Acclaimed chef and James Beard Award-winning host Pati Jinich, travels from El Paso and Juarez to Big Bend National Park. She discovers the people, places, and food -- from burritos to middle eastern cuisine, that make this region unique.
Pati Jinich, chef and James Beard Award-winning host, travels from Laredo and Nuevo Laredo to Brownsville, Texas. She learns how tight-knit family bonds are an underlying theme connecting everything in the Laredos, and throughout La Frontera.
Pati travels along the California-Mexico border, one of the world’s busiest crossings, to meet the fronterizos of the golden coast and experience the melding of cultures, cross-border collaborations, and explosive creativity and growth. In San Diego, she discusses multicultural identity with journalist Jean Guerrero and continues the conversation with muralist Michelle Guerrero, a.k.a “MR. B BABY.” Then she joins in a collaboration between San Diego and Tijuana’s gay men’s choruses. She explores culinary innovation in Baja California meeting the “godfather” of Mexican wine, Hugo D’Acosta. In Tijuana, she tastes the original Caesar Salad and gets in the ring with world champion boxer Jackie Nava. In Mexicali, Pati visits Mexico’s largest Chinatown, La Chinesca, where she tours an underground world built by Chinese immigrants and tastes Mexican-infused Chinese cuisine.
Pati travels along both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border through some of the most wild, untouched places in North America. She starts from where she left off, at the very edge of Baja California in Los Algodones, where perhaps we’ve found the most wild place of all: a town of dentists. Moving across the Sonoran Desert into Arizona and Sonora, she finds herself in a land steeped in legend and tradition. She joins the Tucson Samaritans on one of their hikes to leave water for migrants trekking through the desert. She meets Luis Sotero, a self-taught artist who took up painting while detained at the border and now teaches at a migrant shelter. She explores a ghost town and learns how members of the Tohono O’odham Nation are preserving traditional foods, including the chiltepín – “the mother of all chiles.”
Pati travels the New Mexico and Chihuahua border region, one of the most unique and bio-diverse places. She meets architect Ronald Rael, observes migratory species, visits a remote Mennontie camp, and more.
