Pati Jinich is a joy, one of those people whose life's work has been to create connections by sharing stories of culture and food. Her last series for PBS was the powerfully moving La Frontera, which explored people and communities on both sides of the US/Mexico border. This time, she starts at the top of Alaska and works her way down the Pan American Highway for her latest series Pati Jinich Explores Panamericana, which is available on demand on PBS.org.
Evan Kleiman: What a pleasure to have you here.
Pati Jinich: Oh, my gosh. I love being here with you. I love hearing your voice. I love connecting with you. I feel like whenever we have conversations from the get go, you help me go deep.
Oh, that's so nice. Well, I don't think it's hard because you are deep. I mean, I think it's one of your great gifts in the way you approach the material for your shows. But can we start with this idea of the Americas, its promise, and this idea of the Pan American highway, which seems like it's a mythological situation?
Yes, yes. The Pan-American Highway is a series of roads and highways that connects the entire hemisphere, North and South America, from the top of Alaska to the bottom of Argentina. It is a highway that has been built in random ways. The first section actually was built by the enthusiastic Mexico. Another section was built, from the US to Alaska crossing Canada, by the United States. The history of the Pan-American Highway itself is fascinating.
What I'm doing is I'm using the Pan-American Highway, trekking it, taking side tours, and using it as a metaphor to travel my way from Alaska to Argentina and find the differences, to celebrate the connections, to discover and to really find what unites us all in the Americas, in the entirety of the Americas.
I started the project a few years ago, thinking about it, thinking that we needed to reimagine what it means to be an American in the full sense of the word, thinking that there are so many ways of migration that have come to the hemisphere because of that promise that the Americas has always represented. I'm not only talking about the United States of America but the entirety.
People came here from other places, looking for freedom, looking for safety. What was it about the Americas? I was drawn to this idea after doing La Frontera, as you well explain. After having Pati's Mexican Table for so many seasons, forging bonds, trying to forge bonds between Mexico and the US, going to the US/Mexico borderlands, and realizing the kaleidoscope of identities and cultures, and really going back to my heritage of coming from a long line of refugees that were trying to come to the United States but for one reason or another couldn't make it to the US and found a home in Mexico.
Pati Jinich (right) harvests garlic with Forge and Farm owner Cheryl Greisinger. Photo courtesy of Pati Jinich Explores Panamericana.
One of the things that I find so amazing about this particular series... It was clear in La Frontera that a lot of personal feelings and emotions came up but I feel like this touched you in an even deeper place. I feel like the idea of the Americas, you touched on this, is as much a metaphorical place as it is a physical one. And by starting in the northern most part of Alaska with indigenous people, people who weren't taken here or brought here, we're able to start to see all of these various versions of what home is, which is needed now. We need to have a more expansive understanding.
I think, as always, you are touching on the most important thing of whatever I do. Yes, these series pushed deeply on so many of my buttons. It was very triggering. It touched on many of my sensibilities, my vulnerabilities, the things that I've felt weak and insecure about. But what you're saying about the Alaskan natives, the First Nation people, the indigenous people in the Americas, when I started, I wanted to connect with all the waves of migration that have come to the Americas, thinking that it's people that have been hankering for home, longing to belong, finding a place. So it was incredibly shocking to find that the first peoples to live in the Americas are longing for the same.
They're so tied to the land and yet the land is betraying them. Could you pick one encounter, one person or couple that you met up there way at the tippy top and share with us a food experience you had or just anything?
Yes, I have to say, every story, every person I met, every food I ate was surprising in so many ways, from the Mexican food I ate everywhere. I realized, being a Mexican, I'm always trying to take the pulse over Mexican food, ingredients, culture, and people go. Finding a chicken burrito as the first thing that I found in Utqiagvik, the northernmost point of North America, was insane. Because, you know what? It was a fantastic burrito, too! It had a puff-top flour tortilla. The chicken filling was perfectly seasoned. I took a bite in a place that was so foreign to me, with a culture that was so different from what I'm used to, and I took that bite, and it was like suddenly I found a taste of Mexico, here in the cold at the end of the world.
Then moving down, eating the salmon quesadillas in Anchorage, the reindeer sausage taco in Hollywood Cove, the smoked salmon chowder and quesadilla. On the one hand, realizing where Mexican food has come and how we all enrich one another, and not because there's Mexican food everywhere. Does it mean that there's not fantastic, classic food of that place? It doesn't take away, it ads. But that's just like a side thing that was interesting. I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't stop crying even [when I] was in Juneau.
