Cornbread & Tortillas

Photo courtesy of Erica Chambers

Carla Gover hails from Letcher County, Kentucky, and has been a self-employed artist for three decades. As a mother of three kids, an artist, an activist, and a community organizer, Gover has done it all. 

“I've done a lot of different kinds of community organizing and social justice work over the years. I've done a lot of work with arts accessibility in rural places,” Gover said. “Just a lot of working with Appalachian kids and kids in Kentucky in general to help kind of change the narrative about Appalachia and help steer the story from within about who we are and what our identity is and sort of try to reclaim some of the more egregious Hollywood stereotypes.” 

Over the last three decades, Gover has balanced motherhood, running a traditional music school, and community organizing with being a touring musician, as well. 

Gover’s focus has shifted artistically in the last seven or eight years. 

“I've been doing a lot more preservation work in the traditional percussive dance forms of Appalachia and then also a lot more of my social justice activism work has been focused on creating collaborations and connections between Kentucky and Appalachian culture,” Gover said. 

Gover’s focus has been on the traditional culture of immigrants in Kentucky and Appalachia. 

“I learned Spanish as a teenager, so it opened up a world to me back then, where I had glimpses into cultures from Mexico and South America and saw such commonality between Appalachia and these cultures,” Gover said. “When I was going to [the University of Kentucky] I felt I had more in common with my friends from those cultures than I did with people that were from the city in terms of the connection to our grandparents and we grew up and our grandparents didn’t have electricity and running water and we used outhouses, and we knew how to garden and farm you know, I just I felt such cultural connection.” 

From this, Cornbread and Tortillas was born. In 2016 Gover began a bilingual folk opera. 

Courtesy of Carla Gover

“A lot of my artistic mojo has gone into that project, bringing it up to professional standards and working with directors and producers and lighting designers to get the whole thing looking really great,” Gover said. “I’m really happy with the celebratory aspect of celebrating both traditional Kentucky and contemporary Kentucky and trying to create a more just and inclusive kind of space for immigrants in particular.” 

Cornbread and Tortillas began when Gover was hanging out with the band Appalatin, a group that fuses different Latino music with traditional Appalachian music. 

“We found a Latina director from Louisville, Kentucky, and wrote a grant and she came and worked with us over the course of a few months and helped us take some of our life stories and devise them into theatre,” Gover said. “Mine is about making cornbread with my granny. Then one member is from Nicaragua and he talks about making tortillas with his mother in their kitchen. My partner is Greek Appalachian so his story is about traveling from Kentucky to the Greek weddings and then the foods they ate there.”

“There’s this theme of food and family and shared work that kind of highlights these human commonalities. When people from different cultures witnessed this show, they always said, ‘this reminds me of my family,’ you know, no matter where they're from in the world, which tells you that we have these things in common as humans.”

Gover was approached by Music to Life, a foundation started by Paul Stookey [of Peter, Paul, and Mary] that engages in activism to use music to inspire social change. 

Music to Life created an academy with the mission of finding songwriters that were working from different cultures and backgrounds all over the United States and Canada who are using art to reach certain populations or communities to enact social change. 

“10 of us were selected and that was a huge honor to be chosen,” Gover said. “I believe that the people that were selecting the artists were trying to get representation from artists from different marginalized populations and so it's just an incredible honor to be in this space with these people.” 

“The intention of this- they're calling it an incubator- is that for eight months, they work with us. They give us direct instruction on forming clever partnerships, writing grants, developing your language, your marketing, your website, your project, languages to describe your practice,” Gover explained. “Then also mindset, individual coaching stuff. They give us seed money to work with, to find nonprofits to partner with and to make sure that we get paid as artists, but also to have some seed money to invest in the communities to help get our projects off the ground.” 

Gover hopes the changemakers can help her amplify and elevate Cornbread and Tortillas. 

“I think the goal of the changemakers is to help you take whatever project it is that you've been working on and just elevate it, bring it up into the next iteration of itself,” Gover said. “Another facet that I don't know much about is how do you even market and present a theater piece” and this is something changemakers can help her learn. 

“Part of what I'm doing is I'm trying to help tell a more broad and inclusive version of an American story, because it's not just North America, and it's not just white patriarchal. I can’t do it on my own. As an Appalachian woman, even, I need these other voices,” Gover said. “These are the voices that need to be amplified, and so for me, that's part of what I'm doing. I really believe in the story and I believe in the artists and I want to find ways to help amplify their voices and their talents as well.”

Courtesy of Hannah Thomas