Chef Ray is a tribal member of the Santa Clara Pueblo and has earned attention among Santa Fe's top creative chefs. Ray has been a chef since his teens, graduating from Scottsdale Culinary Institute Le Cordon Bleu in 2003. He believes in preserving his people’s foodways and ancestral knowledge and strives to continue on this path. By using both modern and ancestral cooking techniques, he attempts to push the limits of what is known, unknown, and forgotten about the Indigenous food cultures of North America.
Join Ray Naranjo for a storytelling and hands-on tamale workshop rooted in the Tewa perspective of the Four Directions. Through an oral history of direction and color, participants rotate through four stations to make tamales using indigenous ingredients from each region: North—blue corn, West—yellow corn, South—red corn, and East—white corn. Learn the cultural meaning behind each direction and taste the diversity of Indigenous cuisine.