While NAFTA has provided Americans with nearly unlimited access to ingredients like avocados grown south of the border, the rise in accessibility coincides with a growing scarcity of the very same foods for people in Mexico.

Meet Alyshia Gálvez, author of Eating Nafta for a conversation that explains the connections between NAFTA and the decline in traditional Mexican cuisines; the industrialized and processed foods that flooded in to replace them; and the resulting effects on the health of the Mexican population at large.

Alyshia will be joined by Irwin Sanchez, founder of Tlaxcal Kitchen; Dr. Miriam Bertran, coordinator of the food and culture program at Metropolitan University in Xochimilco, Mexico; Teresa Mares, author of Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont; and Paloma Martinez-Cruz, associate professor of Latinx Cultural Studies at The Ohio State University, and author of Food Fight! Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace.

This conversation will focus not only on how policy has affected the foodways of Mexico, but also how the pandemic has engendered new conversations about who is an “essential” worker and how Covid-19 has impacted food supply and food access south of the border.

MIRIAM BERTRAN

Miriam Bertran is a full-time professor in the Health Department at Metropolitan University in Xochimilco, Mexico. She also coordinates the Food and Culture Program at the same university. She is a nutritionist with a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology.  She has been a professor in Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and France. Her research interests are focused on food, culture and health, and food, heritage, and social development. She is the author of Modernity Menu: Local Manifestations of Food Globalization in Mexico and Uncertainty and Daily Life: Food and Health in Mexico City.

ALYSHIA GALVEZ

Alyshia Gálvez is a cultural and medical anthropologist. She is a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College and of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  She is the author of Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico (UC Press, 2018) on changing food policies, systems and practices in Mexico and Mexican communities in the United States, including the ways they are impacted by trade and economic policy, and their public health implications.  She is the author of two previous books on Mexican migration, Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care and the Birth Weight Paradox (Rutgers University Press, Oct. 2011, winner of the 2012 ALLA Book Award from the Association of Latino and Latin American Anthropologists) and Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants (NYU Press, Dec. 2009). 

TERESA MARES

Teresa Mares is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont. Her research examines issues of food access amongst immigrant communities in the United States. She is the author of Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont (UC Press: 2019).

PALOMA MARTINEZ-CRUZ

Paloma Martinez-Cruz is an associate professor of Latinx Cultural Studies at The Ohio State University, and author of two monographs: Food Fight! Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace (University of Arizona Press, 2019) and Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica: From East L.A. to Anahuac (University of Arizona Press, 2011). She is the editor of a new performance pedagogy book with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Saúl García-López titled A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society (Routledge, 2021). 

IRWIN SANCHEZ

Originally from Puebla, Mexico, Irwin Sanchez started leading cooking classes to teach tradition and culture through food in 2012 with the support of Mano a Mano. At the heart of his classes has been a vision to rescue the Nahuatl language, the Aztecs’ principal language, and one of the most widely-spoken indigenous languages of the Americas. In 2015 with the support of the Endangered Language Alliance and City Lore, Sanchez presented "More than Maize & Mole: Nahuatl Language Through Food", a public talk and cooking demonstration about traditional Mexican food and the legacy of its ingredients, dispelling its popular confusion with Tex-Mex.

From 2017 to 2019 Sanchez found & led Tlaxcal Kitchen. He taught cooking classes throughout New York City at friends’ homes, in parks, and community gardens. These classes highlighted Nahuatl culture’s great gastronomic tradition, including offerings on Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), elements of some pre-Hispanic utensils, and history of the most popular Mexican dishes such as mole poblano. Tlaxcal Kitchen also collaborated with NYC Department of Health, Endangered Languages Alliance, and the Little Sisters of the Assumption Health Center in East Harlem to create “Project Xilonen”. This project consisted of community cooking classes and original research on the health benefits of language maintenance and revitalization. 

Purchase Eating Nafta: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico by Alyshia Gálvez

Purchase Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont by Teresa Mares

Purchase Food Fight!: Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace by Paloma Martinez-Cruz

Purchase Incertidumbre y vida cotidiana. Alimentación y salud en la ciudad de México by Miriam Bertran