 Thanks for joining us. I'm Peter Bergen, Vice President at New America. And we are here to talk about this great new book by Laura Tillman, The Migrant Chef, The Life and Times of Lalo Garcia. It's just a kind of some housekeeping notes. There's in the chat, there will be links to buy the book. And then also, as the announcer said, if you have questions, put it in Slido and I'll moderate them and ask Laura those questions as they come in. So let me first of all introduce Laura. She is a colleague of mine at the podcast that we produced for Audible in the room. She's also published another book, The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts. She began her career as a newspaper reporter on the US Mexico border in 2007 before moving to Mexico City, where she is right now in 2014. She had her writings appeared in New York Times, Los Angeles Times, then the nation. She's also a member of the faculty at Gallagher College where she teaches and she lives in Mexico City with her family. So Laura, over to you. Thank you, Peter. As Peter said, we work on this great podcast that you should also listen to if you're tuning in in the room with Peter Bergen. And it was just really generous of Peter to do this event with me for the migrant chef. You know, in my role on the podcast, I think a lot about narrative structure and how we can communicate complex ideas through storytelling. We actually have an episode coming out about that theme tomorrow about how you sort of turn the news into great writing and writing that people actually want to read. So that's something that I think about a lot. And as someone who thinks a lot about narrative, I'm a big believer in chronology as a a helpful tool to bring people along. And so I figured I would sort of use chronology in this case as my as my friend to just begin at the beginning and tell you a little bit about me and how I came to this story in the first place. So I moved from New York to South Texas in 2007. And there I got my first job in a border city, Brownsville, Texas at the newspaper. I was freelancing for a few years. And then I began in a low residency MFA program. And in that program, I started writing a thesis that would become my first book, which was about a death penalty case. I came across that case not because I was interested in writing about murder or crime, but because there was this building near the newspaper office that the city wanted to tear down. And it was a really dilapidated building, kind of a rooming house where there were you could call them apartments, but really it was just rooms with communal bathrooms. And this murder had taken place a few years earlier. And there had been a trial and one of the one of the people in the couple had been sent to death row. And this building just seemed like kind of a stand in for this crime. And I think one of the things that that project taught me, which I brought into this project is kind of the value of following a subject over the long term, and also the value of kind of thinking about subjects outside of the box of what the way those stories are often told. So instead of approaching this case of these murders as a kind of true crime story about the crime itself, I approached it kind of through the lens of this building and the fate of this building and what this building revealed about the community and its relationship to the crime and the process of healing from tragedy. And I spent six years following that story. And I spent a lot of time just kind of immersing myself in this neighborhood around this building with these people, trying to learn from them, trying to hear how those stories and narratives changed subtly over the years. I went to death row, I met this man who had committed the crime. And I started to think a lot about this idea of erasure versus remembrance when it comes to tragic events. And so, you know, that kind of brings me to in 2016, that book was published. And now I am the mother of two human babies, but that was my first book, baby. And I had this kind of strong feeling of postpartum, you know, depression after my book came out in terms of just feeling the sense of loss that I had had this project that for many years, as a freelancer at the time, had given me a lot of meaning in my work. And I was, you know, working on things as a freelancer, I think sometimes you're working on things that are really compelling. And sometimes things that are more for income. And when I had this book project I was working on, I had this feeling that I was doing something that in the background gave me a lot of meaning in my work. And so I started looking around for another project. And this time I wasn't actually looking for something that was supposed to be long term, I was looking for more of a short term. I thought that I had kind of, you know, I'd been through the MFA program and I had gotten to the point where maybe in a year I could immerse myself in a subject and write a book. And so I was in Mexico City, I had recently moved there. By the way, I'm here in Mexico City. And if you at any point here, kind of the street sounds of Mexico City, I apologize, but they're quite loud and it's kind of hard to insulate oneself from them sometimes. But basically I, you know, I think that one of the ways that a lot of people get to know a foreign culture, and in particular in Mexico is through the food. And so I was living here, I was reporting, I was doing some assignments for Los Angeles Times, and I was eating a lot of amazing food in these restaurants in Mexico City. And there was