Author reclaims her Mexican heritage through cooking

In October 2005, when Andrea Pons was 10 years old, her family emigrated from Leon, Mexico, to the Seattle area. When her family arrived, she was told by her parents that if anyone asked where she was from, she should say she was Mexican Italian.

Pons did have a great-grandmother who was Italian, but she died when Pons was 4 years old. Her mother never made pasta or Italian dishes, and Pons says she didn’t connect with her Italian heritage at all. Still, from age 10 to 24, Pons tried to hide her Mexican heritage.

“Reflecting back on that, it created a lot of stress and trauma for me. The dialogue I received was, ‘Being Mexican is not enough; you have to say Mexican and something else to be accepted,’ ” Pons said.

She married at 20, but says her husband never wanted her to cook Mexican food, which only further disconnected her from her heritage. It wasn’t until 2019, when she was 24 and newly divorced, that she finally started cooking the food of her youth as an act of self-love.

“Cooking saved my life,” Pons said.

The proof is “Mamacita,” a gorgeous cookbook filled with Pons’ family recipes — many sourced from her grandmother.

“Making these dishes helped me crawl out of a dark place of hiding and provided a space where I could finally show up as my whole self,” she said.

Shortly after Pons’ divorce, her mother gifted her, her grandmother’s recipe booklet, and she began to reclaim her Mexican heritage, one recipe at a time. The only problem? “There are no measurements, no ingredients. This booklet was to remind her of the steps she would forget,” Pons said.

Pons worked on the recipes for two years, and the project grew from wanting to preserve her grandmother’s recipes for her family to a book that she hoped would reframe how people look at Mexican food.