South Philly Barbacoa

TYPE: Documentary Feature
GENRE: Documentary
STATUS: Post-Production

LOGLINE

Mexican chef and undocumented American, Cristina Martinez, fights to make the American restaurant industry more just, one dinner at a time.

SYNOPSIS

Mexican chef and undocumented American, Cristina Martinez, fights to re-make the American restaurant industry.  She uses her restaurant, South Philly Barbacoa, as a platform to advocate for undocumented workers rights, and becomes an internationally-acclaimed celebrity.  But beneath the media-driven stories and her celebrity, a complex set of internal and external forces threaten to tear her apart.

After years of dead end jobs, undocumented American, Cristina Martinez — desperate to bring her son to Philadelphia and pay for her daughter’s education back in Mexico — decides to follow her dream and open a restaurant. She schools her much younger, white husband, Benjamin Miller, in her family’s multi-generation tradition: making barbacoa tacos.

 

South Philly Barbacoa is a hit. Cristina’s success inspires Ben — a college dropout saddled in debt — and they become advocates for undocumented workers’ rights. They begin a dinner series that brings together restaurant workers, owners, and patrons. Cristina believes food at these events is spiritual, that it can open people’s minds and hearts; she reveals that she’s undocumented and shares her story.

 

Her work and restaurant receive international coverage and she feels a new sense of belonging in Philadelphia and its restaurant industry.  But phone calls with her daughter Karla in Mexico are agonizing. Unable to console her daughter, she feels searing guilt for being so far away. Cristina can’t visit her in Mexico nor can she get a visa for Karla. Then her son Isaías, too busy and afraid to see a doctor about his chest pains, suffers a fatal heart attack.

 

Cristina’s grief is bottomless.

 

Her food and advocacy garner her a James Beard Award nomination and an episode on Netflix’s Chef Table.  But she works seven-day weeks. Ben does not, and their marriage starts to fall apart. At the James Beard Awards ceremony, Cristina loses. Much worse, the plight of immigrant workers in the industry isn’t once mentioned, and Cristina gets scolded for speaking on their behalf.  She feels that her work will never change an American restaurant industry deeply rooted in a cutlure of whiteness.

 

Then, the pandemic hits. Cristina and Ben open The People’s Kitchen, a restaurant that serves 200 free, nutritious meals a day to anyone in need, an example to an industry beset by inequality. The James Beard Foundation, facing internal accusations of systemic racism, cancels its 2020 and 2021 awards. In 2022, Cristina is nominated again. This time, amid the Foundation's messaging that the industry needs to treat fairly its “essential workers,” Cristina wins.  Her acceptance speech in Spanish brings the audience to tears.

 

On her return to Philadelphia, she and Ben separate. Ben, now a productive member of his community, takes over The People’s Kitchen, while Cristina opens a new restaurant, Casa Mexico. She stands in the doorway and welcomes each customer, grateful to her adopted country for the opportunity to follow her dream.

 

And ten years after South Philly Barbacoa opened, Karla finally arrives in Philadelphia. But the circumstances — a celebrated restauranteur who loves Cristina’s story and food pulled enough strings to get Karla a temporary work visa — only highlight the unfairness of who is and is not allowed to enter the U.S.

 

Mother and daughter reunite at the airport, their tears and hugs conveying the deep strengths and gutting emotional costs of living undocumented in America.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

I am the son of Greek immigrants.  As a first-generation American, I derived an early sense of self from my parents’ stories: my dad, as a boy, delivering notes to the guerrillas in the mountains who were fighting the Nazis; my mom watching her dad fall asleep on the floor of her family’s apartment, after a day of bussing tables.

 

As I grew older, I negotiated two vastly different cultural experiences.  At church and at home, I learned about Greek orthodoxy, dancing, and how to care for my grandmother who didn’t speak English.  At school, I sought (and mostly failed) to assimilate into its white anglo-saxon protestant culture.  These experiences planted the seed for my professional and creative life: exploring how individuals co-exist within cultural and economic systems and negotiate social constructs such as race, gender and identity.  South Philly Barbacoa is the culmination of my film work over the past 25 years.

 

It comes at a crucial moment. Record numbers of migrants fleeing gang and state-sponsored violence, economic deprivation or war have landed at, or within, U.S. borders.  For many, with asylum off the table, their predicament is beyond dangerous: return home to violence, extorition and the impossibility of supporting their families; or navigate family separations, indefinite detentions, mass deportations, and the costs of living in the shadows.  In this climate, undocumented Americans are represented as either villains or victims. Both depictions rob them of their humanity and serve only politicians who ignore or exploit them.

 

For the past 10 years — starting when Obama was referred to as the Deporter-in-Chief, through Trump’s inhumane border policies, to our present (and familiar) predicament — I’ve filmed thousands of hours of Cristina with a direct cinema style and a conviction that representation grounded in complexity builds lasting empathy.  Bearing witness to her inner life allows me (and Cristina) to tell her story with an eye towards emotional and psychological complexity and representational authenticity.  I shed light on the complicated parts of her story ignored by mainstream accounts: her relationships with her children, her husband, her work and her celebrity.   My film will grant her the dignity that everyone deserves: to be seen as admirable, except when they’re not, and always deserving of respect.

 

Sticking close to Cristina’s perspective dramatizes the ways that systems of power — immigration laws, the American restaurant industry, and the culture of white male privilege — affect and can be affected by undocumented immigrants.  The invisible ways in which these systems work to maintain existing power structures make it all but impossible for undocumented Americans to do things “the right way.”  On the other hand, the intimacy that Cristina builds with Ben and her many white supporters helps to undermine an ideology of whiteness.  By making visible her decisions and actions within these systems, I provide audiences with a new lens through which to see her reality, and the realities of 12 million undocumented Americans.

KEY CREW

Connect With The Filmmakers: