Pardo Garcia has been custom-curating the Feed the Pueblo boxes herself, shopping at WinCo Foods and Saar’s Super Saver Foods, to fill 73 boxes per week. She pays for it through a GoFundMe account, which has raised more than $15,000. She has also received financial donations from partner organizations: Southwest Youth and Family Services, Para Los Niños, Equity in Education Coalition and Lake Burien Presbyterian Church, which also donated space for the July to August period. In total she’s raised more than $25,000.
The demand for Alimentando El Pueblo is clear. Pardo Garcia says each box feeds multiple generations, since Latinx families tend to share living space with extended family. So far, she’s recorded that the food bank has given out enough boxes to feed 198 families, or an estimated total of 936 Latinx people.
Despite the impact, the Alimentando El Pueblo effort must come to an end on Aug. 31. (Lake Burien Presbyterian Church has a prior commitment for the space.) But Pardo Garcia is already planning its next iteration: partnering with Southwest Youth and Family Services and Colectiva Noroeste, the latter of which runs a pop-up mercado that serves Latinx people in the South End, to continue to distribute boxes, as well as establishing a delivery service.
For Pardo Garcia, food is more than just a source of nutrition, it is also a source of healing and connection at a time when anti-immigrant rhetoric is rampant. It’s why Alimentando El Pueblo’s slogan is “la comida es ceremonia, la comida es sagrada,” which translates to “food is ceremony, food is sacred.”
Traditional Latin American recipes passed on through generations keep people connected — via smells, tastes and memories — to their ancestors, distant homelands and cultures, even with in-person gatherings discouraged for the time being.
“There has been a mental health impact, whether we acknowledge it collectively or not, that this pandemic has had on the Latinx community,” Pardo Garcia says. “The memories that we're creating because of the pandemic are going to forever be tied to quarantine and isolation and being away from our families.”
Pardo Garcia believes traditional food helps remind members of the Latinx community that they aren’t alone.
“Food is a connection to my people’s story,” she says, noting that she doesn’t know how to cook much outside of what she ate growing up. “Someone once told me they thought that was odd,” Pardo Garcia says. “[But] I came to conclude that it just spoke to the resilience of my mother, and her desire to raise Mexican children in a country that forces so many to discard our cultural identities.”
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August 19, 2020 at 07:02PM
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Burien food bank keeps Latinx community fed with traditional ingredients - Crosscut
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