this kind of electricity to the dining scene here at that moment where, you know, it felt like there were all these really interesting connections that were being drawn between different cultures, both, you know, Italian and Mexican food, French and Mexican food, Indian and Mexican food, but also modern and pre-Hispanic cuisines. And it felt like a kind of intellectual and creative conclusion of a much longer story. It didn't feel like just a moment in time in a food scene where there was kind of a gimmick. And so I think that one of the things that if you, you know, if you're someone who has eaten in fine dining restaurants today or even watched shows like Top Chef, you might have a sense that narrative has become a big part of dining culture as well, that there are a lot of narratives that are told in restaurants in the front of house about food. And at times that's about, you know, the story of the protagonist in the kitchen, the chef. Sometimes that's more of a cultural story or a story about sustainability. You know, in Mexico City, for example, you might see on a menu that some of the food that you were eating was grown in a chinampa. And so you might think, well, you know, what's a chinampa? And that kind of opens up this conversation about pre-Hispanic Mexico, that Mexico, when it was Tenochtitlan, was an island city on a lake. And Zochimilco in the south of Mexico City is the only part of the city today that still resembles what that pre-Hispanic city might have looked like. It's a city with all of these canals and waterways. And there are these islands that since, you know, the time of the Zochimiltecas were created by stacking compost. And so there are these islands that are super nutrient dense. And at the time were used to grow the food that supplied the city of at the time half a million people, which was one of the top five largest cities in the world before the Spanish arrived. And so, you know, you see this little term and it kind of opens up this history to you about the place beneath your feet. And so I think that there were all these stories that were being told sort of in the front of house context. But as a journalist, I was really interested in, you know, well, what are the stories in the back of house? You've got these very self-conscious narratives that are, you know, without, I'm not, you know, saying that they're false, but at the same time they are narratives that are told in the spirit of salesmanship that are being told in the front of house context. And then you have the people working in these kitchens. And I think in Mexico, one of the things that occurred to me as I started thinking about the idea for this book is, you know, it's a country of extraordinary inequality. And it's something that you really feel right away when you move here, when you start living here, because you have people who are living in the city, and then you have a lot of people who commute to the city every day for these jobs in the service industry. And they're coming from a very long way away. The neighborhoods that they're coming from have extraordinary levels of violence, violence against women, disappearances. And it's just these dueling realities of what this city is of people who are kind of living side by side. And I think in a restaurant in the back of house in a fine dining kitchen in particular is a place where people from a lot of different backgrounds are working side by side. And where the hierarchies of a lot of the rest of Mexican life are kind of upended because you might have someone who's from a very poor rural background who ascends to become the chef de cuisine or head chef in the manner of Lalo. I'm going to talk more about in a second. And then you might have someone from a really elite private school who's actually working under them, who's aspiring to be a fine dining chef. And it really is a profession about hard work and talent. It's also about being in the right place. But I think that really intrigued me. What would it be like to put myself in that environment and be able to sort of watch those narratives play out in terms of this place where all of these different people are converging in a relatively concentrated space and kind of map those relationships? And that might be a way of kind of revealing modern Mexico through the lens of a very concentrated environment. So I went to a few different restaurants. I talked to a few different chefs. And I ended up spending a few weeks in one restaurant in the pastry kitchen mostly. And I was interviewing people and I think in a sense I was kind of finding some, you know, the type of story that I thought that I was looking for. But one of the, you know, important pieces of reporting is just logistical. It was a really big restaurant. And it was difficult to observe what was happening in the restaurant as a whole from any one vantage point. And so I felt like it just wasn't really going to work for what I had imagined. And then I was out to dinner with a friend and I was at Maximo Bistro, this small restaurant that was really acclaimed but had a very kind of intimate casual vibe at the time. And my friend was a photographer in Mexico. She just moved there and she was not like a famous photographer or kind of important figure at all. But suddenly the waiter start bringing things to the table that we hadn't ordered. And because we were not the kind of people that are usually treated in that manner, our reaction was essentially like, we didn't order this, you know, don't charge us for this food. And the waiters kept saying, no, the