Back Forty: From migrant farmworker to renowned chef | Food and Environment Reporting Network

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. <a href="https://medium.com/@fernnews/back-forty-from-migrant-farmworker-to-renowned-chef-food-and-environment-reporting-network-3279d4865259">Read More</a>