Pati Jinich Is So Grateful to Be Mexican and American
The author and 'Pati's Mexican Table' and 'La Frontera' host feels doubly blessed and wants to share the beauty of border towns with anyone who will listen.
Courtesy of Pati Jinich
Pati Jinich and the Bedtime Cookbooks
Welcome to Season 2, Episode 27 of Tinfoil Swans, a podcast from Food & Wine. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
On this episode
With her shows Pati's Mexican Table and La Frontera and cookbooks Treasures of the Mexican Table and Mexican Today, Pati Jinich uses her exceptional empathy, political science background, and fearless curiosity to share the stories of the people living, creating, and cooking all around Mexico. For our Season 2 finale, Jinich joined Tinfoil Swans to talk about learning English from Sesame Street, her comfort with being laughed at, cooking nopalitos with eggs, and why now more than ever, we should celebrate our shared humanity and the beauty of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Related: Pati Jinich's Poached Eggs in Tomato-Poblano Rajas Sauce
Meet our guest
Pati Jinich is host of the James Beard Award-winning PBS series Pati’s Mexican Table and docuseries La Frontera, and author of Mexican Today, Pati's Mexican Table, and the IACP Award-winning Treasures of the Mexican Table. Jinich is a former political analyst who turned to the kitchen to connect with her culture, and now serves as resident chef at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C.. Jinich was named as one of the Top 5 Border Ambassadors by The Council of the Americas, as well as a Keeper of the American Dream by the National Immigration Forum.
Meet our host
Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine's Gold Signal Award-winning podcast Tinfoil Swans, and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2024 IACP Award for Narrative Food Writing With Recipes and a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir, and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing. She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.
Highlights from the episode
On taking big bites
"I always used to get laughed at from my entire family because my dad is really big and tall and I was the youngest. My mom used to tell me, 'Pati, you can't put the same amount of food on your plate as your father. You're this petite little thing.' And my sisters also used to joke that in every spoonful or forkful I would want to have everything that was in the plate. My mom was a phenomenal cook and a comida in Mexico is like a dinner here, so we would have, for example, chicken Milanese, mashed potatoes, and chayote salad. On each forkful I needed to have a piece of chicken, mashed potatoes, a piece of chayote, and of course chipotles in adobo sauce. My bites were gigantic and I would figure out how to put them in my mouth. My sisters were always like, 'That is just so embarrassing, please don't do that in public.' Now I do that in public and I get so many emails about that, but it's very funny."
Related: Pati Jinich's Sweetened Condensed Milk Carnitas
On the raw hunger of Cookie Monster
"I grew up watching Sesame Street and the Muppets — all the kid content — and Sesame Street to me was like America. Like this is the United States. It's colorful, it's fun, people are friends out on the streets, and I grew up watching Sesame Street in Spanish. The characters have different names which is really fun. I'm between Cookie Monster and Elmo. I love Cookie Monster because he was just raw hunger. Elmo of course is adorable. But when I moved to the U.S. I was 24 and my English was almost non-existent. Like I could understand but I couldn't string a sentence together and I started watching a lot of PBS."
On discomfort
"I always had the sense that I was treading worlds. Having a Jewish last name in Mexico — which is a mainly Catholic country — having all of my friends go to mass on Sunday — I wanted to do everything with them and the priest was saying, 'You can't, you're Jewish.' I remember feeling part of the culture because in Mexico that culture is part of everybody, whether you're Catholic or not. You're doing Day of the Dead, you're doing Posadas, you're celebrating Christmas, you're breaking the pinata, you're eating the foods of Easter and Lent. It doesn't matter what religion you are. And there's also this sense of my grandparents being so grateful to be in Mexico and live a safe, free life in a country that they adored.
My parents reacted to that and we were completely outside of the Jewish community. We just didn't grow up going to Jewish schools or the Jewish community center. I always felt like I was in, but I was not. I always had the sense of treading worlds and having such a rich life culturally and food-wise because I could eat the buñuelos and the tamales, but also the gefilte fish a la Veracruzana because it was in Mexican style. It was this sense of being able to draw from and enjoy this part, at the same time being a little confused and insecure and kind of embarrassed. I didn't know how to comfortably be within my skin."
On finding her place
"When I moved to the U.S., it was the opposite thing. In Dallas, I was too Mexican. I couldn't speak English well. My culture, my ways were too Mexican. After I switched careers and was pitching up a Mexican cooking show, a Mexican cookbook, it was like it's too Mexican. Here I have a Jewish last name, here I'm too Mexican, but I think that in the end, feeling like I'm in that between and also being one of the millions of immigrants who moved around the world and being the one who moved to the U.S. — you know, my kids are firstborn. They're that first generation that feels American. I will always be in that group of the ones who left and the ones who came. Living in that limbo and that kind of liminal space used to give me a lonely feeling. But now, it gives me so much strength because I've learned that is my power — that I connect with people."
On taking pride
"I can be Mexican. I can be American. And that doesn't take away — it gives me more. It gives me the chance to connect. Mexican food and Mexicans and Mexican ingredients are misunderstood. There are myths, they are demonized. If there was a place and a food and a people that were even more narrowly defined and more demonized, it was the border. I had the opportunity to go to this high school where they teach cooking as a skill, right on the border in Laredo. It was my first time standing in Rio Grande, at the river. The energy in that place — I don't know how to explain it, but the lives that have been lost, the dreams that have been dreamt, the life that's the tension in the countries, and realizing what the lines in the map do. I went to give a talk to these kids — all Mexican American, all of Mexican heritage — I asked the class of 40 kids, 'Who here is Mexican?' No one raised their hand. I had that feeling as a Jew in Mexico. My teacher would say, 'Who's Drijanski?' Which is my maiden name here. Asking like, 'Who's a Jew here?' I'd be afraid. As I moved to the U.S., it was part of the reason why I wanted to go the PBS route. I'm a proud Mexican and I will not put my head down."
On the double blessings of the border
"These kids are at the border, so much at stake for them wanting to make the United States their home. We started talking about food, and I started telling them about how food is so powerful and how they're in the United States, and they have these two countries to draw from. You know, Mexico and the U.S. They have these two cultures and cuisine to draw from. They're so rich. They're so doubly blessed. I said, 'OK, who likes tacos? Where I should go eat after this?' They all started recommending tacos. And then they all started fighting between them about whose mom makes the best taco and dad makes the best burrito. So it was clear by then that we're all Mexican here. I told them, what I said when my son graduated — don't ever be thinking that you need to put your Mexican-ness, your accent, your culture as a negotiating thing on the table. That is who you are, and that will be your strength. Make it your strength."
Related: Previous Episode: Joel McHale and the Spiced Steak Fantasy
About the podcast
Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.
This season, you'll hear from icons and innovators like Daniel Boulud, Rodney Scott, Asma Khan, Emeril and E.J. Lagasse, Claudia Fleming, Dave Beran and Will Poulter, Dan Giusti, Priya Krishna, Lee Anne Wong, Cody Rigsby, Kevin Gillespie, Pete Wells, David Chang, Raphael Brion, Christine D'Ercole, Channing Frye, Nick Cho, Ti Martin, Kylie Kwong, Pati Jinich, Yotam Ottolenghi, Dolly Parton and Rachel Parton George, Tom Holland, Darron Cardosa, Bobby Flay, Joel McHale, Cheetie Kumar, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what's on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that'll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.
New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.
Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.