chef, you know, the chef sent this to you. And it was just so interesting to me at the time because I just thought like, who is this person who we're not the kind of people, like there's no sort of transactional benefit to him sending us this food and what is the deal with this guy. And it just intrigued me to know more. I mean, I feel like that story makes me sound a little like I just was excited about some free food that I was getting in a restaurant. But I think for me, it was like, I had never experienced that. And it just made me wonder about who this character was behind the, you know, behind the kitchen and door. And actually at that restaurant, there is no kitchen door. You walk into the restaurant and you see him right away. He's at the pass. He's always there. And so I basically called up the restaurant, I requested to have an interview with him. And we sat down for about an hour and I told him that I had this idea of writing a book about a restaurant kitchen. And he told me this very, you know, just amazing life story in a distilled version where he was born in this town in rural Mexico. He as a young child moved to one of these towns that I mentioned, you know, that's near Mexico City, where a lot of people commute to and from for work. Then he ended up moving to the US with his father, mother and brother when he was around nine years old to work as a migrant farm worker. They went from Florida to Michigan and back and forth for several years. And then when he was a teenager, he moved to the Atlanta area and he worked in a restaurant kitchen. He started working for Chef Eric Repair at one of his restaurants. And he was just kind of this this innately talented young cook, the people around him, you know, one of his co-workers at the time dubbed him a scoffier reincarnate. He just had this amazing talent. And so he's kind of working at these restaurants. But then on the other hand, he's also this kid who's never really had any friends. He's never stayed in one place for very long. And he starts trying to get in with this crowd of of kids in his neighborhood and who are committing crimes. And he becomes part of this robbery gone wrong of a liquor store and ends up going to prison. And so he's incarcerated for a few years. Then he's deported back to Mexico. His father, it turns out, has stage four stomach cancer. He comes back to take care of him. Then his father passes away. He is caught by ICE. And he has at this point kind of this burgeoning restaurant career in the Atlanta area. He's caught by ICE and he's deported back to Mexico again. And then he has to start over again. And he is now one of the most famous chefs in Mexico, if not the world. His restaurant in 2022 made it to the top 100 restaurants in the world list. But I just, I was really intrigued by him from that story. But I think that one of the things in this profession is it's like you have people who have amazing things that have happened to them. And then you also have people who have amazing level of insight into those experiences. And I think it was extraordinary because I understood from that first meeting that he was both of those things, that he was someone who had had this really epic life story that had touched on so many different issues and contexts. But he was also a really interesting insightful speaker and had a lot to say about those experiences and was really kind of reckoning with this life that kind of fused those two front of house, back of house narratives in a sense. He's someone who can go off and eat at some of these really celebrated restaurants all over the world and he can participate in this fine dining culture. And a lot of the dishes on his menu have big piles of caviar on top and freshly shaved truffles and kind of all of the all of the signs of luxury in that sense. But he's also someone who is always seems to be really struggling with the inequalities that he's witnessing with what's happening to the environment with the way that workers are treated. His father, there's no proof of the reason that he died, but he was a healthy man who died in his mid 50s and the family can't help but believe that the cause was probably all of these pesticides that he was exposed to over many, many decades as an agricultural worker. So it was really interesting to hear kind of from him about anything that was going on in the news that was going on in the world and the kind of perspective that he brought as a person who is in these spaces of luxury and privilege, but who was kind of a critic from the inside. So, you know, I had this idea that I was going to spend like a year immersed in a kitchen and write a book and be much faster than my first attempt. But it ended up taking me essentially the same amount of time to write this book as it did the first book. And I think that I just also appreciated that that long term perspective that I was able to follow him. You know, from these first meetings, like the first scene in the book is someone comes in for a job interview at the restaurant. And that was one of the first moments that I ever witnessed in the restaurant as a reporter. And it just felt to me like a very a very helpful introduction for both me and the reader to this world of kind of seeing the person who's coming from this far away place and seeing the city from their perspective as they go from, you know, one of these communities that most service workers come from into the city, this journey that takes hours, you get there. And he's kind of telling this young woman, you know, this can be a