We hear all the time that Phoenix is the fastest growing city in the country. It’s booming. But, at the same time, it’s infuriatingly transient.
As we documented in our series, Exit Interview, it’s the kind of place where you can really make your mark. But then, too often, those people who really make an impact here — leave.
They head off for the big time. You know, the grass is always greener. But then, there are those who stick around, those who came back, and those who are somewhere in between.
That is where we turn today, to one of Phoenix’s most famous chefs, Silvana Salcido Esparza, who stayed here her entire career. Until, after 22 years, she closed her beloved restaurant Barrio Café last year.
Salcido Esparza joined The Show to talk about why.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Was it time?
SILVANA SALCIDO ESPARZA: Not for the Barrio, right? It was not time for the Barrio, it was time for me. I'm 65 years old this summer, and I'm feeling every last bit of it.
GILGER: Today she lives on the other side of the border in Rosarito, Baja, California, where she's getting ready to release her autobiography. But she told me she'll never really leave Phoenix.
ESPARZA: I still have a residence there. I'm still very much involved in Phoenix as a whole.
GILGER: But Phoenix hasn't always been easy for Esparza. She's opened and closed beautiful restaurants, like Barrio Gran Reserva and parted ways with the investors of her concept, Barrio Queen. They walked away with the name. And the James Beard Award nominee has often found herself at the center of politics in some of the most divisive times in our state's history.
She joined the charge against former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in the name of the Latino community and found artists who covered walls and fences near her restaurant with murals that told the story of their oppression.
But, it all began for her in culinary school. She came here to avoid San Francisco, where she thought a young person like her might be “too distracted” in the 1990s.
ESPARZA: I came here, and I didn't see any lesbians, much less. I went to Scottsdale to check out the school and I didn't see people of color except at the motel and I went, “Oh, I'm definitely not gonna get in trouble there.” So here I came.
GILGER: And you stayed.
ESPARZA: And I stayed, Why did I stay? Probably because I was broke.
GILGER: She spent some years at the Phoenix Convention Center and then nearly a year backpacking through Mexico.
ESPARZA: And when it was time to come back, I thought, “LA? No, been there, did that. New York? I'm 40, no. Chicago? Too cold.” And basically it all brought me back to Phoenix, whether I liked it or not.
GILGER: At the same time, her mother had passed away from cancer and she told me her heart was broken.
ESPARZA: So I came here and something very healing about the desert and the rain and how it washes off and it doesn't saturate the ground. And the vastness of the Valley and those hills that we can hike and meditate. And the people. I healed here. And I grew armor. And then I thrived.
GILGER: Barrio Cafe was a revelation in Mexican cuisine in Phoenix in the early 2000s.
ESPARZA: This might be my only restaurant, my only opportunity to really showcase Mexico in a different light than what we're accustomed to, which is the yellow cheese, the crispy taco, the chimichangas.
GILGER: Instead of chips and salsa, she served bread and toponade. And while she got a lot of questions about where the sopapillas were on the menu, she stopped trying to explain it.
ESPARZA: You see, I believe there's discrimination, or a bias or even racism that occurs in Mexican food or towards Mexican food. It's probably the most appropriated cuisine out there. And when it says authentic Mexican food, the American palate believes that. When I came in, my total intent was to, one, honor my start as a Taquera inside my dad's bakeries and, most importantly, to help change those erroneous perceptions that North Americans have about Mexican food and later on, I added its culture
GILGER: Right. So I mean, but this has been a theme I think in your career in the last decade or so, right, like sort of pushing back against appropriation, but even like the, the sharing of it in this way, like you want to protect it, it sounds like.
ESPARZA: I wanna protect it. I swore to the little ancestral cooks that I encountered and had the privilege to be with in Mexico, in these remote areas, these humble dirt floored shacks. And they were teaching me their ancestral ways, not for me to capitalize on it, but to inspire me. And when I told them the way North Americans perceive the food and the culture and the people they said, “Go back and help change that.”
GILGER: You felt a responsibility.
ESPARZA: I did, you know, I'm just kind of a responsible person and I have a thing that my parents taught me: integrity. So I mean a lot of people know that I had my hands around and created a big concept that's right down the street from here.
GILGER: You're talking about Barrio Queen, I'm assuming?
ESPARZA: But, I walked away because of that integrity. It's a tough road when you have to pick capitalism versus your values and your beliefs.
GILGER: Right, right. Let's talk about one of the big things that happened in your career and in your life in general, which was your role in the battle against SB 1070, which was, you know, more than a decade ago now. You were really outspoken. This is when you found artists to paint the murals on the walls around your restaurant that are so poignant. Tell us about why you felt it was important to take a stand right then, as a chef.
ESPARZA: It's not like I was, “Oh, I'm gonna say something.” The newspaper called and left a message and my business partner said, “I know how you are, and I would like to ask you to measure your words,” because I was very agitated. I spoke when I thought. I thought it was a racist law, so I came out, “Barrio chef speaks out against SB 1070,” the headline.
And that was the day everything changed. I stopped being the darling, in spite of being a lesbian, I was a darling in this town, and I stopped being a darling of many. I've, I got instead of the continued support and accolades, I got from death threats to less than love letters. Since then, what I learned about myself is that anything adverse fuels me.
GILGER: You liked it.
ESPARZA: I went, “Oh yeah, y'all wait until you see what I've got next,” and that's where somebody came by. We were having a mural painting behind the restaurant, just coincided that the artist was finishing right that July of SB 1070. He was out there at five in the morning finishing the mural when some guy in a pickup truck pulls up, says “we don't like your kind doing that to our walls,” and showed him a gun. The artists left, he moved to New Mexico where he lives now, and I painted more murals.
It was a response to that. Artists came out and we started including kids from the neighborhoods, kids from the local schools. Principals were bringing those troubled kids and next thing, they're bringing other kids to paint. Those kids were learning the origins of the murals, the origins of their culture, how ancestral that is, back to Mochica, Maya, Toltec, from the making of the colors from annatto from nopal.
To painting on the frescoes of the pyramids, to painting to modern day Phoenix. It's all related and that's what Calle Dieciseis, or our answer to SB 1070 was.
GILGER: Today Esparza is looking forward, in Rosarito, Mexico and here in Phoenix.
ESPARZA: Sixteenth Street, Calle Dieciseis is half finished for me. That's unfinished business.
GILGER: She wants to create a culinary district along 16th Street, and her old Barrio Café space has an exciting future too.
ESPARZA: I'm a property owner. I own the buildings by Barrio Café, not all, but a couple of them, and I have rented them out to a Mexican chef that's going to just absolutely follow the tradition that we left behind.
GILGER: More to come, she says, on the next phase for Barrio Café. Chef Silvana Salceda Esparza's new book is out this month, and she'll be at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend to talk more about it.
