Herbert De Paz

Pulamil—formed by the Nahua words pula (banana) and mil (plantation)—is the ancestral name of the territory now known as Santa Tecla, El Salvador. Although bananas are not native to the region, the toponym reveals how deeply the fruit became embedded in the cultural landscape. In Night Falls in Pulamil, Herbert De Paz draws on this layered history to construct a personal homage to his hometown, intertwining geography, memory, language, and food. Suspended against a twilight sky, a hand firmly grasps a bunch of plantains while ornamental motifs inspired by Indigenous visual traditions frame the composition, linking everyday life to ancestral knowledge and place-based identity.

Rather than functioning as an export commodity or a symbol of imperial capitalism—as bananas so often do in Latin American visual culture—the plantain here operates as an intimate marker of domestic life and cultural continuity. De Paz specifically evokes the majóncho, a plantain variety deeply rooted in Salvadoran cuisine and associated with the African heritage of the region. The aroma of fried plantains at dusk becomes a sensory memory that transforms the fruit into a symbol of home, family, and belonging. In this work, the banana is reclaimed not through global economic histories but through local experience, Indigenous place names, and the everyday rituals that sustain collective memory.