Thanks for such an informative article. I loved the photos!

It is beyond any question that both tenants and homeowners within the Sulukule project area gained unparalleled benefits from the generous offer made by the local authority Fatih Municipality and TOKI (Public Housing Administration). The tenants enjoyed the opportunity of becoming homeowners where TOKI built social dwellings in Tasoluk. The property owners either sold their buildings to the third parties at very high amounts, or made an agreement with the municipality to possess the new houses to be constructed.

Many surveys showed that Istanbul citizens who know the area well strictly support the Sulukule urban renewal project as it is hoped to bring an end to the ongoing security and health problems in the area. Everyone accepts that the area was almost fully occupied by the thinner addicts, bag snatchers, extortionists and beggars who are far from the so-called Roma culture and music. It should also be noted that there was sexual abuse of the teenagers; the pimps were good earners of Sulukule and they were serving the little girls to the visitors.

While this is the case, some of the NGO’s and especially the members of the opposing party in Turkey, developed a systematic campaign to abort this project of the century, claiming that the dwellers of the area were forced to leave and a cultural heritage is about to fade away.

Not surprisingly, those NGO’s and opposing parties were completely silent although they were witnessing the misuse of the historical buildings and the occupied land walls destroying the tangible heritage day by day before the Sulukule renewal project was introduced.

I grew up on Manuel’s hot tamales. I never imagined how a Mexican food could become so popular in a rural area such as the Mississippi Delta without many Mexicans settling there.

My first experience of tamales came from a jar that contained about 8 tamales from a grocery store in Southern Illinois. They were like canned spinach — yuck. Later, in a Chicago grocery store, ladies made homemade pork and chicken tamales, one dozen for $6 or $8, respectively. They were the best I’ve tasted. I suppose they were the Mexican sort with the corn husk. Every tamale since then has been a disappointment. Next time in the Delta, I’ll have to try some of of those listed above. Thanks for the article.

My great-grandmother was famous for her hot tamales in the 1880′s and 90′s. She, along with most other southern farmers, also made her own hominy, which was a Native American recipe as well. Her family came to Louisiana after the Louisiana Purchase and had Cherokee blood even at that time.

I vote for the Native American source. European settlers intermarried with them for hundreds of years and their cultures brought us so many good dishes. As far as I know, tamales, hominy, tomatoes, and that staple of southern life, beans and cornbread (which form a complete protein) all go back to the Native Americans.

I learned about tamales from migrant workers employed by my father on his West Texas cotton farm when I was a preschool girl. Everything was prepared by hand and the tamales were wrapped in a corn husk. My recollection is that the taste varied daily, depending on what the workers had in their stores at any particular time. The Indian angle sounds very likely to me.

Maybe a large part of the answer can be found in the link between New Orleans tamales and Delta ones: the Mexican/Guatemalan versions that I’ve had were wrapped in banana leaves and had green olives and peas in them. They were sweet, not spicy.