Mexicans lose a friend
Last Friday morning, I was done with the week’s Adelante Valle, but not done with my weekly duties. In fact, I was about to resume writing our Mexicali briefs. For the fourth or fifth time of the day, I checked to see what surprises Facebook had for the early stages of the day.
To my surprise, one of my social media friends had shared some breaking news from CNN that turned heart-breaking for me. I was astonished to learn New York chef and television personality Anthony Bourdain, 61, apparently decided to put an end to his own life while at his Paris hotel room.
While disheartening, Bourdain’s loss for the world of food is also a loss for us Hispanics in general and Mexicans in particular. After recording a chapter of his “Parts Unknown” show in Mexico, the host wrote an essay regarding Americans’ complicated and inconsistent attitudes toward our southern neighbor.
From one side U.S. citizens adore food, spirits, beaches, mountains, deserts, jungles, colonial architecture and archeological sites.
“Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes and look after our children,” Bourdain wrote. “As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy — the restaurant business as we know it — in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers.”
Bourdain added that during his decades as chef and employer, he never employed a single American as a dishwasher or as a prep cook. Those jobs were usually held by Mexicans. And in our area, these same Mexicans are responsible for feeding the United States, especially during the winter time.
The well-known chef also said Mexican cooks taught him many secrets related to a cuisine that has been for some years part of humanity’s cultural patrimony.
“It’s a country I feel particularly attached to and grateful for,” he wrote. “I have been fortunate to track where some of those cooks come from, to go back home with them. I have been fortunate enough to see where that affinity for cooking comes from, to experience moms and grandmothers preparing many delicious things, with pride and real love, passing that food made by hand from their hands to mine.”
“In years of making television in Mexico, it’s one of the places we, as a crew, are happiest when the day’s work is over,” he added. “We’ll gather around a street stall and order soft tacos with fresh, bright, delicious salsas, drink cold Mexican beer, sip smoky mezcals, and listen with moist eyes to sentimental songs from street musicians. We will look around and remark, for the hundredth time, what an extraordinary place this is.”
His attachment to Mexican immigrants was such that in the closing of one of his Mexican shows, he took some items one of his cooks had given him to deliver to relatives on the other side of the border. After enjoying some dishes especially prepared for Bourdain at the family’s humble home, the host fulfilled his promise and talked about the disgrace of border separation.
His understanding and vision of our culture, our food and our issues made of Bourdain one of the most Mexican white man in recent American history. His loss — accompanied by the disappearance of his widely known voice — will be hard to replace, but his legacy as an immigrant advocate will endure forever.