Guelaguetza, the Second Generation

Appears in
Oaxaca: Home Cooking from the Heart of Mexico
Oaxaca

By Bricia Lopez and Javier Cabral

Published 2019

  • About
“If I didn’t move back to Oaxaca, I would have died.”

Ask my father why he decided to leave everything he built in the U.S. and go back to live in Oaxaca in 2013, and that’s the answer he is likely to give you. He worked himself to the bone. At one point he was running five restaurants, founding and running El Oaxaqueño, a Spanish-only newspaper he made for LA’s Oaxacan community, and also running a money-wiring service from Los Angeles to Oaxaca.

He’s hustled his way through life this way since he was a young teenager, when both of his parents died within only a few years of each other. Work is the only way of life he knows. It’s understandable that after a life of getting up early in the morning to open the restaurant and going to sleep late signing paperwork, he was exhausted and just wanted to go back home.