great job, but this is also a really difficult job. And you have to make the choice if you want to commit totally or not. And then I was able to follow him all the way through the pandemic. And to kind of see see kind of an arc, I felt of what he was going through, but then also trace a lot of the backstory of what happened to him over the years and try to provide context. And I think having come from the border and having spent so many years reporting on the border and watching the way the news cycle can kind of treat the border region and package it into these narratives about it being a place of refuge, a place of conflict, good immigrants, bad immigrants. I think one of the things that I wanted to do in this book was just really follow this person's authentic journey without trying to kind of package it around a policy or a news peg or even a preconceived idea of what an immigration story might look like. And so that's something that I, in the same way that because he's a critic from within in this fine dining space that I kind of appreciated about this story and some of the qualities of this story was that he's someone who sort of was always defying my expectations about how I thought those stories might play out. And you could say it's a story about an American dream, but really he doesn't realize his American dream until he's back in Mexico. And so I think that was just one of kind of my takeaways from both of these books and from kind of bringing that border reporting into the interior of Mexico is just that value of kind of widening the lens and what that offers I think in book form that is sometimes hard to do when you're reporting in other more kind of time pressured forms of journalism or storytelling. So yeah, but that's my basic kind of introduction to the book and how I found it. And then I'll turn it over to you, Peter, to see if you have any questions for me. Thank you. Thank you. And anybody in the audience who have questions just a reminder that put them in the slide over and I will moderate them for Laura. So I mean, I was struck in the beginning of the book about it's it's the father is called Lupe. Yeah, I'm struck how, you know, and Lalo, I guess was like nine years old when he was coming as a migrant worker working, you know, picking various kinds of crops in the United States. I mean, it's seen and also that family was split up, right? Because the mother and the daughters were left behind and it seemed like they didn't want, they weren't reunited for many years. So talk to us a little bit about that experience and also from a policy point of view, you know, you've got these nine year old kids who are presumably it's against the law for them to be employed in this way or there must be some sort of loopholes. What is the, you know, I mean, I was just struck me we've got these child laborers coming across the border and they seem to be operating in some kind of quasi legal manner. Yeah, I mean, I was trying to understand that as well. So just to go back, Lalo, when he was around nine years old, his father came back to Mexico as he did periodically after these long stretches of working in the US and he brought Lalo's mother and brother and Lalo to the US and so Lalo was around nine, his brother was around seven and he had two sisters who were teenagers and who the family decided they would leave in the in the house in the inside of the Mexico where they'd been living and there was an aunt and uncle who lived close by who would kind of keep an eye on them. But his sister was close to getting her her high school degree and she was getting kind of a semi professional certificate as an accountant and they wanted her to stay and finish. And also I think their father felt like this was just a really dangerous life for girls even more so than for boys. And so they they went and they started this journey of, you know, every year going to Florida going to Georgia to Ohio, Michigan, picking tomatoes, oranges, cucumbers, you know, blueberries, mushrooms, onions, pretty much anything that was being harvested along this route. And so it was a really, really, really brutal life. They had come from a very poor background, so kind of the that experience of working in agriculture and working, you know, kind of having these meager living conditions in general wasn't new to them when they were living in the east side of the Mexico they were building their house and they were living in a room with a dirt floor at one point. But there was something much more psychologically taxing about this kind of itinerant lifestyle where you're going from place to place you don't have any family or community support. Some of the employers can be exploitative some not I think in the years my impression he you know he passed away so I didn't get a chance to interview him directly but my impression from talking to other family members is that in his years on his own Lupi had really tried to scout out some of the better employers and spend more time working for them each season. But yeah I you know Lalo was a child when this was happening and so he has kind of his impressions of what the circumstances were but this was one of the issues that I tried to then go to you know people who had worked in the Department of Labor people who had been working for nonprofits to help migrants in these situations to try to get more context of what these conditions were really like what the laws really were from people I spoke to virtually none of what the work that Lalo and his brother were doing was legal. There are certainly