had little success due to “ administrative backlog.”
Rosa says his older brother was killed in the conflict.
“They had to find pieces of the body and put it all together,” he said, making eye contact before bowing his head and turning his gold bracelet three times, “It was horrible.”
“Once you get to America, people talk about bad guys and good guys all the time, which I can’t see. There, it was lose-lose. It was either the government or guerillas. Just no way out.”
The moment had come for Rosa to flee once again — this time, by himself. As the youngest of 10 siblings, many of whom had already been wrapped up in the war or had families of their own, his parents sent him north, relying on him to support them — and save himself from the conflict.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like for your parents to send you to another country and say ‘Provide for us. We need you. ‘My father said, ‘If you want to survive, you go to America.’”
In May of 1979, with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, the 19-year-old Rosa began his journey to the United States, walking, hitchhiking, and even swimming to get to the Southern border.
“We called each other mojados because we had to break our backs and swim to get here,” he said., using the Spanish word for “wet” that when used to disparage migrants, became a derogatory slur.
The majority of migrants crossing through the Southern border of the U.S. are single adult males hailing from Mexico. According to reports from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, single adults accounted for 63.75% of the total number of Southwest Land Border encounters for this fiscal year.
Yet, much of the stringent modern immigration policy of today does not stem from any influx of single Mexican males. Instead, they are a response to the Cold-War era civil wars and conflicts in Central America, and more importantly, their refugees, like Rosa himself, which directly confronted U.S. foreign policy, demanding support.
Congress created TPS, or Temporary Protected Status in the Immigration Act of 1990. It acts as a temporary form of immigration status which is provided to nationals of specifically designated countries that may be undergoing an armed conflict, natural disaster, or other extraordinary conditions. It provides a work permit and stay of deportation for up to eighteen months at a time.
According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as of May 2021, there are approximately 320,000 TPS recipients residing in the US.
Many of the 900,000 people displaced from the Salvadoran Civil War fled to areas of Los Angeles which were already controlled by powerful Mexican gangs, who were known to victimize weaker cultural groups.
In response, former members of the FMLN formed Mara Salvatrucha (roughly translates to ‘gang of tough Salvadorans’) in the early 1980s, which is the gang now known as MS-13, as well as the 18th Street gang, which had multicultural roots in L.A. since the period after WWII.
In September 1996, President Bill Clinton Signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Reponsibility Act (IIRIRA), which eliminated key defenses against deportation and subejcted more immigrants, including legal permanent residents to detention and deportation. The law also made it much more difficult for people to seek asylum.
Subsequently, between 1996 and 2002, 31,000 convicted Salvadorans were sent back to El Salvador, proliferating MS-13 members across a society still reeling from civil war. Ironically, much of the migration to the U.S. Southern border is fleeing the same cycles of gangs and corruption. In El Salvador, the murder rate is 10 times as high as the 2018 US rate, at 51 per 100,000 inhabitants. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Encounters, tese migrants mostly cross the border at Rio Grande Valley and Del Rio, following the same path as Rosa.
For most of Rosa’s journey in the summer of 1979, he was without food. He still is haunted by a scene he witnessed from a train in the south of Mexico: A 3-year-old-child, in his mother’s arms, crying out for food that was nowhere in sight.
He sees irony in the fact that now his life is marked by the abundance of food.
In August of 1979, at 20 years old, speaking no English, Rosa entered the US via the Del Rio-Acuña Border, hitchhiked to San Francisco and immediately flew to Boston, where he had a family-friend from El Salvador. This friend got a job washing dishes at a restaurant there, then another dishwashing job washing dishes at Pinocchio Pizza in Amherst, Mass in January of 1980.
Rosa had never eaten, much less made, pizza in his life before.
One fateful day, a coworker didn’t show up to work. Some might say a star was born. Rosa made his first of many pizzas that day.
In Massachusetts, Rosa experienced a harsh winter for the first time, with no car, living off $3 an hour — under the table, without permission to work. He sent almost all of his money to his family.
“I was working from 9 in the morning to 2 in the morning, completely alone,” he said. “No friends, nothing. All I had were the people I worked for. I had to make that my happiness, because I don’t know what else I could have done. When you’re 20, you have all the energy in the world. But I guess I didn’t stop.”
In 1992, Rosa took up a job with a friend of the owners of the Amherst pizzeria, which took him to Ithaca. They knew he was a hard worker. But after six months, work conditions worsened, he said, with undocumented immigrants bearing the brunt of long hours with almost no pay. So he quit, and moved back to Amherst for six months, doing odd jobs and struggling through the winter.
Soon after he left, in August of 1994, the pizza parlor was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. They detained eight undocumented immigrants from El Salvador.
Workplace raids began in 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act was created, sanctioning employers who hired non-U.S. citizens.
During the Trump administration, immigation enforcement was funded at a much higher rate than labor standards enforcement. The administration’s raids were a stalwart of its immigration policy, with 700 immigrants arrested on one single day in 2019.
In October of this year, the Biden Administration ordered ICE to end mass workplace raids, citing its pivot towards exploitative employers and labor trafficking allegations. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said that fear of these raids is often used by employers as leverage.
Rosa came back to the area, partially because he felt that, despite these raids, “Ithaca is a wonderful place to be an immigrant,” he adds, “people are willing to learn from you and willing to talk to you.”
In the Finger Lakes, there is a large community of support for immigrants through advocacy groups in the region.
