A Morning at La Morada
It’s thirty minutes before opening and La Morada’s phone is already ringing off the hook. “It’s teachers in the nearby schools,” Marco says, as he picks up the cordless landline. “They’re putting in their lunch orders.”
Movement crescendos as La Morada speeds toward opening. Marco is fielding calls. Antonio, Marco’s father, is darting back and forth between a minivan loaded with wholesale groceries and the kitchen where his wife, Natalia, is making lunch. At the same time, Marco’s sisters have come in and are assembling La Morada’s community kitchen. Whole squash and heads of bok choy are being unloaded and prepped into edible chunks on three white folding tables, which fully take up the thousand-or-so square feet that once housed diners before the pandemic. And yet, every single person who walks through La Morada’s door is greeted warmly and offered a cup of coffee and a plate of food.
“Would you like a tamale? They’re chicken. Do you eat chicken?” Marco offers, his voice sweetened with the rich agave-honey quality of true care for every living being.
The energy inside La Morada is fast-paced without being frantic. Marco’s demeanor matches the backdrop — his shaved head and soft, deliberate sentences make one feel like they are in the presence of a Buddhist monk. And yet, he has a current of intensity, which flows through him and around the busy open floor of the restaurant. Such intensity that can only come from extreme presence of mind. Be. Here. Now.
Fast yet careful; Quiet yet intense; on a superficial level, La Morada operates on this theme of dichotomy. It’s an Oaxacan restaurant in a traditionally Puerto Rican part of the South Bronx. The front door is plastered with accolades from culinary insiders alongside slogans of staunch activism.
Zagat stickers surround a photo of Marco Saavedra mid-protest, holding a handmade sign reading “STOP LOW PRIORITY DEPORTATIONS.” Elsewhere, “People love us on Yelp,” is side by side with “Unite the hood fight oppressors.” Smack dab in the center of the front door, a blackboard reads,
“REFUGEES WELCOME” in thick red paint.
When Marco was pressed to comment on La Morada’s recent James Beard Award – the first award of its kind to be given to a restaurant in the Bronx – Marco visibly shrugged.
"We’ve accepted a lot of awards. In part, we are flattered and
honored, there is all this publicity. But my mom has always said this is not our biggest badge of honor. Our number one priority is serving the community."
Natalia, cleaning chicken carcasses, echoed Marco's sentiment, “My children are my privilege. They are my true blessing.” [Line translated by the author from Spanish.]
What belies La Morada’s incongruity, and what makes that incongruity superficial, is that Marco and his entire family are undocumented. Because of their status, they fostered a business and a center for community aid outside of the formal systems of government and culinary hierarchy. So, when the foodie megaphone for the formal systems that shut them out for years – megaphones like the New York Times and Bon Appetit – sing La Morada’s praises, the Saavedra family gives a quick thanks and moves on.
Alienation from the status quo runs deep in the Saavedras’ blood. Natalia Mendez and Antonio Saavedra were born in the late 1960s, into families of Mixtec tenant farmers.
“We’re indigenous from Oaxaca. We have suffered oppression for five hundred years. My parents were born into [this] repression and silence. But they had this crazy immigrant drive, which is outside of market economics.”
Their drive led them, as young parents in their early twenties with three infants in tow, to the U.S. First to the Southwest as farmers, then to Washington Heights. “We started schooling right away. We only had church and school, that’s all we had.”
The first two decades in the United States, the Saavedras toiled in the small fragile place between the rock of wanting a good life in their new country and the hard place of undocumented life. While their children excelled in magnet schools, and then elite prep schools via Prep for Prep, Natalia worked as a custodian while Antonio pumped gas across the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee. On weekends, the Saavedra family would sell tacos at the park underneath the Whitestone Bridge.
“We sold for two summers, until the police started throwing away people’s merchandise because they didn’t have a license. During that time my dad got laid off from his gas station job,” remembers Marco.
With Natalia’s custodial work their only source of income, Antonio left his young family in New York and took up a construction job in Virginia with the hopes of obtaining a driver’s license. In the wake of 9/11 and the ensuing anti-immigrant sentiment, Virginia was the only place an undocumented person could get a license at the time.
At every point in Marco's telling of his family's story, there is a common theme within each twist of tragedy, his family saw opportunity. Such a mindset requires an ardent optimism, at the very least admirable and at the very most, absolutely astounding.