loopholes but they're virtually never granted this permission because of concerns about pesticide exposure they were really young. It's interesting now because you know this is one of the things that's happening is that certain states are actually peeling back some of the laws that prohibit child labor. There's a great series this year in the New York Times about you know a lot of young migrants who are coming to the U.S. and who end up working in these illegal conditions inside of factories or farms. So a lot of this is still very much happening. I think that in practice you know part of it is that you go to a place like Michigan and there's no childcare I mean in the summer you're harvesting berries there's no childcare to be found and definitely not that you can afford on the wage that you're being paid to do this work and so kids are in the fields whether they're working or not but it's kind of like there's not much else for them to even do to be in the field all day then kind of help out and because a lot of these crops are paid per piece or per pound you know the more hands you have contributing to filling up a bucket the more money you make so in practice this is still very much going on and while there are you know there are some there is some oversight hypothetically to make sure the children are not working it's very easy to kind of hide kids or pretend they're not working when those inspectors come by so yeah it's it's definitely been interesting to see how you you hear about these brutal conditions that Lolo was experiencing you know 30 years ago and then it turns out that not much has really changed and are they I mean so when these Mexican work agricultural workers come I mean are they are they are getting some sort of temporary visa often for the specific kind of work and their family or how does it work I mean it's it's really depends there there is the H2A visa and that program right now is actually up for some possible improvements but I think one of the things that you know a lot of people come undocumented without papers at all and are working these jobs and then there are visa programs where people are coming and they are enrolled in a program but those programs are almost designed for exploitation because you're recruited from your town the recruiters themselves are very powerful people often in these communities and so if you're recruited to go work for a certain employer say in Florida and you go and you show up and the conditions are really not what you expected there have even been cases over the past year of essentially people who are brought and then are made into indentured servants are working for free to kind of pay back their passage and they end up living in really horrific worker housing with some of them without even a mattress to sleep on without even a place to bathe except for a spigot and a bucket and then they they have very little possibility of logic a complaint or choosing to go work for someone else because they've come to work for this specific employer and if they do complain then that recruiter in their town is not only going to blacklist them from getting one of these jobs again they could blacklist their whole family so the incentives to not complain about these conditions are really high and it's been a very dysfunctional program for many years but that I mean that is that is the way that a lot of people come they do come through that visa I mean if we did if you did the thought experiment where there wasn't any of these temporary agricultural workers what effect would it have on American agriculture and places like the Central Valley and California and elsewhere yeah I mean I think time and time again you know that they've tried to get American workers to do these jobs and people do not want these jobs I mean they are really physically demanding jobs often you know you're in the heat all day long you're working for many hours you're stooped and you're doing kind of a repetitive motion whether it's grabbing the green beans off of a plant or stooping down to dig onions out of the ground over and over and over for many hours there's a there's a good book about this called The American Way of Eating by Tracy McMillan where she kind of embeds with migrant workers and she she does this work herself and you can get a better idea of what that physically is like and then how you're paid in comparison to the costs that you expend along the way in terms of just getting housing or kind of surviving on those wages so they're they're jobs that people just don't don't want for the most part yeah a couple of questions here from the audience um how do the experiences of Lalo and his family shape your perspective on migration cultural identity and the culinary world that's a all-encompassing question yeah I think um you know one of the things that was really interesting to me was his family was migrating um and his mom who's a good cook herself um was also just challenged to be able to to replicate the food that she'd made her whole life in Mexico for her family where's her mother where's the mother from they're they're all from this very small village in the state of Guanajuato Mexico which is where it is in central Mexico it's a little bit northwest of Mexico City it's about a five-hour car ride from where I am in Mexico I believe now and Guanajuato is now one of the most dangerous places in all of Mexico is a lot of organized crime but they're from this very you know I've been there a few times this very beautiful village um that is mostly agricultural and from a