Living in Southern California means living with a keen awareness of the cultural richness of our neighbor to the south, Mexico. Our border may be politically fraught but it is still permeable enough for culture to intermingle. From San Diego to Brownsville, communities on both sides of the line share more than most of us imagine. Chef and TV host Pati Jinich brings her unique focus to the people who reside in the borderlands in her James Beard-award winning series La Frontera, which you can watch on PBS. You can also see Jinich in the cooking show Pati’s Mexican Table.
Evan Kleiman: Congratulations on winning the Beard for season two of La Frontera.
Pati Jinich: Thank you so much. It truly means so much to me and my team. I definitely thought it was the longest shot in the universe so just getting nominated was pretty incredible. But bringing home the award felt like such joy, just for the recognition of the 31 million people who live in the US/Mexico borderlands and rarely have the chance to share the story with their own voice.
I found your approach to covering the border so interesting. Yes, of course, you showed the food, which we'll talk about, but you allowed the complexity of this area to breathe. Many of your guests used words like "fluidity," "liminal," "permeable" to describe this in-between space that makes up the areas on both sides of the border. Can you share your thoughts about that?
Yes, for sure. I think you just captured the most poignant words from the series. I think that if you haven't been to the borderlands, it's really hard to understand the space, because it's really like a third dimension, like a twilight zone of sorts, where the categories that we use both in the US, Mexico or anywhere else to understand the world — what's right, what's wrong, what's good, what's bad, what's happy, what's sad — all those boxes gain a different meaning or lose shape, and many things become very relative. It's not that things that are bad aren't bad but it's like there is this other dimension where there's this, as you said, this liminal space where you come to understand that the human experience is just not the same everywhere.
Here, you have an area where there's many people who are constantly, 24/7 rubbing with two different cultures, two different countries, two different ways of the law being applied or not applied, not only the languages that we've seen, the values, the way a culture or religion is perceived. People bring with them their suitcase of values and traditions and culture and cuisine. But once they get to the border, it's like they're holding onto them but there's also this open door for new possibilities. That's why food in the borderlands is so unapologetically delicious and unbridled, because you don't need to do what your grandmother did yet you have access to the techniques and the lessons learned but you're free to play and explore while, at the same time, you may be trying to hold on to some of the things that you grew up with because you're so afraid of losing it.
Pati Jinich attends an artists' cookout in an episode of "La Frontera." Photo by Alan Jinich.
You're a Chilango, you're from Mexico City. Did you already have opinions about Tex Mex combo plates or San Diego-style burritos before you did the show?
Yes, of course. I had lots of strong opinions before moving to Texas. I had a lot of strong opinions before going to Tijuana. And they were very biased opinions. I have had to swallow my words and take my thoughts back. I used to think when I first moved to the US, that Tex Mex was a bad rendition of Mexican food. I had to humble myself again and again by visiting Texas and the different regions of Texas and southern Texas and northern Mexico, to realize that many of the things I thought were true were not. So when I moved to the US, for example, I used to think of burritos as not Mexican food, not authentic. I used to think of flour tortillas as the tortilla that was the choice of Americans, not Mexicans. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I started traveling to the northern states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Nuevo Leon, Chihuahua, Baja, where I hadn't been before, and realized that flour tortillas are a big part of Mexican culture and cuisine. We've been eating flour tortillas in the north for over 500 years. And yes, wraps may be more of an American thing, but a burrito has deep roots in Mexico. And, of course, there are different ways that burritos are eaten in El Paso or Juarez or California, but that's the beauty of diversity. I've come to appreciate the borderland cuisine in Tex Mex food and Southern Cal Mex as their own beautiful regional cuisines.
One of my favorite moments was, I don't remember which city this was in, which region, but you asked a gentleman who was making you this incredible plate of delicious food, what he thought defined Tex Mex food, and he just unapologetically said, cheese.
I know.
Pati Jinich runs with Mennonite children in "La Frontera." Photo by Alan Jinich.
I loved it so much. It was just perfect.
Evan, you're really finding the nuggets of the spaces where I have found the most wisdom being shared with me from my travels along the journey. I know you're talking about Larry Delgado, a chef in the Rio Grande Valley who made the most incredible Tex Mex buffet for me and my team. It was fajitas made with Wagyu beef with cattle raised by these Japanese Texan Mexican women cattle ranchers who are raising the most incredible Akaushi cattle, which makes for the most extraordinary Wagyu beef. They're making these fajitas with them. Then he made some incredible beans and guacamole and salsa. His biggest pride was his queso, that cheese.
I have to say the meal was incredible. I said, tell me about Tex Mex food. I tried Tex Mex the first time in San Antonio, and he was like, "No, Pati. Tex Mex from San Antonio is not the same as Tex Mex from the Rio Grande Valley or from Brownsville or from Ciudad Juarez." It was such a lesson because it's like when someone comes to Mexico and they say Mexican food is just a blob of things, and you're not acknowledging that there's Yucatec and Oaxaca northern. It's like Texas is its own country. It was so humbling.
