Pati Jinich: La Frontera x Food
On this episode of cultureXchanges, Meridian’s CEO Ambassador Stuart Holiday speaks with Mexican Chef, TV host, author, and educator Pati Jinich. Throughout this episode, Pati discusses her experience with food and diplomacy and how these themes work together to transcend histories, borders, and identity. Pati Jinich is the Emmy-nominated Mexican host and executive producer of both La Frontera, her PBS Primetime docuseries that reveals untold stories from the US-Mexico border, and Pati’s Mexican Table, which has brought Mexican flavors into American homes for more than 10 years. A James Beard award-winning chef and former political analyst, Pati has made it her life’s work to build greater understanding between her two home countries: Mexico, where she was born, and the United States, where she currently resides and is raising her family. In addition to her television work, she is a New York Times bestselling author with 3 cookbooks, including her most recent book Treasures of the Mexican Table: Classic Recipes, Local Secrets.
Episode Transcription
Audio file
cultureXchanges - Pati Jinich (1) 2.mp3
Transcript
00:00:01 TK Harvey
Hello and welcome to culture exchanges, a podcast at the intersection of the Humanities and cultural diplomacy. I'm your host, Terry Harvey, Vice president of the Meridian Center for Cultural Diplomacy. This podcast series explores the impact of the arts and culture on diplomatic relations across the world through discussions with cultural diplomacy experts.
00:00:22 TK Harvey
On this episode of Culture Exchanges, Meridian CEO, Ambassador Suite Holiday speaks with Mexican chef, TV host, author and educator Patty Heinich.
00:00:32 TK Harvey
Throughout this interview, Patty discusses her experience with food and diplomacy and how these scenes work together to transcend histories, borders, and ideas.
00:00:41 TK Harvey
Patty Henich as the Emmy nominated Mexican host and executive producer of both La Frontera, her PBS primetime docu series that reveals untold stories from the US Mexico Border and Patty's Mexican table, which has brought Mexican flavors into American homes for more than 10 years. A James Beard award-winning chef and former political analyst.
00:01:02 TK Harvey
That has made it her life's work to build greater understanding between her two home countries, Mexico, where she was born in the United States, where she currently resides and is raising her family.
00:01:13 TK Harvey
In addition to her television work, she is a New York Times best selling author with three cookbooks, including her most recent book, Treasures of the Mexican Table, Classic recipes, Local Secrets.
00:01:25 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Patty, it's great to be with you. I enjoyed being with you in Mexico City for the panel with the US Mexico Foundation. A terrific partner of meridians. One of the things that was interesting about that panel is there were some government officials, some business leaders, and then there was you.
00:01:42 Amb. Stuart Holliday
And it was interesting to think about the evolution of your career from going obviously into studying international affairs and Latin American studies at Georgetown and and obviously being from Mexico and then moving into this incredible career where you've won these James Beard.
00:02:02 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Awards. You've got an incredible show. I think I told you in Mexico that I've been watching your show for years. It's one of my favorite pastimes, and I learned so much and I learned so much, actually, about the way our cultures influence each other. So I was wondering maybe to start out with, I wanted to make.
00:02:20 Amb. Stuart Holliday
We asked a little bit about your background. Your family originally came from Eastern Europe to Mexico, and that was sort of phase one of entering a new culture. And I was wondering if your grandparents or your parents told you any stories about what that was like to move from Europe to Mexico initially?
00:02:38 Pati Jinich
So I love this content.
00:02:40 Pati Jinich
So much Stuart and it's my pleasure to talk to you. I I really enjoyed your conversation in Mexico so much as well. So yes, I come from a long line of immigrants from different countries who made their way to Mexico in the last century and.
00:02:58 Pati Jinich
At home, they were trying to make it to the US as they were fleeing the Holocaust programs. Whatever kind of persecution that exists in the world, they were all fleeing from and they were able to find a home and grow roots in Mexico. And ever since they settled in Mexico.
00:03:19 Pati Jinich
They.
