The Brief

It all started with salpicón.

Nine years ago, Karla Tatiana Vasquez wanted to make the seasoned minced meat dish with radish and fresh mint that’s a staple in El Salvador.

She called her grandmother, Mama Lucy, for the recipe. It satisfied her salpicón craving — but it also made her curious to know if there were documented Salvadoran recipes available for her to come back to whenever she wanted.

When she looked online, she was dismayed to find only two cookbooks, both self-published — and one of them sold out.

This month, Vasquez is finally rectifying that omission with her cookbook, The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and the women who preserve them — a compilation book of stories and recipes for Salvadorans who añoran, or long for, their homeland.

Salvadoran salpicón

(

Courtesy of Ren Fuller

)

Connection to her roots

Growing up, Vazquez was constantly searching for a connection to El Salvador, which she left behind in 1988 as a baby during the country’s civil war. Her family moved to Los Angeles where thousands of other Salvadorans also took refuge.

But it was always food, the dishes her mother, grandmother and other women in her life made, that was the strongest connection to her roots.

“I was trying to alleviate that pain that told me you're from a place you're not sure you’ll live [there] again,” said Vasquez.

She heard often that those who left El Salvador behind would forget who they are or where they come from. That was not a reality Vasquez wanted for herself.

Karla Vasquez

(

Courtesy of Ren Fuller

)

“If I can figure out how to touch home in the kitchen, and cook something, then I know how to find myself within myself,” said Vasquez.

She began trying to write down recipes for Salvadoran dishes. But when Vasquez would ask her mother to break down a recipe with measurements for staples like arroz frito, her mother couldn’t give her a direct answer. She would ask "how much salt do you add to this dish?" and her mother would say “Ay Karla, tu palader te dice" — Your palette will tell you.

“I thought it was this mysterious thing that I just didn’t have,” Vasquez said. Her grandmother would assure her and tell her that it will come to her. And it did, over time.

(Her grandmother, who was one of her biggest champions, recently passed away. Vasquez dedicates the cookbook to her).

" I feel like this book is only scratching the surface of everything I have learned in this journey. We have so much" — Karla Vasquez

(

Courtesy of Ren Fuller

)

SalviSoul features a range of Salvadoran dishes, with chapter headings like “Salvadoran Essentials” laying out pupusas de loroco (an edible small green flower), or riguas (a sweet corn cake wrapped in plantain leaves, filled with cheese or refried beans), and “Antojitos” (cravings), describing how to make empanadas de platano con leche.

There's also recipes for conejo parillado (grilled rabbit) and ceviche de pescado, which she learned from Salvadoran women in L.A.

The beauty of Salvadoran cuisine is reflected on the pages, with hues of orange, pink and green, all inspired by the produce you find in El Salvador like jocotes, mamey, alguashte and mangoes. Vasquez says Salvadoran foods are already very vibrant and she channeled those colors onto the pages.

"Salvi cuisine loves flora and fauna. We love eating the flowers that are edible in El Salvador," she says.

Weaved in are the personal anecdotes from the women who share their recipe. “I feel like every immigrant has an odyssey to tell,” said Vasquez.

Salvadorans make up one of the largest Latino populations in the U.S., and Los Angeles is home to the largest Salvadoran diaspora.

The signs of Salvis in L.A. are everywhere, from panaderias and pupuserias to our own Salvadoran Community Corridor in Pico Union, where murals of Monseñor Oscar Romero remind Salvis that our saint is always looking after us.

A likeness of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980 near the start of the civil war in El Salvador, on a mural off a stretch of Vermont Ave. known as the El Salvador Community Corridor.

(

LESLIE BERESTEIN ROJAS

/

LAist

)

Nothing but pupusas 

When she would talk to other Salvis and other Latinos about her project, she constantly heard the same narrative — pupusas were the only recognizable Salvadoran food and there was nothing more.

Another person told her the only interesting cuisines in Latin America came from Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, or Brazil. She was shocked.

Pasteles de hongo. Achiote powder is used to give the masa for pasteles the orange hue and is also used in other dishes like Salvadoran enchiladas.

(

Courtesy of Ren Fuller

)

“The myth was that there was nada, but I had this feeling, I bet there's a lot, and I bet that people are just — we're just repeating what we're hearing,” said Vasquez.

She set out to find out what makes Salvadoran cuisine, talking to an anthropology professor based in El Salvador, who told Vasquez that Salvi cuisine is fusion cuisine.

"We use a lot of ingredients that are native to Mesoamerica. Corn, tomatoes, beans, ayote, like, those are all things that are in the cuisine. Then there's also ingredients like, plantains, right? Those are definitely more Caribbean I feel because of how they made their way from Africa," said Vasquez.