very young age I mean she started having kids when she was 15 years old she had her own kitchen and you know her mandate was to take care of her family and cook and so there as they were migrating from place to place she was really challenged to be able to feed them or cook for them food that resembled the food that she'd eaten growing up and so she would have to invent and she would have to kind of try to summon these flavors from other herbs or other vegetables that she was finding along the way um and it was kind of this through line of the book about creativity and migration and the fact that even though today we kind of think of of those innovations as being the territory of a fine dining chef in a kitchen like Maximo Bistro that they've always been there's always been this thread of ingenuity and innovation in the home kitchen in Mexico and just it's kind of part of the migration story I think is this this need to innovate this need to adapt um so that was that was one of the things that I I took away but yeah I'm yeah I'm are you uh cook I do like to cook um I think that this this book both taught me some things about cooking but it also humbled me a little bit in terms of how I think of my own cooking um and then it has coincided the the reporting and writing process has coincided with with my experience of motherhood so um in the second year of reporting this I became a mom and you know there's no diner um who's more tempestuous than a than a small child at your dinner table and who can make you feel worse about your your cooking um my son who's my older child is now a really enthusiastic eater and he will eat anything under the sun and um loves the salad loves escargot the couple of times in his life he's had it well really is a big adventure when it comes to food I think also probably hearing a lot about this book and lalo and meeting lalo has informed his sense that food is this exciting important thing um but yeah I I do like to cook I just think that that is um when you're cooking for kids you're under a clock a lot of the time and it's not it's not nearly as fun as when you one of the takeaways from from your book and also just I mean from what I understand about running a restaurant I mean it's the hours are brutal and very long the work is hard you know it's tough and that's in any restaurant in the world right in mexico city I'm presuming it's yeah with some of the you know you mentioned you know people having to commute four hours to get to these jobs and yeah that woman you mentioned in the introduction when you were talking who was coming for the job interview she basically she didn't take the job because she must have been put off by what it really entailed yeah it's a lot I mean it's you know most most um jobs in mexico are a standard work week is six days and with these restaurant jobs their 12 hour shifts kind of standard and then they can even go beyond that depending on you know what what's happening that night so they're really demanding jobs I think that I just spent a lot of the first year of of reporting this book just kind of marveling at that reality and kind of the the way that people work I think it's also it's also a career where and it's kind of part of what I saw in Lalo's story as he got older and I mean he's still only in his 40s but it's it's not really a sustainable career physically in terms of keeping up that pace and that it is you know he's kind of suffered these different health issues in the last few years and even someone who's such a incredible worker like him finds it difficult to sustain so yeah it it's how has he received the book in his family yeah I think that he like he really likes um one of the things that he's reacted to the most is like the parts that aren't about him the the context kind of about his life and you know I was talking to him and I was observing him but then I would go you know do all this research or interview these experts and I would come back and I would learn that you know round up what he was exposed to is now being linked to this liver disease that he has and I think that there was a lot that that he enjoyed about kind of the the city beyond him there's also a big section in the book about some of the chefs who shaped the the Mexican cuisine that we have today in Mexico City and kind of brought Mexican food to white table costs in Mexico City which was something that I was really surprised to learn that you know in 30 years ago even in Mexico City you really would not find for the most part Mexican food in a fine dining setting and kind of what that says about the enduring biases and inequalities um here culturally and so that that was also kind of a section of the book was trying to understand how that evolution happened and how those chefs sort of set the stage for Maximo Bistro so that one Maximo Bistro opened it was kind of this overnight success that was bringing together French and Mexican food but up until that point um you know that had been kind of a long and difficult road for chefs here I presume uh you know Oaxaca and Chiapas have very different cuisine than say other parts of Mexico I mean there are very strong regional cuisines and how does he draw up those yeah I mean he's a big traveler and so he you know he's gone all over Mexico but I think he's also really interested in he recently went on a long trip to Japan he spends a lot of time in Europe um he's interested in kind of learning from all of these different cultures and traditions and um but yeah there's there's a lot of regional differences in in