00:03:20 Pati Jinich
We're so grateful for the opportunity. We're so proud to be Mexican, to have Mexican children and to have their children have Mexican children. And there was this, like, inherent learning for my part, for my grandmother, especially my paternal and my maternal grandmother.
00:03:40 Pati Jinich
Seeing first hand how they weaved, all they brought from where they came from and mixed it and meshed it with what they found in Mexico and created absolutely wonderful things.
00:03:55 Pati Jinich
So my maternal grandmother, to give you an example, she came from a little town in Austria. All her family, except for one sister were killed in concentration camps in Auschwitz and Benson. And one sister survived and she found her through the Red Cross after the war.
00:04:15 Pati Jinich
He was able to bring her to Mexico in my grade and went on to open the first Austrian bakery in Mexico, so she was making these Austrian baked goods with Mexican.
00:04:28 Pati Jinich
Chocolate and vanilla from Papantla, Veracruz and Sonora and wheat and I learned from them how much they loved Mexican food, how much they enjoyed adding the dried chilies to their Austrian schools.
00:04:45 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Very different cuisines, right? I mean, when you think about what they eat in Schnitzel and veiner, Schnitzel, and now you have all these spices, these incredible ingredients, these fresh fruits and vegetables.
00:04:48
Yes.
00:04:57 Pati Jinich
Yeah, looking back, food has always been for me, the common ground of how I can understand and explain my mosaic.
00:05:06 Pati Jinich
Of different pieces.
00:05:08 Pati Jinich
And now my kids being Mexican American because they were born in the US and within all of their identities and food really helps us understand in a delicious way. So you're talking about the Schnitzel, the Schnitzel in Mexico is a huge dish. We eat milanesa de.
00:05:28 Pati Jinich
Toyo ores or Estado in Tortas? That's like a daily Mexican food, not only in Mexico City, but of the entire country.
00:05:29
Mm-hmm.
00:05:37 Pati Jinich
And if you think about the tomatoes that go in the Austrian goulash. Well, thank you, Mexico, for those tomatoes. It's really wonderful to see how there can be compromised. There can be collaboration without losing your identity. Mexican food will always be Mexican food, but it.
00:05:57 Pati Jinich
Sparrows. It lends it adapt in in this humans, I think we tend to.
00:06:00 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Yeah.
00:06:04 Pati Jinich
Be pushed by social media and by politics and and you know, pressure groups to identify as solely one thing where it is OK to be many things.
00:06:18 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Mexico, of course, has an incredible culinary history, but I think of places like the United Kingdom, where Indian food is among the most popular food and adaptations of Indian food in Germany were Curry worst, and the kinds of dishes.
00:06:34 Amb. Stuart Holliday
As a result of the Turkish immigrants that live in in Germany, it really becomes a melting pot. You know, of course, this country has a tradition of what they had called Mexican food or so-called Tex Mex and and then really in the last 30 years, Americans have come to realize that.
00:06:53 Amb. Stuart Holliday
There's a rich diversity of of Mexican food beyond what they think of, you know, you probably have witnessed that. What do you think about the rise in popularity of Mexican dishes in America, the ones that really represent Mexican cuisine?
00:07:07 Pati Jinich
Yeah, he's such a great.
00:07:08 Pati Jinich
Question. It has been a really humbling journey for me. When I first moved to the US over 20 years ago and there was this idea that Mexican food north of the border was nothing but a bastardisation of true Mexican cuisine, and that the only true Mexican cuisine was South of the border and.
00:07:28 Pati Jinich
You know, and when I started Patty's Mexican table, my TV show, which is going now on its 13th season, I started wanting to share the the true Mexico, the Mexico that I grew up.
00:07:40 Pati Jinich
The Mexico that I missed.
00:07:41 Pati Jinich
And as I started traveling to different regions of Mexico, first of all, I realized how little we know Mexicans of our own Mexican food. I used to think of burritos as Tex Mex food until I went to Chihuahua and Sonora and Sinaloa, the home of the burrito is in Chihuahua. There's all these meats and preconceptions and the same.