That conversation that you had with activist Jennifer Quinto in Juneau was really hard. Even though I knew the stories of the residential schools that ripped children away from their parents, their families, their way of life, to listen to this one woman's story was so powerful. And it was such an interesting story because her parentage, in and of itself, was so complicated.
So complicated. That connected deeply with a theme that we kept finding as we traveled down south, which is people that belong to a community being narrowly defined, being stigmatized, being demonized and the people from those communities feeling shame and guilt and embarrassment in these negative, vicious cycle of repercussions.
When you tear communities, you tear families apart, then the children, they get into drugs, they drink alcohol, they abuse. And it's people saying, "See, more criticism." And people trying to come back to the soul, to the connection to the land, to who they are... The incredibly sad thing, and we see it all over the world, in specific places more than others, is we humans don't seem to learn. This show, I really wanted to share lessons learned. When will we learn?
Pati Jinich (middle) with Inupiat advocate Marie Carroll (right) and her husband, biologist Geoff Caroll, in Utqiagvik, Alaska. Photo courtesy of Pati Jinich Explores Panamericana.
I think so much about you and the fact that you were in the policy world before you came to food, that you were a political analyst. I was thinking, don't you want to take a bunch of policy people and stuff them in a van and take them with you?
Absolutely! It's so interesting how when you put food on the table, you can have the most severe gridlock in policy, in politics, in third rail themes, in very difficult themes (and we all know what those themes are today), and people will just not see eye to eye.
Say you and I are from opposing pendulums, and I come to you with my grandmother's soup that she made when I was growing up. She made this incredible soup that had savory crepes, and they were super thinly sliced in an intensely flavored chicken broth. That soup, to me, connects me to my grandmother, to her story of persecution, to her finding a home in Mexico, to her making that for my family, to me making that soup, to my Mexican American voice as I became an immigrant to the USA. That soup represents so much.
If I give you that soup, I am making myself vulnerable and I am opening up. I am opening a door. I am just becoming emotionally naked. If you take that soup and you take a spoonful of it, I'm grateful already we've connected. If people from opposing factions went through these exercises of eating the food together and connecting, I feel like, of course, it's an idealist idea, it's like this secret key that helps us connect.
When you were saying, as I first walked in the studio before we started, you said, you make yourself very vulnerable when you go on the road. I feel that I increasingly make myself more vulnerable the deeper and the tougher the themes I encounter because I realize that the only way that people are going to connect with me and open up with me is if I make myself raw and vulnerable.
I know you crossed the US/Canadian border more than once in the process of doing this. Tell me about that experience.
Definitely different from crossing the US/Mexico border, which I have done all the time, a thousand times — by plane, by car, walking, every possible way. It's a border that I'm very familiar with. The US/Mexico border grabs a headline, I think, every day. Millions of people cross it, and it's so talked about, so known.
The US and Canada have not one but two borderlands, and not much is said. Well, I take that back. A lot is said about it now but not when we were filming. Crossing the first border from Alaska to Canada, it was so seamless. It was like one vast expanse of the wild Northwest.
Was it monitored?
It was barely. Really incredible. You know what it is to cross the US/Mexico at any of its points. I kept going to that theme and wanting to talk about it with people and people were like, "Yeah, whatever."
When we were in Alberta, actually, everywhere we met such diverse points of views. In Alberta, as shocking as it may be, we met people who said, "Canada loves to be its own thing, and we are so proud of who we are, and we're so proud of our culture, and we're a young country, and yes, we have this sibling rivalry with the US, but we love who we are." Other people said, "Well, Alberta has so much in common with the US. You would love to be a part of the US."
I know many people are not gonna be happy with this but I am not gonna mute voices. I come there with a microphone and with no bias. It just makes you really understand and question and wonder. More than having definitive answers and saying, "Oh, this is what it is," or "This is the way it should be," it is having an openness and a wider understanding of the humanness and human nature and just how complex we are, and hopefully have less of an agenda and more of an understanding.
Pati Jinich rides with biologist Geoff Caroll and his sled dogs in Utqiagvik, Alaska. Photo courtesy of Pati Jinich Explores Panamericana.