“There is a lot of politics in food,” she said. “I don’t do food for me. One thing they say in my culture is: They want the taco but didn’t want the taco maker.” At those California bakeries where she was raised, she recalls their immigrant field laborer customers, who’d barter tomatoes and peaches for the bread or milk her father provided, and also get help from children there to translate forms, job applications and such. “Our bakery became the hub for our culture” – as did her uncle’s bakery, she said, for the United Farm Workers in Delano. “I knew as a child, that’s my foundation. We’re of service to our community, through our food and our bread.” Mexican food as generally experienced in the United States, she said, “is not really Mexican food. It is more ‘necessity food.’” “When I first opened, 20 years ago, the number one thing I could see was the consumer was not experiencing my kind of restaurant from a Mexican chef.” “They expected chips and salsa. … Baker’s daughter, I gave them bread. They expected combination plates. ‘Where’s the tortillas? Where’s the sauces?’ I gave them none of that. Instead, I gave them regional food.” “I use it as an opportunity to change erroneous perceptions that North Americans have not only over the food from Mexico, but of the culture. That was 20 years ago. And that fight is still going.” From Mexico, she said, we got corn, tomatoes, chilies, beans, papaya, pineapples – “chocolate, for Christ’s sake! – and technique, such as barbecue pit cooking. “I traveled the country – 17 states – studying American barbecue as a Mexican chef,” she said. “And what I found is that there’s a white supremacy that has taken over that food.” “It’s typical not of assimilation, but appropriation, because that food developed out of Mexican culture into Texas and the rest of America.” And then, some of the best innovations in barbecue came from enslaved cooks finding ways to make palatable scraps left off the tables they served, she said. “There’s a lot of culture in food,” John Rudolph, founder of Feet in 2 Worlds which produces the blog site Food in 2 Worlds, concluded. “It’s about history. It’s about politics. A lot of personalities, a lot of great stories, an endless source of inspiration.”
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