The interesting thing is that before I went there and I ate his queso, I kept thinking of the queso fundido Mexican-style, which is our Mexican cheeses that we think of as really good, like Chihuahua or Mexican Manchego or Oaxaca, and they just go melted under the broiler with chorizo or rajas or something. But it's not this queso sauce. So I kept thinking, "Oh, if I make a version of this queso, should I use good cheddar cheese or Mexican Chihuahua?" And he was like, "No. Velveeta rules. American cheese rules."
It's the same thing as when I was doing research for an article I wrote for the New York Times on the origin of the nachos, how nachos are deeply rooted in Mexico, in the city of Piedras Grandes, which is on the border with the US. In the original nachos that were made by a Mexican with corn tortillas and pico jalapenos, they were covered in Colby cheese, because that is the cheese that ruled in the area for decades. In this area of Mexico, it's very poor, no refrigeration, the cheese that was subsidized by the government in the post-war era was traded with Mexico. It was a deeply valued ingredient and beloved in that city and grew really deep roots. So who are we to tell this huge Mexican community that their nachos aren't authentic?
I feel like we live in an era where everybody wants to police everybody. Who belongs to the Latinos group? Who belongs to the Hispanic community? Who belongs to the Mexican? Who belongs to the American? We're pushed all the time to choose which box we belong to that has to have some purity in it, as if having mixed cultures or mixed identities or mixed religions makes you a lesser person, when in reality, it's just your kaleidoscope, and it is as beautiful and as rich as anyone else's.
In the borderlands, Evan, I felt so at home because I grew up in Mexico City from a Mexican family of generations with descendants of Eastern European roots. On both sides of my grandparents, they were Jewish refugees trying to find freedom and safety in Mexico, and they made it their home.
I grew up in Mexico with my Mexican family with a Jewish last name, and that Jewish last name really stood out. There's not that many Jews in Mexico, although there's like 45,000 in the entire country of 127 million. Then, when I moved to the US, my accent was too Mexican, my ways too Mexican, my culture too Mexican. When I went to the borderlands, I felt so at home.
Pati visits champion boxer Jackie Nava in "La Frontera." Photo by Darren Durlach.
You talked to a fourth gen customs broker who actually characterized the border as a third country — bicultural, binational, bilingual — so in that respect, people at the border are uniquely suited to what the future will bring. Another guest talked about how resilient the children are growing up in such expansive communities, how you could plunk them down anywhere and they thrive.
You picked up again on something that's so important. It is people from these US/Mexico Borderlands and we're talking about more than 31 million people who are being narrowly defined and demonized as not belonging from here everywhere. But it is people who can swim in any water because they can turn a switch on and off. You pluck them in a place where there's English, they'll have that. You pluck them in a place where there's Spanish, they'll have that. But it's not only the language, it's the ways.
When you're north of the border, you put on your seat belt when you're in the back seat. But if you're in Mexico, you can relax. No need to put that seatbelt [on when you're sitting] in the back. Maybe I shouldn't be saying this out loud. But many things. The ways we eat, the ways we linger at the table, if you ask for coffee before or after. the manners, the etiquette, the ways of connecting. They don't see one or another thing as what is not authentic, because they know that there's different worlds that they can live in and that are okay to be in as well.
I've always found the idea of borders somewhat problematic since they're political constructs. You showed so beautifully in the show how this border, in particular, has changed so much throughout history that people on both sides have at various times found themselves on one side or the other of the border without ever moving. There are entire extended families whose ties extend on both sides of the border deeply, like centuries, and who feel connected to both places in different ways. So there's that human element but then there was that extraordinary moment where you were in that wildland range with those two eco scientists, the ones who were taking 50,000 photographs a year of wild...
Porcupines.
Pati Jinich hosts the series "La Frontera," on PBS. Photo courtesy of Pati Jinich.
They said it's a place where wolves run with jaguars. It was this one area that hadn't yet built a wall so the wildlife was able to be natural, to run its range, so to speak.
Yeah, absolutely. That's where we realize the world is not only of humans, right? There's the impact that happens to rivers, to mountains, to animals. It's flora and fauna that are impacted by the borders and by these walls. What you were saying about the sister cities having these bonds, one really incredible example of this is the Tohono O'odham in Arizona. It's the same indigenous tribe north of the border in Arizona, in the Tucson area to the papalos in northern Mexico. They're the same tribe. They're the same people. But after over a century, these same people have fared differently because of being under a different country. The communities were broken.
They used to have special permits to come and go and celebrate their festivities and meet for harvest or meet for communal reasons. It's increasingly difficult so you have these political walls and fences really impacting communities that, as you say, existed as one nation before that one nation was split into two countries.