the food in Mexico I think that's one of the things that depending on who's reading the book you know there are some people who might really already have a good sense of Mexican cuisine but I think that for people who maybe have experienced it mostly through Americanized versions of Mexican cuisine or Tex-Mex to sort of open them up a little bit to all of the variety all of the diversity all the ingenuity of what Mexican food can be and the fact that a lot of what people consume in the country today is really pre-Hispanic um which is so interesting to me because that you know there was such a campaign to extinguish um that culture and campaigns to kind of replace the tortilla with bread that just it's just so intrinsic to the identity of people here that it was it just wasn't possible to to kind of stamp out those practices and in fact you know if you go into the street in the morning and you're on your way to work one of the most common breakfast that you'll find is a tamale with a cup of a tole which are both pre-Hispanic foods that are people are eating as they're you know going about their routine in the morning so I yeah it's been that's been really fun to explore so there's obviously the influence of pre-Hispanic cuisine what about the influence of colonial cuisine I mean yeah yeah I think that that was another piece that was interesting in seeing like the particular that someone pointed that out to me kind of early on like it's interesting that he found this success by combining Mexican food with French food because you know French food is kind of been I think the world over kind of worshiped as the height of sophistication and cuisine and refinement and I think that in a way it makes a lot of sense that in Maximo Bistro you know his cuisine is so lauded because it sort of takes these techniques that we think of as kind of the height of fine dining food or these ingredients like I mentioned before the fresh truffles and the caviar and but then it brings those pre-Hispanic techniques to bear along with them so you know you have you have a mole verde which is combining all of these native herbs and seeds into this green sauce but then it's being served with you know a sea bass that's prepared with butter in the French style you have a mole negro that's served on top of risotto with fresh truffles shaved on top so you have yeah those ideas are kind of combined and I think that's part of where we're making you very hungry Laura so what about sustainable you know how do you sustainably source foods in Mexico City is that something that people are trying to do and are succeeding it's challenging I mean it's funny one of the stories in the book is um this guy Lucio Usobiaga who I interviewed who has this group in the chinampas that we discussed earlier where he's supporting small farmers who are still using these ancient pharma techniques and you know in my house every two weeks we get a box of vegetables from these farmers um and from other farmers in the region who are growing organic produce and it's really evolved over the years but he talks about when he was a graduate student you know 20 years ago he um was working with this guy who said that he was bringing food from the chinampas to these top restaurants in Mexico City and in reality he was going to the central de abastos which is the big just market public market and buying stuff and putting it in boxes and pretending that it was from the chinampas and I said how could you tell that that he was lying and he said well he was bringing pineapples that were supposedly from the chinampas like you can't grow pineapples in Mexico City you know it's not the right climate so it is this very obvious fraud um but there just wasn't the kind of integrity to sourcing ingredients um even in these top restaurants to really understanding where things were coming from and how they were being grown I think that's that's one of the biggest influences that Lalo has had on the dining scene here because he's someone who you know it's not enough to him to just say this comes from this place he worked on farms he really understands the process of farming and growing food and not only from the industrial fields where he was you know a migrant farm worker but from his village where the town where he comes from where his family worked in agriculture um and so he uh you know he'd go to that to that farm he would go to that coffee plantation he would go to that um you know that area on the coast where they're diving for scallops or to see where the cows were being raised for the beef or so he he's really immersed in kind of the the sustainability and the the growers and understanding where those products are coming from and so he's kind of become this person who has created all of these pathways to sourcing with integrity from these producers because he's kind of identified who those producers are and he's made them known you know to this larger restaurant community that then kind of follows and starts getting their chickens from this purveyor or starts getting their you know cheese from this purveyor um because they they trust his judgment and so um he really strives for most of the ingredients that are served at the restaurant to come from Mexico although there are exceptions um but it's it's become a really that's become a big part of the ethos of the restaurant and I think that that really comes from those experiences of seeing the contrast between you know the mill bus style of agriculture where he grew up which is a system where um the plants are intercropped where