She says Salvi cuisine loves to play with different flavors: "We love sour, we love tart, we love bitter."

Vasquez says even the cooking methodologies come from different cultures. Nuegados for example is a fried yucca patty that has a brown sugar molasses drizzled on top — Vasquez thinks of Jewish latkes when she thinks of nuegados.

And a lot of Salvi cooking is also done over a fire, so a lot of dishes have that fire-grilled flavor to them.

Preserve point of view

Initially Vasquez doubted whether she would have enough to say in her cookbook. But she cast that doubt aside and started with the recipes from her family.

She knew her mother had at least 40 recipes under belt. And speaking with other women, she learned more.

Vasquez said that the women she interviewed reacted differently to her questions — some felt chastised for not having every detail written down, others felt embarrassed. Vasquez assured them she wasn’t questioning their methods.

Some felt they had nothing to share, that their dish wasn’t special, that it was “nothing." So instead of arguing with them, Vasquez asked them to share what they thought was nothing — and from there, she learned recipes she had never heard of, like gallo en chicha, a rooster cooked in homemade wine that takes five days to make from scratch.

“I want to appreciate what you consider delicious and once we've isolated how to get there, I want to make sure that we can still access it and replicate it,” said Vasquez. “I want to preserve your point of view in there and we can do that through this recipe.”

Pupusas de loroco, an edible flower that's used in many Salvadoran dishes.

(

Courtesy of Ren Fuller

)

Timing is everything

Vasquez started this journey in 2015 by creating an online community. On her Salvi Soul Instagram she shared pictures of different Salvadoran foods and held Facebook Live conversations with other Salvadoran chefs.

Then in 2020 the L.A. Times wrote a piece about her efforts to make Salvi Soul into a reality. The piece noted a frequent wall that Vasquez was always hitting — Salvadoran cuisine was unknown and major publishers couldn’t buy into the unknown.

The piece was pivotal to Vasquez’s journey because it created what she describes as “a big splash," and more networking connections opened up.

This was the year when the racial reckoning over the summer of 2020 compelled businesses to think twice about their diversity practices.

Bon Appétit came under fire when chef Sohla El-Waylly called out her previous employer on their diversity problems, like underpaying chefs of color.

Jeanine Cummins' controversial novel American Dirt — which was highly praised by a white audience but criticized by Latinx authors and readers — also highlighted the publishing industry's practices of favoring white authors retelling of immigrant experiences and the lack of Latinx representation in the industry.

All of this is crucial to understanding how Vasquez’s book finally got a green light a couple years later with an agent who, Vasquez says, was "beyond ecstatic" to get this book out.

In total, the cookbook features 33 recipes. But Vasquez says she didn’t create just a cookbook, but a community of Salvadoran women, whether it's the people on her team who are from El Salvador or those she met along the way here in Los Angeles.

And her work won’t stop here. She’s currently cooking up another concept. For now, she eagerly awaits the book's release on April 30 and the reaction from her community.

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Thousands of immigrants who are lawfully in California are set to lose their food assistance benefits, known as CalFresh, starting this month.

The new restrictions stem from H.R. 1 — also known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — which Congress passed last year.

The changes remove eligibility for certain noncitizens, including people with refugee status and victims of trafficking. It also applies to immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan who have special immigrant visas for helping the U.S. government overseas.

 ”These are folks … many of whom have large families that we have a commitment to as a country because we welcomed them and invited them here to find a place of refuge,” said Cambria Tortorelli, president of the International Institute of Los Angeles, a refugee resettlement agency. “They’re authorized to work and they’ve been brought here by the U.S. government.”

The federal spending bill, H.R. 1, made sweeping cuts to social safety net programs, including food assistance and Medicaid. In signing the bill, President Donald Trump said the changes were delivering on his campaign promises of “America first.”

Officials estimate 23,000 people in Los Angeles County will be affected. The state estimates about 72,000 immigrants with lawful presence will be affected across California.

CalFresh is the state’s version of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Undocumented immigrants have not been eligible to receive CalFresh benefits.

State officials say noncitizens who are currently receiving benefits will continue to get them until it’s time to renew their benefits — adding that people might be able to receive benefits again if their legal status changes to lawful permanent residents.

Who the changes apply to:

• Asylees
• Refugees
• Parolees (unless they are Cuban and Haitian entrants)
• Individuals with deportation or removal withheld
• Conditional entrants
• Victims of trafficking
• Battered noncitizens
• Iraqi or Afghan with special immigrant visas (SIV) who are not lawful permanent residents (LPR)
• Certain Afghan Nationals granted parole between July 31, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2023
• Certain Ukrainian Nationals granted parole between Feb. 24, 2022, and Sep. 30, 2024

Nearly every student in the California State University system has used artificial intelligence tools, but most don’t trust the results, are worried about how AI will affect their future job security and want more say in systemwide AI policy.