00:08:02 Pati Jinich
Because we takes like school, I used to think, you know, I lived in Dallas for a couple of years. We used to visit San Antonio all the time. I really wanted to try that technique food. And when I tasted it, it was.
00:08:13 Pati Jinich
Not what I.
00:08:14 Pati Jinich
Expected because I was expecting food from central Mexico and I've been.
00:08:19 Pati Jinich
Learned that Tex Mex food is its own cuisine is its own regional beast and it's beautiful. And you know what I learned even more so. It's been a journey. I mean, it's really been such an incredible adventure. You know, as a Mexican moving to the US, switching careers from a political analyst to cooking, realizing that.
00:08:26
Mm-hmm.
00:08:39 Pati Jinich
Cooking in the kitchen is really the most noble place to communicate and share differences and sharing. You know the different things from Mexico. And after 10-11 years of doing parties, Mexican table I had.
00:08:54 Pati Jinich
These.
00:08:55 Pati Jinich
Urge to go to the border to where these two countries meet, you know, because after more than 20 years of living in the US and my kids being born here, I started growing, unbeknownst to me, really deep and strong roots to the United States. And I started understanding so much more.
00:09:11
Mm-hmm.
00:09:15 Pati Jinich
The meter because.
00:09:16 Pati Jinich
Options that we Mexicans have of the US when in the beginning I just wanted to break the myths and the conceptions that Americans had about Mexico, you know, between this talent pool, I did this docuseries called La Frontera, where I went from San Diego Tijuana to Brownsville, and I ate my way.
00:09:30
Yep.
00:09:36 Pati Jinich
Toward and the food was ridic.
00:09:41 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Seeing some of those shows and it's amazing and also the just the diversity along the border is quite remarkable of of food. I wanted to ask you about borders. Borders are geopolitical constructs that people have created to identify sovereign boundaries, right. But all over the world borders.
00:09:59
MHM.
00:10:01 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Are in some cases relatively new. In the case of our border with Mexico, my family of course came to Texas. Their neighbors were Della Garzas and Gutierrez's and.
00:10:13 Amb. Stuart Holliday
There's been a lot of tension on the border recently. I was wondering if you could share some examples of how the border itself has not talking in the immigration issue or the political issue, but in terms of understanding cultural similarities and differences. What role has that border played in your view?
00:10:33 Pati Jinich
Again, I learned so much as I went to the Borderlands and explored the entire border of the.
00:10:41 Pati Jinich
Lives Mexico frontier and I realized how diverse, how rich, how complex it is, how fabulous it is. There's 31 million people or more that are defined as borderland communities in both sides of the border. It's not just the thousands of people that people say.
00:11:02 Pati Jinich
Ohh, they're just trying to cross. No, like there's communities that are rooted there that have lived there for generations that make a life and living there and that collaborate with their sister cities.
00:11:15 Pati Jinich
Go intensely. There's so much that goes on in these borderland communities that people don't talk about the thriving businesses and entrepreneurial activities, the art, the music, the food, the collaboration is so intense and so insane that if you think about California and.
00:11:36 Pati Jinich
In Baja California, they compensate themselves themselves. Sorry, the calabaza region. If you think about La Lero in the US and the Valero in Mexico, they call themselves amble laredos. And they always say we have one beating.
00:11:52 Pati Jinich
Yeah, it's they, they have to go against so much. That is politics and the news and they have to go against and battle against so much when they are really thriving and collaborating most of the time together. So that is really humbling.
00:12:09 Pati Jinich
And the other.
00:12:09 Pati Jinich
Thing that is fascinating to see in terms of.
00:12:12 Pati Jinich
Food, which I think is the same as the theme of the border and the people it's looked down upon. People think about border food as mainly bad Tex Mex food and not true Mexican food and.
00:12:24 Pati Jinich
The food in the Borderlands is extraordinary because you have people holding on to dear lives to their traditions because they're so close to the other country, while at the same time you have a lot of people that are breaking new ground and taking chances exactly because they're far away from the grandmother so they don't have to do the salsa in exactly the.