you have the corn that's serving as a trellis for the beans you have squash that's um protecting the ground from weeds and insulating moisture with its leaves um and also a lot of other vegetables are kind of intercropped with those three sisters that we we always talk about in the US um and seeing the contrast between that and all of the milpa all that the milpa kind of provides um in the symbiotic relationship and the monoculture and the industrialized fields and the tomatoes that they harvest before they're even ripe and the cucumbers that just taste like water um because they're so massive and really appreciating not only as a consumer but also as a chef you know the difference in flavor and quality between those products so I think that his appreciation for sustainability runs much deeper it's not just about like a catchphrase or an idea um a pretty idea I think it's really about like this kind of creative integrity that goes very deep um in his restaurant but yeah it's challenging and it's like it's hard because it's a it's a movement and it is making a difference but you also don't want to sort of exaggerate the impact that it's had you know Mexico is a country that's going through profound environmental destruction um from the trend maya that is being completed and is about to open that was built over these cenotes and the yucatan that are really fragile ecosystems um that most environments will tell you it's not a good idea to build a train on top of them um or to raise the jungle in the name of of building them a turn away from sustainable and energy wind energy towards more oil um so you have these kind of contradictions at play in Mexico between the narrative of sustainability in a place like maximo bistro and the realities of what is happening to the environment in a lot of the country um but I I've come to think of these chefs as almost people who are conjuring a kind of utopia for what they hope the country could look like and they're sort of that is part of the narrative of what they're telling is they're trying to communicate you know the value of these products and the value of these practices um before they're lost another question from the audience um how do you approach telling an immigrant's life without romanticizing it yeah I think it was something really important to me um in part because of what I was talking about earlier with having lived on the border and having seen you know the way that the narrative seems to flip-flop back and forth between you know these empathic stories about people's struggles to come to the US and these stories that are describing you know this is kind of an invasion of people um to the US and I think that one of the things that was exciting to me about Lalo is that he's this person who really um speaks with this candid kind of reflection that um sometimes it seems like he's really not speaking as the person that you you expect in terms of what you imagine a question would solicit to a reporter um he doesn't tie bows around things he's very honest um and so for me part of it was just really trying to capture him as a person and kind of the full scope of him as a person on the page and having it not be reduced to um the usual beats that were accustomed to in these stories so one of the examples that I think about is in these stories the the crossing of the border is usually a key plot point in a narrative about a migrant you know that journey the uh which which these are very dramatic journeys I mean there are record numbers of people right now crossing through the Darien Gap and they're on their way to the US and these are incredibly dramatic journeys but in Lalo's experience those journeys were pretty easy he crossed a lot of the time in a car he was a young child at one point he crossed through the fence but he took a bus to get to the I mean it he was with his family um they just weren't those kinds of dramatic journeys and when we would talk about his life and we would talk about his stories he didn't seem to dwell on the boarding border crossing stories um a lot and so I think I kind of followed that lead in the book you know the the border crossing moments in the book are not big chunks of the book they're not whole chapters they're moments in time um and I think that that kind of subverts in a way the idea of what a immigrant story is supposed to look like um but yeah I just I really I think he's he's an incredibly charismatic person and a very complicated person and I think I just really tried to do justice to that um in the book and make him a three-dimensional and just convey that and I think the other thing I would say is that you know this book's called The Migrant Chef and part of that title is about sorry someone's revving their engine up my window I don't know if you can hear that but um part of that title is about migration but part of that title is about him being a chef and so a lot of this story is about that journey of someone who's just kind of um on a creative path and finding themselves creatively and to me um that was kind of as much of a through line or as much of an arc of the story as the migration piece um and looking at him through that lens of just I would want you to be interested in this guy regardless of the issue that he's tied to I want you to just be compelled by him as a person and kind of his personal journey the book is The Migrant Chef thank you very much Laura for the brilliant book and please buy it and thanks for listening to this and thank you Laura for the presentation thank you so much thanks Peter