Stories from My Mother’s Kitchen: A writing workshop exploring our ancestral connections to food

This workshop combines crop origins with personal narratives. Stories From My Mother’s Kitchen intends to open up a space for dialogue with our ancestors through food. We will do some crop origin explorations of African, Indigenous, and Asian foods, such as gandules/pigeon peas, rice, corn, bananas and more.

We will delve into:
- How these foods got to our plates
- What lands first watched them grow
- Who were the people that tended to these seeds
- What trade routes were already established prior to colonization

We will read & listen to works by BIPOC poets, chefs and food historians like: Michael Twitty, Kay Ulanday Barrett, June Jordan, Rowen White and others.

We will do some in class writing exercises and co-create a container to share our personal connections to food. Some guiding questions for this workshop are: How do we connect to our ancestors through food? What tastes like home? What do your people eat on special occasions or holidays? Why? What can we learn from our everyday foods? How do these dishes speak to our connections (or disconnections) to ancestry? How have we maintained our rituals and cultural practices through food despite colonization and displacement?

Note that some of the content will be tailored to what the group is interested in exploring; folks are welcome to bring their expertise in this subject and to come with a beginner's mind to be able to both listen and share.

This workshop is only open to Black, Indigenous, People of Color.
Workshop Cost: $25-100
$100 - Pay it forward

When: Saturdays Dec 3, Dec 10th & Dec 17th
Time: 12:30-2:30pm
Where: Zoom

*** Scholarships available!
Please email: ienna@maydayspace.org for scholarship inquiries.

About the Instructor:
Cris Izaguirre (He/They) is a farmer, educator, writer, trans, queer Nicaraguan immigrant of Afro-Indigenous descent. He is an old school jaded New Yorker with a big laugh, committed to creating spaces that celebrate the brilliance of Queer & Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color.

For five years he managed an urban farm in Brooklyn, where he taught Black and Brown students how to grow food from seed to harvest through a social justice lens. He studied Ecological Horticulture at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) at UC Santa Cruz, and apprenticed at Ho’oli permaculture farm in Hawaii.
Prior to their work in agriculture, they worked for LGBTQ rights organizations including El/La Para Translatinas, Community United Against Violence and Lambda Legal. Outside of paid work, he has directed and produced community theater shows at WOW Theater Cafe, BAAD, Dixon Place and Galapagos Art Space.

Currently he is a Culture of Health Leadership Institute for Racial Healing (CoHLI) fellow at the National Collaborative for Health Equity and a fiction fellow as part of the inaugural class for Roots. Wounds. Words. Writers’ Retreat for storytellers of color. He teaches Propagation for Farm School NYC and is a consultant for Transgender Equity Consulting.