Sitting With the Ache of It All

I’ve been carrying a heavy mix of emotions lately. Back home, in the streets where I grew up, innocent and hardworking Mexican immigrants are being taken into big unmarked trucks — disappeared under the cover of night. Families are left wondering where their loved one is and if they will ever see them again. Dreams are erased. People who have built lives among people they thought were friends are treated like they don’t belong anymore. Watching those videos makes something in me crack wide open. It’s rage, and sadness, and helplessness all braided together.

And meanwhile… I’m here in Romania, an immigrant myself, cooking Mexican food.

As a white woman, that tension is not lost on me. Mexican cuisine shaped my childhood kitchen and my adult life. It’s the food I grew up with, the flavor of home. Yet part of me still hears that whisper of conflict: Is this mine to represent? Am I allowed to carry this forward?

At the same time, another part of me feels fiercely proud to keep these traditions alive. In a moment when the United States is ripping these very people, these very cultures, out by the roots, it is my act of defiance. It feels like honoring a lineage that welcomed me long before I understood how political food could be. It feels like standing in quiet solidarity with the families who fed me and defined the communities that raised me.

And now, as someone who has uprooted her own life and crossed a border, I have never understood the struggle and bravery of immigrants more than I do today. Even with privilege, resources, and legal pathways, the process is overwhelming. It’s destabilizing. It asks you to rebuild your identity from scratch. I cannot imagine carrying all of that while also fearing that someone might hunt me down simply for existing. The weight of that is beyond anything I will ever truly comprehend, but I feel it more acutely now than ever.

None of this is clean. There is grief in watching a culture be brutalized while its food is celebrated. There is discomfort in knowing I hold immense privilege. I get to cross borders, build businesses, and serve meals without fearing the knock on the door that so many are living with every day.

I don’t have a perfect conclusion. I just know that I refuse to look away. I refuse to forget who is paying the highest price for the flavors everyone claims to love. And maybe cooking this food, with respect and gratitude, is one small way I stay connected to the people who are being pushed into the shadows.

I carry the ache, the honor, and the contradiction together. That’s the honest shape of it right now.