Featuring:
Cristina Martinez
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Watch the recorded interview with Cristina below.
This interview was conducted in Spanish, and include English interpretations thanks to ACSI Translations.
Cristina Martínez is a Mexican chef and immigration activist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and a native of Capulhuac, Mexico. Cristina is an immigrant and arrived in the United States after escaping from abuse and looking for more opportunities for her family.
Christina had been cooking Barbacoa in Mexico and so she began working as a chef in an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia. When the restaurant was asked to help her become documented, she was fired. After that, she began cooking food for other immigrant workers in her apartment.
Word got out about the delicious food she was serving and soon she and her husband Benjamin Miller started selling tacos from a street cart on the weekends.
In 2015, the two opened their national award-winning restaurant South Philly Barbacoa. In 2016, Bon Appetit magazine ranked them #6 of 10 best new restaurants in the U.S. Cristina was featured in “Chef’s Table” on Netflix in 2019 and the same year was a finalist for the James Beard Award and nominated for the Basque Culinary World Prize. She now owns two other restaurants: Casa México and El Compadre.
In the United States, the fear of deportation silences and exploits more than one million undocumented workers a year. Cristina is determined to change this situation using the platform she has built through the success of the restaurant. She wants to help the many immigrants who work in restaurants to make them more visible.
Cristina and her husband now host food events with other chefs and organizations to advocate for restaurant workers, feed the community in need and build a stronger and solidary community.
They founded The People’s Kitchen that they describe in 215 People´s Alliance as “a food security and employment survival project in collaboration with the restaurant South Philly Barbacoa. The Project initiates base building, political education, and organizing strategies in Philadelphia to connect people, through the synergy of food, worker, and cultural platforms, into a movement that grows relationships, stimulates community dialogue, and builds political power, all while serving up 200 free, chef-cooked meals per day.”
“What motivates me is to leave a legacy. We need to learn to educate people and set an example.”
This webinar with Cristina will be conducted as an interview and will be entirely in Spanish. We will be offering simultaneous interpretation into English thanks to the generous donation of the work by ACSI Translations as well as closed captioning in English thanks to Don Rombach.
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More press and information about Cristina
Featured in Chef´s Table on Netflix
#Right2Work dinner and discussion series
South Philly Barbacoa #6 of 10 New Restaurants in the USA Bon Appetit