By Sorayda D. León
When Samantha Enriquez thinks back on nacatamales, she’s not just talking about food. She talks about a table full of hands working together, about banana leaves spread out like little homes, about rice, marinated pork, potatoes, olives, and raisins (even though she hated them), passing from hand to hand in a sort of family ritual. She talks about her aunt, her parents, conversations around the kitchen, and the steam rising from the pots while the whole family built something together.
“It was one of my favorite dishes,” he says. “Because it brought us together.”
This is also how the story of the chef and founder of La India begins—a culinary venture born out of memory, grief, migration, and a deep desire to reclaim identity through food.
More than just a culinary venture, La India has become a space for cultural resistance, community, and conversation about what it means to be Latino, Indigenous, and an immigrant in the United States.
The daughter of Nicaraguan parents, the chef grew up between two distinct realities: her father’s privileged upbringing in Nicaragua and the poverty that shaped her mother’s life, who grew up in a small community in Granada and faced discrimination because of the color of her skin and hair. “La negrita,” she recalls them calling her. Years later, that word would become a symbol of pride.
“I wanted my business to stand for something,” she explains. “And the word that kept coming up was ‘La India.’” What many had used as an insult, she decided to turn into a statement of pride. In recognition of the Indigenous roots that run through much of Central and Latin America. “Indigenous people are the most resilient,” she says. “They’re the ones who share even when they have little. They’re the ones who make something out of nothing.”
Her cuisine stems precisely from that collective memory. From a childhood where blended chicken broth was served in a baby bottle, where weekends meant roast beef, indio viejo, or vigorón, and where cooking was a way for the family to find emotional support.
But it also stems from grief, especially when he left home and began to deeply miss his parents’ cooking. “I started cooking out of nostalgia,” he says. From those scents and memories, that emotional quest eventually evolved into something greater: using gastronomy to reclaim Latin American cuisine’s place within global culinary narratives.
At culinary school, he noticed that the so-called “mother kitchens” were almost always European or Asian. They were never Latin American, and that bothered him because many techniques and foods come from our ancestors. “It’s just that we don’t document them. We keep them within our families,” he says.
That need to tell stories became even more urgent during the immigration raids that took place in her city of Charlotte. While much of the community lived in fear, she began cooking chicken soup for families affected by ICE. She organized deliveries, raised funds, recruited volunteers, and ended up distributing more than 400 servings of soup in a single week.
“All I could think was: What does someone need when they’re scared?” she recalls. “A hot meal. Something that reminds them of home.”
The experience left a deep impression on her. She visited apartment complexes affected by fires and evictions, spoke with families sleeping outside immigration offices while waiting for appointments, and heard stories of separation and despair. But she also found something else: community. “People want to help,” she says. “They just often don’t know how.”
Her cooking, however, is never limited to food alone; every dinner she hosts includes poetry, stories, and visual elements that evoke childhood memories: bricks, clay, banana leaves, and crayons on the table.
Her guests read stories while they eat, sketch their memories, and reflect. “I don’t want people to just consume food,” she explains. “I want them to see themselves reflected in the stories.”
One of those stories recalls a night of a power outage during his childhood. With no electricity or money, his father improvised a bonfire outside the house to reheat baho, a traditional Nicaraguan dish made with cassava, plantains, and pork cooked in banana leaves. “We ate around the fire,” he recalls. “And instead of making us feel poor, my dad turned that moment into something magical.”
To her, those stories are just as important as the food itself.
She also talks about gender, migration, and women’s place in the culinary world. She constantly challenges the male-dominated structure of professional kitchens and highlights the emotional and community-oriented work that Latin American women have historically sustained. “We were taught that cooking was for serving a man,” she says with a laugh. “Now I cook to tell my story.”
Today, although he has had to temporarily put part of his project on hold due to financial constraints, his vision remains clear: to open a restaurant serving Central American haute cuisine. A space that brings Nicaraguan, Honduran, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan flavors into culinary conversations from which they have historically been excluded.
“I’ve never seen a Nicaraguan fine-dining restaurant here,” he says. “So someone has to do it.”
India does not attempt to separate food from history, migration from flavor, or pain from beauty. Everything exists simultaneously, just like those nacatamales from her childhood: complex, slow, layered, collectively crafted, and carefully wrapped to feed others.