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After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, Dr. Luz Calvo’s world tilted. Dr. Calvo, a professor of ethnic studies at Cal State East Bay, felt unmoored, helpless—and the sudden need to research. “Whenever I’m trying to control my reality, I think I can just research my way out of it,” Calvo said. Calvo started digging through the research on breast cancer, and the results were startling. In the Bay Area, Latinas and Chicanas born in the U.S.—like Calvo—are 50 percent more likely to get breast cancer than their foreign-born counterparts. The longer an immigrant Latina stays in the U.S., the higher her risk of breast cancer. It’s part of what’s called the Latino Paradox: Why are Latino immigrants, who often lack health insurance and economic resources, healthier than their ostensibly better-off counterparts? Spurred on by Calvo’s diagnosis, Calvo and partner Dr. Catrióna Esquibel, an associate professor in ethnic studies at San Francisco State University, searched for an explanation. They started speculating that the gap might be diet related. Drawing on their experience as ethnic studies professors—and as Chicanas—they started examining the effects colonization has on a culture’s diet. Their findings? The all-American combination of carbs, sugar, and processed foods was making Latino immigrants sick, and repeating a harmful pattern they could trace throughout history: Latin American food culture being slowly eroded by colonizing forces, to the detriment of both Latino health and culture. It’s a damaging arrangement colored by Latin history, from Spanish missionaries forcing Mexicans to start eating bread and cheese instead of corn and beans, to white reformers in the 1920s who told immigrant Mexican mothers that feeding their children tortillas would lead to a life of crime, to Coca-Cola’s current obsession with marketing toward Latino youth. As they researched, Calvo and Esquibel started eating more of the foods their Mesoamerican ancestors ate: beans, squash, and homemade tortillas. They tore out the concrete in their East Oakland backyard and installed raised beds and irrigation systems. Esquibel started a Facebook page to share recipes with her students who were curious about her new work, and the page now has over 15,000 vocal fans across the country who chime into lively conversations about cooking with traditional ingredients like purslane. And after going through chemo and adopting their new diet, Calvo has remained cancer free. In October, they released Decolonize Your Diet, a collection of mostly vegetarian pre-colonization Mexican recipes. There are recipes for a salad made from nopales, Chicana Power Chili Beans, and tepache (a cold drink made from fermented pineapple rinds). One of their suggested menus is a spread to accompany direct-action planning meetings, featuring a jicama salad and cantaloupe agua frescas. Recently, Calvo and Esquibel talked about their book, the Latino Paradox, and what we can learn from Mesoamerica when it comes to agriculture. Luz: I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006. I had been a vegetarian for fifteen years, and I thought I was really healthy. The whole diagnosis came as a real shock to me, but more than that, the whole process of treatment and chemotherapy just undid me. I really lost my way and a lot of that was manifesting emotionally for me around food. Like, Where did I go wrong? What should I be eating? How can I prevent the cancer from coming back? I came upon a study of Latinas and breast cancer where they studied San Francisco Bay Area Latinas with breast cancer. They found that immigrant, foreign-born Latinas had a 50 percent lower risk of breast cancer than U.S.-born Latinas. We started doing more research into Latino immigrant health and found out that it’s very well known in the public health literature that immigrant Latinos, when they first arrive in the U.S., have better health than middle-class white Americans. Those first ten years their overall mortality rate, infant mortality rate of children born to immigrant mothers, all these statistics are really strong, which is very surprising given health disparities in this population. There are literally hundreds of studies about this dichotomy. The more educated Latina you are, the higher your risk of breast cancer. We started thinking, Well, what if it’s diet? We started researching Mexican ancestral foods, the foods that people in rural Mexico are eating, and finding that it’s really a plant-based diet. Meat is used only as a condiment. It’s not the cheese-laden food that you find at the typical Mexican restaurant here in the U.S. We looked at particular foods that our grandparents talked about, nopales (prickly pear cacti), tlacoyos (corn cakes), and wild greens like verdolagas (purslane), and found that they all have anti-cancer properties. We came across studies that put indigenous groups on a standard American diet to see what happens to them, and then put people on an indigenous diet and see all their health measures improving. L: People have ideas about Mexican food and the Mexican diet but they don’t actually look and listen to communities, and look at the foods. We get caught up in these kinds of narratives about what Mexican food looks like, or what traditional foods are. If you look up tamales on Wikipedia, it’ll say that tamales are usually made with pork, beef, and chicken. Yes, for the past 500 years they’ve been made with pork, beef, and chicken, but thousands of years before that they were made with many other things, like seeds, chilies, fruits, and pumpkin. We’re not looking at tradition as one fixed thing from the past that we should try to get back to, but at how, in the past, there was this immense diversity of foods that’s narrowed in recent years. We want to get back to [that] diversity of food—hundreds of varieties of beans, squash and corn: white, red, blue, and black corn Catrióna: The Mexican-American-Mesoamerican diet, which is really corn based, was built on women’s labor. Women would soak the corn, grind the corn, and spend all day so they could make tortillas to feed the family. That labor made it possible, but we don’t want to return to a system where women are 100 percent responsible for maintaining the food system.
