“How are you doing?” A letter from Alimentando al Pueblo

Hello PCC Community,

My name is Roxana — I am the co-founder and current Executive Director of Alimentando al Pueblo (“Feeding the People.”) We are a community and cultural building organization based in Burien, with the mission of cultivating healing through community, food and celebration. We house the nation’s only Latine food system — and we are a proud partner of PCC Community Markets. You can find us at the Burien PCC once a quarter hosting a community food drive. In addition, we will be at the Burien store Sept. 13 celebrating the kick off to Comida y Corazon, our monthlong campaign honoring our heritage and addressing food insecurity.

This letter and its reflections comes to you from a conversation between Rachel Tefft, PCC’s Senior Manager of Community Food Systems, and myself. The conversation started as many conversations have since this new administration took power: “How are you doing?” I expressed to Rachel the frustration I was feeling, and experiencing, as this question was posed to me, over and over.

This frustration is familiar, not just for me, but for all people who have been historically marginalized, oppressed and othered. This is not a new place for many of us — it is a place of deep remembering. As a brown-skinned Mexican woman, who grew up in poverty, in a single mother household, my existence in this society, this culture and country “is to be in a rage almost all the time,” to borrow a description from James Baldwin.

To understand this, it may help to share the context of how Alimentando al Pueblo came to be. Let’s rewind to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

It’s March 2020 and we are all slowly starting to understand that we are entering a moment that is going to change our lives forever. Reading the headlines, I feel in my body an overwhelming sense of doom — I know, in that moment, people in my community are going to die.

Imagine — to be sitting in your home, and accurately predicting the death of people in your family and community. Everyone with race equity training, knowledge and understanding feared that communities of color and other vulnerable populations would have higher rates of COVID infection, hospitalization and deaths, and this was quickly proven true. Within just a few months, the pandemic was causing “the historic decimation” of Latinos, as one expert said.

The Latino community, along with other communities of color, experienced devastating loss — the loss of our elders, their stories, our connection to the past; the drain on our mental and spiritual wellbeing. And it deepened the inequities my community experienced. The pandemic deepened the disparities in access to food, employment, housing and economic opportunities. It effectively made the poor poorer.

This is where Alimentando al Pueblo emerged. This food pantry was initially about meeting one of the most pressing needs of our community; food, but not just any foods, Mexican and Central American foods. Foods ancestrally familiar to the people we were serving. As we grew, so did our programs, guiding philosophies, theories of change and values. Alimentando al Pueblo today is a community and cultural building organization rooted in a power sharing model with a goal to develop leadership within our community. Our sacred work is to undo the harmful conditioning and consequences of colonialism within our community; to undo the harmful programming that teaches my people to settle, to be complacent, and to not believe that they are worthy of a dignified life.

Food is the vessel to healing for us at Alimentando al Pueblo — and for so many other cultural food programs in the region. And at this moment, we are collectively facing incredible funding challenges. Cuts to food funding such as SNAP benefits will have the deepest impact on communities of color and children. Cultural food programs  that cultivate a sense of belonging, creativity, community, and empowerment, — like Alimentando’s — are seeing decreased funding and attention.

While federal cuts are affecting most food assistance programs, culturally-based programs face an extra burden: Many must purchase food because organizations supporting food access do not have the foods their clients rely on. This balloons our organizational budgets and catapults us into a funding landscape that has been strained by funding requests severely outweighing current available resources.

We have the solutions to the problem we face; we do not have a lack of motivation, innovation, ambition, or will, we have a lack of financial resources and widespread community solidarity.

The answer to “How are you doing?” or “How are you feeling?” in the current moment is more of a call to action than an emotion.

This moment in time, is calling us to be more present, to be connected, brave, courageous. To be audacious in service of justice. To connect to our humanity, our imagination, to bring forth dignified possibilities for all people. It is calling us to be disciplined in our practices of solidarity with other humans on this planet, in this region — practices that include our time, financial abundance, relationships and access.

My hope today is that you have been moved to action — not just because my community is being dehumanized — but because you join us in our belief that everyone is deserving of joy, of dignity, and relationship to the brilliance we share.

Hope, discipline and solidarity are all a discipline. We must be disciplined in our pursuit of justice, liberation and joy. We must be disciplined in the pursuit of a future that has room, and dignity for this earth, and all its people.

We look forward to having you join our Pueblo.

Con amor y solidaridad,