00:12:45 Pati Jinich
Same way their Mama says, you know, and so they can innovate. So there's there's these incredible surviving energy and mostly Stewart.
00:12:47 Amb. Stuart Holliday
They can innovate, yeah, so.
00:12:55 Pati Jinich
People are so kind and generous and giving and have such strong family values so hard working, and so I just wanted to go there and just bring the microphone with no political bias, just live the life in the border.
00:13:11 Amb. Stuart Holliday
So that's a perfect segue to my next question. So at Meridian, you know we we have a focus in addition to international diplomacy on cultural diplomacy and we're entering a new era where diplomats alone cannot solve the problems between countries. There needs to be collaboration.
00:13:31 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Between whether it's, you know, student exchanges, scientists, artists, athletes, and and culinary diplomats. And I was wondering when you came up with the patties table concept, to what degree were you driven by this, maybe non traditional diplomacy career where you might be able to have?
00:13:52 Amb. Stuart Holliday
More of a diplomatic impact in building mutual understanding than writing a really good cable and sending it back to your foreign ministry or your State Department.
00:14:02 Pati Jinich
I mean, I definitely felt.
00:14:05 Pati Jinich
That's food. Help me communicate and express my Mexican Ness in a much clearer way and with a much warmer welcome than to policy papers. And I was getting very frustrated. I was working in a think tank, and I just, you know, was reading the article be written.
00:14:25 Pati Jinich
Again and again and again, and the same things again and again and again. And first of all, I was trying to understand my.
00:14:33 Pati Jinich
Health as a Mexican living in the US with all these historical background of having a long line of immigrants making.
00:14:41 Pati Jinich
It to Mexico.
00:14:42 Pati Jinich
And now having American kids and food was a way that I could understand that I can make pasta with a poblano cream sauce and call it poblano Mac and cheese. And it's fine we.
00:14:52 Pati Jinich
Eat it. It's delicious.
00:14:53 Pati Jinich
You know, I feel like it was a liberating thing for me also because.
00:14:59 Pati Jinich
My English was really bad. I mean I still have, I think, a big accent and and I stumble on ideas and sentences but I couldn't string a sentence when I was talking in English without having to stop and rethink in Spanish. And when you're cooking and sharing food many times you don't even have to talk.
00:15:20 Pati Jinich
It's like ohh you don't understand the haka. Try this mode. You don't understand Sudan hordes. Ohh, it is burrito, you know. So I feel like it was helping me in my lack of good English.
00:15:34 Amb. Stuart Holliday
You know, originally you.
00:15:36 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Said about being sort of a representative in a way of Mexican culture in the United States and educating Americans about Mexico, what has evolved in your role that has also allowed you to be an envoy of sorts from the United States to Mexican culinary?
00:15:56 Amb. Stuart Holliday
And and cultural communities.
00:15:58 Pati Jinich
It has been. It has.
00:15:59 Pati Jinich
Been such a wonderful, wonderful journey because it has been nonstop learning.
00:16:06 Pati Jinich
And the more I learn, the more humble I become and the more I realize that I need to learn even more. So, as you were saying, I started wanting to share Mexicans and explain it to people and shine a light and show how we can collaborate and communicate and understand each other. But it was mostly trying to explain who we were to make it digestible.
00:16:26 Pati Jinich
For Americans and a longer journey, I started when my first cookbook came out in 2013, and then my second cookbook came out in 2016.
00:16:36 Pati Jinich
Then my third cookbook came out in 2021. I started traveling throughout the US, bringing my Mexican gospel and I as I.
00:16:44 Pati Jinich
Was doing that.
00:16:46 Pati Jinich
I was learning all these things that I didn't know about the US, the good, the bad, The Dirty, the clean, the everything. You know, when I was in the Texas Borderlands.
00:16:57 Pati Jinich
Little Rock like.
00:16:58 Pati Jinich
Many people don't know about Mexican segregation history in the US, you know, in many places there was no blacks, no Mexicans, no Jews.
00:17:08
M.
