Chilate de Pollo de la Costa Chica

This is Guerrero. Not the Guerrero of Taxco silver and Acapulco hotels, but the Costa Chica: the stretch of Pacific coast between Acapulco and the Oaxacan border where Afro-Mexican communities have been cooking for centuries and where the rest of Mexico barely looks.

Chilate de pollo is the signature soup of that coast. The word 'chilate' comes from the Nahuatl 'chilatl,' chile water, and that is exactly what it is: a thin, clean, rust-red broth built on chile costeño, the small dried chile that grows along Guerrero's coast and gives this region its backbone flavor. You will not find chile costeño at most markets outside Guerrero and coastal Oaxaca. If you do find it, buy every bag they have.

The spicing is what tells you this is not the same pot as the rest of Guerrero. Ginger, clove, cinnamon. These are African-influenced aromatics carried into Mexican cooking by the Afro-descendant communities of towns like Cuajinicuilapa, Marquelia, and San Nicolás. The women who taught me this dish in the Costa Chica market at Ometepec did not call it African. They called it theirs. But the ginger and clove are not Mesoamerican, and they are not Spanish either. They arrived with the people who arrived in chains and made this coast their home. The food remembers what the history books forgot.

You serve it the way they serve it in the Costa Chica: white rice mounded in the bottom of a deep bowl, cubes of ripe avocado scattered over the rice, and the hot broth ladled on top so the avocado softens but does not melt. Corn tortillas on the side. Lime if you want it. Saber cocinar es saber vivir, and this dish is proof that the cooks of the Costa Chica have been living well on their own terms for a long time.