A lot of people become disheartened from a singular instance of rejection, “I’m sorry, but we have decided to go in a different direction with this job.” Or “I’m flattered, but I’d rather be friends.” But an entire government – the biggest and most powerful of all governments – had excluded the Saavedra family from taking part in daily life, and even the most mundane tasks were a struggle. Marco’s dad had to fight for a driver’s license, fight to find a minimum wage job, and – when the opportunity came to lease a space in Mott Haven to start a family restaurant – fight for a business loan.
“We had to borrow from friends and family. In 2009, it was wild to make that jump. My mom was still a custodian. Loaning from family, there was some shame involved. They [Marco’s parents] didn’t make a profit for two years.”
By the time his parents started La Morada, Marco was deep into his activism. He had purposefully traveled to the US-Mexico border to be apprehended by border patrol, so Marco and a group of activists could be sent to a detention center in Broward County, Florida. Once there, they secretly filmed the mistreatment of migrants at the hands of the U.S. government. Marco toured the country screening the documentary he and his fellow activists put together from their harrowing experience and sacrifice.
“I had a tension with what I wanted in my activism and my family needs. My parents wanted me to help out in the restaurant. And by 2013, I was burnt out of all that movement work. I came back here.”
As Marco returned to New York, La Morada was picking up steam. Natalia had included an array of moles on her menu, not only the famed chocolate brown mole, but green, red, orange, yellow, and white moles – dishes seldom found outside of Oaxaca. Foodies, who had been seduced by Anthony Bourdain waxing poetic about Oaxacan cuisine, dared to take the 6 train up to 140th street.
“I feel in some ways complicit, because one of the reasons we’re alive is that Oaxacan cuisine blew up because it’s become a cultural destination. It is a double-edged sword, because it is such a rich culture. But how do you preserve it and maintain your integrity?”
Aside from Natalia’s moles, that integrity is the secret ingredient of the Saavedra family’s restaurant, and life. It is the fire which stokes their intensity and it is upheld to a superlative degree.
When the first wave of the pandemic rolled across the country, it hit the South Bronx hard. “Here in the South Bronx has the highest asthma rate in the nation. We’re straddled by highways. Basically, the community is suffocated on all sides by toxic fumes.”
La Morada stepped up and turned their restaurant into a community kitchen. Once again, the New York Times sang their praises. Even the AP distributed a cutesy little 500-word piece about La Morada. The media attention garnered Jose Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which offered to pick up the tab for a substantial portion of La Morada’s mutual aid kitchen.
The family refused the offer, publicly denounced the World Central Kitchen for their collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2017. The Saavedras chose to serve the people in their community on their own, rather than sacrificing their integrity. The public letter to the World Central Kitchen is displayed prominently on La Morada’s website.
“People around here are used to mutual aid and not relying on the government. We’re used to being resourceful.”
It was nearing 11am, opening time, and a handful of volunteers had come into the store to help the Saavedras prepare the community meals for the day. An older man, Mr. Lee, dressed head to toe in black, wearing glasses with gold pumas perched on the corners of his wire-framed glasses, was sipping coffee and making the rounds.
“I live right up on 148th. When the pandemic hit, I couldn’t sit at home and do nothing. And Marco is good people and I like working with them. I try to come here at least twice a week. Help out. They help out with the community, I like that.”
Mr. Lee came down to help the community but stuck around for Natalia’s cooking, “She makes a squash soup. I take it to the gym. It’s a protein, it works on my body. When I have my jacket on, they think I’m an old man. But when I take it off and they see the muscles!” Mr. Lee flexed a bicep and grinned, “Don’t sleep on an old man.”
But his favorite thing on the menu is the meatballs with olives with a side of black beans and rice. “I could eat that every day.”
Covered in a mole and studded with green olives, the meatballs are similar to the stuffed and fried ascolana olives of the Marche region in Italy. Like everything on La Morada’s menu, they are delicious and fortifying. It was hard to leave La Morada without asking some advice. This family had come so far and upheld their standards in their community to a degree worthy of reverence.
Q: “One of the foundational principles of Digest is ‘don’t blow up the spot’ meaning, we want to be anti-food colonialist. One of the big tenets of La Morada is ‘no displacements, no gentrification.’ What should we do to maintain this standard?”
A: “Obviously, doing your research, being respectful of the place you’re going to, acknowledging you’re on occupied territory. When you come into a space, you can ask what they need.”
Q: “For our readers. What does La Morada need right now?”
A: “We always need volunteers. Our volunteer days are Monday through Wednesday, 10-2.”
Dante Pilkington is always on the run.