00:17:09 Pati Jinich
Here's one that covers it too. Your nose. I think it's just been fascinating and at the same time, it was humbling to realize ohh, I used to think about the US in terms of pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers, and BBQ.
00:17:22 Pati Jinich
You well, wait. There's hundred different kinds of BBQ with 100 different kinds of traditions in stories. And the same thing happened to me when I was in Texas. I was in the Rio Grande Valley, and I was eating with these chefs called Larry Delgado. We were in a battle range of these Japanese.
00:17:42 Pati Jinich
American, Texan, Mexican farmers, and they're raising a cushy beef to make for one. You be the most extraordinary beef I've eaten. And they were using it to make taquitos.
00:17:45
Mm-hmm.
00:17:56 Pati Jinich
Incredible that he danced and Larry was telling me I was like, Oh yeah, we're making cancel. We're making fajitas Tex Mex. And he was like, no, no Rio Grande Valley, Tex Mex is not San Antonio, TX. It's not El Paso, TX. And so all these nuances, all these differences have been incredible. So.
00:18:16 Pati Jinich
I've connected in my humanity like my message. Now is. Of course I'm an immigrant. I'm a dual citizen. I am Mexican and I'm American, but I understand clearly that I am not like my children who are born here. I will always be the one who can. I will always be.
00:18:32
Mm-hmm.
00:18:33 Pati Jinich
The immigrant I will.
00:18:34 Pati Jinich
Always live in this limbo. You know, I call it a happily torn place.
00:18:39 Amb. Stuart Holliday
You know, we lost Anthony Bourdain. We have a number of iconic chefs like Jose Andres, who walks the same walk in, in, in a fashion of bringing different types of food and food aid and humanitarian assistance. But you've been doing your show for what, how many years, 15.
00:18:57 Pati Jinich
2014 yeah.
00:18:59 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Do do you think your approach to a border and looking at the cultural and culinary connections is applicable to other parts of the world and have you ever thought about taking your concept not thinking?
00:19:13 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Of yourself simply as as a Mexican or as a now adopted. In some case, you know, mother of American children, but as somebody who's cracked a code on how to connect people across the borders, whether it could be Greece and Turkey, whether it could be Lebanon and Israel.
00:19:33 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Whether it could be Myanmar and Thailand, are you on to something here that should be exponentially expanded?
00:19:40 Pati Jinich
Yeah, absolutely and yes and yes and.
00:19:44 Pati Jinich
Yes, I feel that increasingly and I'm doing that increasingly and I did that in a Frontera and when I was in LA Frontera and I was in El Paso, Juarez and we were, you know, experiencing all the intensity, the difficulties and the blessings.
00:20:04 Pati Jinich
I kept on thinking about the Israeli Palestinian struggle, and this was long before October 7th, you know.
00:20:12 Pati Jinich
I think that food really has a way to make space for connection and communication when words just won't do.
00:20:22 Amb. Stuart Holliday
And particularly Mediterranean, when you look at the similarities in a Mesa platter in Israel or in Jordan or or Lebanon, or even stretching into Egypt, and all the way up into the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire and the trading routes brought some of these.
00:20:42 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Incredible.
00:20:44 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Obviously ingredients have something to do with it, but I wanted to maybe wrap up by asking you a few questions that maybe just short answers short questions. These are just off the cuff. It can be whatever it is that comes to your mind, but the first question is to you, what is coolinary diplomacy?
00:21:03 Pati Jinich
Culinary diplomacy is harnessing the power that food has to create understanding.
00:21:11 Amb. Stuart Holliday
That's great. Is appreciation for food and culinary tradition universal in the.
00:21:18 Amb. Stuart Holliday
World absolutely.
00:21:21 Pati Jinich
It should be. It should be more appreciated. I I think it is something that it truly is a common denominator for all humans and it shows how we are all the human race. We all need to eat not only to nurture ourselves, our children, to satiate the animal hunger.
00:21:41 Pati Jinich
But food also gives us links to past and future generations as we pass down recipes that we love and that may bring us to fears or may may make us angry, or I mean food.
