Back Forty: From migrant farmworker to renowned chef

Back Forty will bring you periodic reviews, interviews, and reporter insights about the stories they wrote. We hope you enjoy it as a companion to our content on TheFERN.org and our Ag Insider policy news site. You can subscribe to the newsletter below.

By Brent Cunningham

In 2014, reporter Laura Tillman moved to Mexico City. She had spent the previous seven years covering the U.S.-Mexico border, where the scope of stories is often limited to policy debates and the imperative to get across. She was interested in finding more robust stories of migrants that played out well beyond the border. Once settled, she began to focus on restaurants — places, she says, that are narrative-rich and where people from a range of class and cultural experiences work alongside one another. She assumed that she would tell a story about a few different people working in a kitchen. But then she met Lalo García, whose restaurant Máximo is among the best in Latin America. His story — from rural Mexico to the U.S. to Mexico City; from migrant farmworker to prison to deportee to famous chef — touched on so many of the experiences she had hoped to capture through multiple perspectives. And, importantly, García was at a stage of his life when he wanted to tell that story. 

Tillman’s book, The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo García, is more than just the story of a chef’s journey from farmworker to the top of Mexico’s high-end dining scene. García’s journey intersects with every significant food-world issue of the last quarter century, from NAFTA and the rise of undocumented farmworkers in America to the local food movement, the age of celebrity chefs, and the Covid-era upheaval in the restaurant business. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

A restlessness runs through Lalo’s story. Just when you think he’s about to settle in, he veers away, as though he can’t be at peace — either professionally or personally. Can you talk a bit about what, specifically, Lalo struggles to reconcile?

Part of what I immediately found fascinating about Lalo was this restlessness. I would go to the restaurant and ask a question and, initially at least, expect a certain kind of answer. Instead he would begin to talk about a dimension of working in a restaurant or the food system or his life that he was wrestling with, answering a question that was perhaps tangential to what I’d asked but very authentic and revealing. I think anyone who knows Lalo well would share the sense that part of what has made him successful is his refusal to settle. As I spent more time with Lalo and his family, I also began to understand that the tidy story — that Lalo had realized his American Dream in Mexico — obscured the bitter losses and injustices of that journey. Lalo is the hardest working person I’ve ever known, and he is incredibly successful, but he’s not at peace with the sacrifices he’s made, nor should he be. When it comes to essential workers, people aren’t asked to make those sacrifices explicitly, this is not a clear exchange of time or effort for money. It’s a path of sacrifice that quietly steals physical and mental health, that destroys communities and traditions. 

We read a lot in the U.S. about undocumented farmworkers, but almost always as either victims or as political pawns. Rarely do they reach us as fully formed human beings. Lalo’s story is certainly rare, maybe unique. But are there ways in which his story is also the story of all migrant farmworkers? 

Of course, as you say, we don’t often get stories of migrants told in this full-throated, complex way, but every person has such a complex life story to tell. Lalo is unique in his success, in his artistic vision, and his ability to realize that vision. But as I interviewed cooks, I realized how many of them have also undertaken these kinds of risky border crossings, or worked in the fields, or worked for famous chefs. So there are elements of his story that are anything but unique. In telling one story I hope to also allude to what we might learn if we spent time with more people who do these jobs, and look at them as people, rather than examples of a policy or as a useful soundbite. 

With that in mind, what aspects of the time he spent in the fields continued to influence him, either personally or professionally?

Lalo worked in the industrialized fields of the U.S., but he grew up in rural Mexico, exposed to the milpa system of agriculture, which is about as farm-to-table as it gets. I think that his work today — the kind of food he makes in his restaurant and the care he takes in sourcing the ingredients — is a reaction to the bland flavor of an industrial cucumber, and to how the workers in those industrial fields are treated. He’s working to create food with incredible flavor, but, more importantly, to acknowledge and reinforce the integrity of his network of suppliers and of the people who work in his restaurants. 

Had Lalo stayed in Mexico, do you think he would have become the chef he is? It’s almost as though the dislocation — the loss of Mexico and then being forced to rediscover it — created in him an insecurity, a need to second-guess himself and the opportunities that came his way. 

It’s hard to know what the narrative of Lalo’s life might have been if he’d never left Mexico. He is a tremendously ambitious person, but would that have taken the form of growing an agricultural business? Would he have become a chef if he hadn’t washed dishes in Atlanta? Would he have become a great chef of Mexican cuisine, but without the French techniques that have defined his cooking? It’s impossible to say. Through this book, I have spent time with many young Mexican chefs, some of whom have had the chance to go abroad and study at restaurants in other parts of the world, and it’s clear how much growth and inspiration stems from those experiences. Imagine a teenage Lalo in Eric Ripert’s kitchen, and what an impression that must have made on him. I think that lack of complacency is a prerequisite to becoming a great chef. 

At the end of Chapter 8, when Lalo reads about the Mexican man who commits suicide after being denied re-entry to the U.S. under Trump’s immigration policies, Lalo wonders if sharing his story could help some other deportee feel less alone — could “save someone.” What do you make of that?

I think that this quest to use his story to help others remains his motivation. He’s not out to become a celebrity or make more money; he is already well known as a chef and extremely successful. He has received word — as I have since publishing the book — of people who have been through something similar and feel profoundly inspired by his story. I’ve also talked to people with completely different life experiences who feel seen in some other aspect of Lalo’s journey — the fight against corrupt officials, for example. I also hope that this story makes people rethink what ethical questions are raised by the food on their plates. Food justice doesn’t end with organic vs. industrialized agriculture. We need to rethink how we treat the workers who grow and cook our food.