That’s according to results of a 2025 survey of more than 80,000 students enrolled at CSU’s 22 campuses, plus faculty and staff — the largest and most comprehensive study of how higher education students and instructors perceive artificial intelligence.

Nationwide, university faculty struggle to reconcile the learning benefits of AI — hailed as a “transformative tool” for providing tutoring and personalized support to students — and the risks that students will depend on AI agents to do their thinking for them and, very possibly, get the wrong information. Educators want a say in how and which AI tools are used. Students across the CSU system want to be included in those discussions.

Some professors teach students how to use AI and encourage students to use it, while others forbid its use in the classroom, said Katie Karroum, vice president of systemwide affairs for the Cal State Student Association, representing more than 470,000 students.

“Both of these things are allowed to coexist right now without a policy,” she said.

Karroum said that faculty practices are too varied and that what students need are consistent and transparent rules developed in collaboration with students. “There are going to be students who are graduating with AI literacy and some that graduate without AI literacy.”

In February 2025, the CSU system announced an initiative to adopt AI technologies and an agreement with OpenAI to make ChatGPT available throughout the system. The system-wide survey released Wednesday confirms that ChatGPT is the most used AI tool across CSUs. The system will also work with Adobe, Google, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn, Microsoft and NVIDIA.

Campus leaders say the survey and accompanying dashboard provide much needed data on how the system continues to integrate AI into instruction and assessment.

“We need to have data to make data-informed decisions instead of just going by anecdote,” said Elisa Sobo, a professor of anthropology at San Diego State who was involved in interpreting the survey’s findings. “We have data that show high use, but we also have high levels of concern, very valid concern, to help people be responsible when they use it.”

Faculty at San Diego State designed the survey, which received more than 94,000 responses from students, faculty and staff. Among all responding CSU students, 95% reported using an AI tool; 84% said they used ChatGPT and 82% worry that AI will negatively impact their future job security. Others worry that they won’t be competitive if they don’t understand AI well enough.

“Even though I don’t want to use it, I HAVE TO!” wrote a computer science major. “Because if I don’t, then I’ll be left behind, and that is the last thing someone would want in this stupid job market.”

Faculty are divided about the impact of AI on teaching and research. Just over 55% reported a positive benefit, while 52% said AI has had a negative impact so far.

San Diego State conducted its first campuswide survey in 2023 in response to complaints from students about inconsistent rules about AI use in courses, said James Frazee, vice president for information technology at the campus.

“Students are facing this patchwork of expectations even within the same course taught by different instructors,” Frazee said. In one introductory course, the professor might encourage students to use AI, but another professor teaching the same course might forbid it, he said. “It was a hot mess.”

In that 2023 survey, one student made this request: “Please just tell us what to do and be clear about it.”

Following that survey, the San Diego State Academic Senate approved guidelines for the use of generative AI in instruction and assessments. In 2025, the Senate made it mandatory that faculty include language about AI use in course syllabi.

“It doesn’t say what your disposition has to be, whether it’s pro or con,” Frazee said. “It just says you have to be clear about your expectations. Without the 2023 survey data, that never would have happened.”

According to the 2025 systemwide survey, only 68% of teaching faculty include language about AI use in their syllabi.

Sobo and other faculty who helped develop the 2025 survey hope other CSU campuses will find the data helpful in informing policies about AI use. The dashboard allows users to search for specific campus and discipline data and view student responses by demographic group.

The 2025 survey shows that first-generation students are more interested in formal AI training and that Black, Hispanic and Latino students are more interested than white students. At San Diego State, students are required to earn a micro-credential in AI use during their first year — another change that was made after the 2023 survey.

Students in this year’s survey said they want training that will be relevant to their careers. “I want to learn AI tools that are actually used in my industry, not just generic chatbots,” a mechanical engineering student responded. “Show me what engineers are actually doing with AI on the job.”

The California Faculty Association, which represents about 29,000 educators in the CSU system, said in a February statement that faculty should be included in future systemwide decisions about AI, including whether the contract with OpenAI should be renewed in July.

“CFA members continue to advocate for ethical and enforceable safeguards governing the use of artificial intelligence,” the CFA said in the statement, asking for “protections for using or refusing to use the technology, professional development resources to adapt pedagogy to incorporate the technology, and further protections for faculty intellectual property.”