00:21:55 Pati Jinich
I think it can be so much prettier than it is, even though you know these days it it has really gained so much attention and space.
00:22:04 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Did you have mentors in your life or role models that helped you take the these risks?
00:22:11 Pati Jinich
Yes, absolutely. So I think I really looked up to Diana Kennedy, who did such an extraordinary job being a foreigner. You know, being a British woman who moved to Mexico and loved Mexico, she did a phenomenal job of archiving what existed in a county.
00:22:30 Pati Jinich
We that we weren't appreciative of our own food. Mexico has always looked to the US and to Europe in culinary terms as superior. And it wasn't until like 15 years ago, with Enrique Olvera and that caterer of cater of new chefs and the chefs that really love it, to have Mexican cuisine.
00:22:52 Pati Jinich
Turn the UNESCO feel that we started looking at our food like we have something great and.
00:22:58 Pati Jinich
There's a treasure.
00:22:59 Pati Jinich
In Mexico, when people celebrated a birthday or whatever it was, people wanted to go to Italian or to.
00:23:06 Pati Jinich
We had the malinchista complex. It's called the Malinche complex.
00:23:09
Yes.
00:23:11 Amb. Stuart Holliday
So last question, even though you're a chef and author, a television personality and entrepreneur, I wanted to ask you a question because I also think you're a diplomat and I'd like to ask you, what are the diplomatic skills that you use?
00:23:26 Amb. Stuart Holliday
To make your show successful.
00:23:29 Pati Jinich
So I love this question and I don't know if I have done this on purpose or not.
00:23:35 Pati Jinich
I think it's just part of how I approach life in the world and the people that I meet. I'm so grateful when people let me into their homes and their space and their private life. For me, it's like a really sacred space because you have the microphone, you have the camera, they're letting you in and it creates these really intense.
00:23:57 Pati Jinich
On and I have an insane amount of empathy. Something happens to her like I feel you're doing the same I when I connect with someone who's letting me in.
00:24:10 Pati Jinich
I'm all vulnerable. I'm all in. I'm connecting, feeling I'm sensing I'm. When I came back from feeling like Frontera, I couldn't stop crying for like 3 days.
00:24:24
Mm-hmm.
00:24:25 Pati Jinich
Because I had to.
00:24:25 Pati Jinich
Hold it in the whole time we were filming and the stories were so intense and what we were leaving was so strong and I couldn't let it go. When we, you know, I couldn't let it out when we were filming. And I feel like it's that serious connection of empathy that gives me, you know, I'm not for what I do.
00:24:40 Amb. Stuart Holliday
What I'm hearing.
00:24:42 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Yeah.
00:24:44 Amb. Stuart Holliday
What I'm hearing from you is that there's also no real substitute for face to face communication.
00:24:51 Pati Jinich
Absolutely. You have to be there. It's not like you're standing on somebody else's shoes, is that you're putting your shoes and you're walking yourself over there and you're standing right next to the.
00:25:04 Pati Jinich
There's there's no substitute for being there, especially when you're talking about the Borderlands. Yeah, the farther away you are from them, the more misunderstood they are.
00:25:14 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Well, Patty, I can't thank you enough. It's been a terrific pleasure to spend some time with you. Your work at the Mexican Cultural Institute, which is right up the street from Meridian, is also a great.
00:25:15 Pati Jinich
Hmm.
00:25:26 Amb. Stuart Holliday
Attribute to Washington, DC and look forward to seeing you soon.
00:25:30 Pati Jinich
Me too. Thank.
00:25:31 Pati Jinich
You so much what an absolute joy.
00:25:34 Amb. Stuart Holliday
And thank you for your time. I appreciate.
00:25:37 TK Harvey
Thank you for joining us today on culture exchanges and podcast that examines the impact of cultural diplomacy and its many forms on global relations. We'd like to thank our guests on this episode for taking the time to share their expertise. Our podcast editor, Ed Bishop, and our listeners for taking the time to engage in the world with cultural diplomacy.