The FLX Rapid Response Network, which operates primarily on social media platforms, is a coalition of residents working to mitigate the harm caused by immigration policies by providing legal consultation, health, childcare, and medical support, as well as raising awareness in the community.
The Tompkins County Immigrant Rights Coalition provides leadership training and resources for migrant communities and non-citizens, while Open Doors English provides affordable, comprehensive English (ESL) classes.
One of the most well-known resources for immigrants is the Sanctuary Ministries at the First Congregational Church in Ithaca, which is part of the Ithaca Sanctuary Alliance. The church became a sanctuary church on May 5, 2019, after the congregation voted to provide shelter as needed for undocumented immigrants.
The church’s Senior Minister, Rev. Dr. David Kaden, stated, “Becoming a sanctuary church is an extension of one of our core principles in the United Church of Christ: ‘no matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.’ Engaging in the Sanctuary process is a statement of extravagant welcome for at-risk members of our community, modeled on the principle of God’s unconditional grace offered to all.”
Churches in the US have a long history of providing support for persecuted peoples, beginning with the aiding of escaped enslaved people by abolitionist churches following the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. The Sanctuary movement took hold in the 1980s to provide a safe haven for Central Americans fleeing conflict in their countries of origin. The religious movement came as a swift response to federal immigration policies, passed largely under the Reagan administration, which made obtaining asylum remarkably difficult for Central Americans in particular.
In June of this year, immigrant advocates pushed to enact a law to make New York a sanctuary state, but the law has not yet been passed as of November of 2021.
Through most of the 90s’, Rosa continued to work long hours, deftly making pizza by hand at local pizzerias, until January 1997, when he had mustered enough money to open his own restaurant in the sun-kissed space on the corner of Cayuga and Green Street, where there was an abandoned bar.
The restaurant was almost immediately popular, he said, with weekly and even daily regulars. But something was missing, between the poster on the wall of El Salvador and of the Manhattan skyline, between the phone cards to Central America hanging right above the parmesan cheese and barbeque sauce.
Then Dora, Rosa’s wife, suggested pupusas. They’ve been married since 1983, when she was able to leave the rural township in El Salvador where Rosa grew up and come to meet him in the United States, seven month-pregnant with the couple’s first daughter. They met as teenagers-- their families were neighbors in San Sebastián.
When Rosa left, he really had the pressure of supporting two families-- the one he had and the one that was about to be born, Dora says. Weeks after she arrived in Boston, her father was killed in the conflict.
Dora, who is reticent and holds a semi-permanent cheeky smile, says of her husband, “I always had my eye on him. I always knew about him. He just had to go and make a life for himself, and I would be right there with him.”
As he speaks of his wife, the corners of Rosa’s mustache curl up as he looks at the ground; he is 20 again in an instant. He pauses in his recollection to take a lunch break, which is to say, he cuts half a slice of bologna for himself and chews it meditatively while he listens to voicemails.
“Back to Dora,” he started in again. “It was all her idea. About 5 years ago, she said, ‘I can help you. People will buy these. They do well.’”
She was right. Over many hours spent in Pizza Aroma, observing dozens of customers, exactly half the customers order Salvadoran food, while the other half order Italian-American. It is a freakishly specific split.
The menu itself seems impossible for one man alone to prepare, but somehow, it works. At 4pm Monday-Saturday (they are closed on Sunday), he is joined by his only employee, Sean Lewis, who has worked there for thirteen years, sometimes turning pizzas, other times delivering. He asks where to drop off pizza ordered on Cornell’s campus and yells out to customers, “Any of you from Cornell?”
Lewis is married to Rosa’s daughter, which is how he met Rosa. He has spent a lot of time alone with his boss, which he says is often quiet. He adds, “He can be a little moody. He has good days and bad days, I’ll tell you that. But he’s been through a lot. He’s been through a hell of a lot, and he just keeps making pizzas.”
There are classic pizzas typical of a New York spot, yet also absurd banters of culture, such as nacho pizza. Mr. Rosa spins the pizza in the air with glazed eyes, as if he doesn’t have to tell his body to toss and knead.
The Salvadoran menu, on a white board to the left, is modest and nearly camouflaged, though it boasts some of the most underrated comfort food in Ithaca, according to one local reporter. There are sumptuous plates of pollo guisado, which is a warm and spicy stew; chile relleños; tamales; pasteles, and of course, pupusas, with curtido and salsa roja, which are hand-made by Dora.
The pupusas are teeming with cheese and magically don’t show the sweat of oil. The chile relleño sops up the sauce it sits in with grace. In front of the counter on a recent afternoon, the postal service worker grabs a coconut water from the humming cooler. A pair of Cornell students discuss their outfits for a fraternity’s date night, one with sausage pizza, the other with a loroco pupusa. Rosa’s gold braided bracelet spins as he shimmies the pizza in the oven.
He says the community reminds him of home in a strange way. Maybe it's the quiet laughter of Ithaca’s citizens in winter, or the way the buildings downtown sometimes sag. He doesn’t elaborate.
Historian and author María Cristina García remarks, “Most immigrants who came to the United States did not immigrate to become American. In many cases, immigrants came to replicate the best of the old country in more favorable circumstances.”
Perhaps it’s the quiet abundance, the singularity of its people, each individual like an island in the glacial valley that makes Ithaca feel safe to Rosa. He adds, “I still see opportunity everywhere I look,” Rosa says, “It’s across the street, it’s sitting in here with me, it’s everywhere. That’s beautiful. I’m not a very pious man, but that to me is godly.”