Pati Jinich Heads to Alaska and Canada in the First Chapter of a New Series Exploring the Americas

Pati Jinich Explores Panamericana airs on WTTW Tuesdays at 8:00 pm beginning April 29, and will be available to stream. 
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Pati Jinich didn’t expect to eat a burrito at the end of the earth. The host of PBS’s Pati’s Mexican Table has made a career out of exploring the food of her native Mexico and likes to try it wherever else she travels, but she didn’t think she would find it in Utqiagvik, Alaska, the northernmost city in the United States – much less made by people born in Mexico.

“It was the first food I found after leaving the airport and it was a shocker not only finding Mexicans there, but also finding such a good chicken burrito,” she says.

Utqiagvik is the first stop in her new PBS series, Pati Jinich Explores Panamericana, which is inspired by the Pan-American Highway that connects the Americas from Alaska to Argentina. The first chapter takes her from north of the Arctic Circle in remote Utqiagvik through Alaska and Canada’s Yukon to Alberta.

Jinich was born in Mexico but has made a life and family in the United States. She recently explored the highly politicized place where her two homes meet – the border between the U.S. and Mexico – in two seasons of La Frontera with Pati Jinich. Making the show led her to think more about her identity as an immigrant who is the grandchild of immigrants who fled persecution in Europe and found refuge in Mexico after being turned away from the U.S. because of quotas limiting immigration from specific places.

“What connects us, all the people that have ventured into what was called the New World?” she wondered. “What makes the Americas so special? Not only Americans in the United States, but the entirety of the Americas?”

Those questions led to Panamericana. They’re also the reason that Jinich visits various immigrant communities throughout the series, from Filipinos who came to work in Juneau, to Black farmers who fled segregation in the U.S. South for Alberta, to Russians who sought religious freedom in isolated Alaska. She tries some Nigerian dishes for the first time in Calgary and enjoys an Indian meal with a Punjabi food critic trying to rank all the butter chickens in Edmonton.

“I really wanted to touch on, ‘What has America represented to the people that have come throughout the many immigration ways,” she says.

The series also focuses on Indigenous people, who both see parallels to their own past in the oppression that some immigrants are fleeing – like the First Nations chef who helped set up a commercial kitchen for Ukrainians – and marvel at the welcome given to new immigrants in contrast to their own treatment – like a daughter of a mother who was separated from her family as a child and sent off for adoption and assimilation outside her culture as part of a Canadian governmental policy known as the Sixties Scoop.

“It’s Indigenous people that were taken away from their culture, their language, their religion, their fabric completely torn apart, their families broken. They’re longing for home, even if their home was transformed,” Jinich says. “In the end, we’re all longing for home, and hankering to belong.”

Where people long for can be surprising, as with the Canadian rancher who wants Alberta – which is known as the “Texas of Canada” for its oil, ranching, and political conservatism – to become part of the U.S. (The series was filmed before Donald Trump began speaking of Canada as the “51st state.”) An Alaskan Native who forages with Jinich told her that many Alaskans quietly want to be their own nation, although the segment didn’t make it into the final show.

And then she and Jinich turned to using berries they foraged to make “Alaskan ice cream” or akutaq, an Alaskan Native treat of fat simply whipped with sugar and fruit. Jinich shares food with everyone she meets on the show, using it as a gateway to culture, history, tradition, and stories – and a way to come together.

“I’m always surprised by what you can discover with a simple cup of tea,” one First Nations woman says as she and Jinich sip tea made from ingredients they foraged.

“My main goal is to really reimagine what it means to be an American in the full sense of the word,” Jinich says. “How can we enrich one another and help one another and make each other stronger?”