Chef Heals Herself, Others Through Food and ‘Comadrismo’

This season of 2 Lives is sponsored by the Women’s Foundation for the State of Arizona. Learn more at womengiving.org.

You can learn more about Maria del Carmen’s work at Sana Sana Foods and the Cihuapactli Collective at:

https://www.sanasanafoods.com/

https://www.cihuapactlicollective.org/ 

Maria del Carmen Parra Cano’s family is from Texcoco, Mexico. Growing up, her parents were artisans who made folk costumes for ballet folklorico dancers and mariachi groups. In 1980 one of those groups, tired of traveling to Mexico every time they needed new costumes, sponsored them to come to the United States. So the Parras (then a family of six) moved to Phoenix. That’s where Carmen and two other siblings were born.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: We grew up with a great sense of…community… There were so many of us, you know, we needed a 15 passenger was our regular vehicle. We shared beds, you know, I always have a memory of there were six of us and we all slept on a king size bed and we grew up that way. I didn't have my own room until I bought my own house.

Eventually there were a total of nine Parra kids. And Carmen’s mom Maria Christina was also looking out for the neighbor kids too.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: My mom was a mother to many, you know, not just her immediate <laugh> children, but to a lot of the kids in the neighborhood, you know, by feeding them, clothing them if needed. And you know, my mom had a very great big heart, and that's all I knew, you know, as her being a role model for me. 

Maria Christina would sew Carmen and her sisters long colorful dresses for the traditional dances they’d perform for the neighborhood. 

MARIA DEL CARMEN: We grew up with being the, the house that on the block that kids would run to and after school. And we would dance for hours. And I remember like a really big dance floor. And then when as an adult we went back to that house and it's like, that was how do we fit so many people here? 

In Latin America when a kid scrapes a knee and comes running, it’s common to hear a mother say, “sana sana colita de rana, si no sanas hoy, sanarás maňana.” Heal heal little tail of the frog. If you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow. Carmen’s mom was always busy sewing, cooking, taking care of her family along with the neighbor kids so whenever someone got hurt and ran to her, she’d shorten it. 

MARIA DEL CARMEN: She would just be like, ‘Okay, sana sana, okay, now vamanos let's go.’ Yeah, my mom was very much of, we don't have time to dwell, you know, like, and I feel like that that's a lot of where my, um, characters come from too, of like, ‘Okay, we can do this, but let's move forward.’ 

This is a story about how Carmen took in her mother’s teachings about perseverance, love, and community and how those would heal her later in her OWN life. 

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

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Carmen’s mom would go to the store every other day to get food for her growing family. Carmen’s favorite meal was chiles rellenos or stuffed chiles. Her mom Maria Christina would line up the kids in the kitchen to help.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: Like she would set us in an assembly line and there were so many of us, she would set us in, she would roast the peppers, somebody would peel them.I would actually be in charge of whipping the egg up, whisking the egg, the, the, the batter. 

Every October on the feast of Saint Francis, Carmen would help her mom cook several steaming pots of menudo, a traditional gamey smelling soup. They’d deliver it to everyone who marched in the long procession for Saint Francis that wound its way up South Mountain in Phoenix. Carmen’s siblings started telling her she was just like their mom.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: We would have pots and pots and pots of menudo cooking. Um, and so for us, the smell of it, we like, oh, menudo, we knew what it was, you know, <laugh>. And so my mom would literally make pots and pots and pots of it to take up there so that whoever walked or did the pilgrimage would have food after.

Years later after all the kids had left home, Maria Christina and her husband Jose Arturo ate fewer home cooked meals and more fast food out of convenience. And in 2003 both of Carmen’s parents were diagnosed with diabetes. Carmen decided to do something about it. She’d always loved cooking traditional Mexican food but wanted to learn to do it in a healthy way so she figured the best way to do that was to train to be a professional chef. So she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Scottsdale.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: My favorite class overall was my food history class, <laugh> cause I loved reading about that and learning, you know, where foods come from in your origins and things like that…  I also learned what didn't sit well with my body – lactose, you know, some glutens and also, um, how my body reacted to animal products.

There was another class devoted to learning what they call the mother sauces of French cooking. But for Carmen with her indigenous and chicana heritage mother sauces meant something entirely different.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: … learning how to make a bechamel a tomato sauce and what have you learning from scratch, you know, how to make all these sauces. And, and I was like, Oh, I want my mom's sauces, like my, my mother's sauces, my red chili list, my mole, my green chili, my salsas. You know, like those are the base for all of my dishes. And so for me it was really interesting that at that time I was even making that connection then of this is not, French cuisine is not my food. 

In school the teachers insisted the students try everything they were cooking. It didn’t take long before Carmen noticed she had put on a few pounds. So once she graduated she returned to her traditional foods – cactus, blue corn pancakes, bean soup, quinoa – and she noticed how much better she felt.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: I started just focusing on ancestral foods for myself, just really trying to heal myself. So within that year, that first year of graduating, I lost 50 pounds, mainly just on focusing on ancestral foods. 

In college at Arizona State University Carmen met Brian Cano through mutual friends. Both were part of a Chicano student activist group and ceremonial circles.

MARIA DEL CARMEN:  He just showed up to my house one day wanting to talk and I was thinking, who sent you? You know, like, how did you know where I lived?

He wound up staying and talking with Carmen for five hours. The first of many long conversations the couple would have. In 2012 they got married and soon discovered Carmen was pregnant. She had dreams of a big family like her own and was excited to become a mother.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: I ended up having gestational diabetes… I had already gained 30 pounds in the first trimester, which is not normal <laugh> not normal whatsoever. So I knew something was wrong. 

Carmen had a plan for her birth – she wanted to deliver naturally. But after 30 hours of labor the doctor told Carmen and Brian their baby was stuck, they’d need to do a c-section. Her mom Maria Christina helped Carmen accept that things don’t always go as planned. In fact she told her that Carmen was her own first cesarean. 

MARIA DEL CARMEN: And so at some point she told me, it's okay if you don't have, if you can't do it vaginally, it's okay. She had to learn how to manage differently from a c-section.

After Carmen came home from the hospital her mom stayed by her side to listen, to tell stories and to bring her comforting foods to help her milk come in for breastfeeding–foods like corn mush, oatmeal and hot cinnamon drink called atole.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: I don't know how my mom did it, but each of us felt like she loved, she would make time for each of us, you know? And she, each of us felt the same love, you know, at the time... I don't know how she managed being self-employed, being the, at some times the sole provider for our family of nine … she also comes from the mentality of, I don't have a choice. You know, I have to make, I need to survive. I need to have my children survive. And so she was a powerhouse.

When her oldest was almost two Carmen became pregnant with their second child. Carmen and Brian invited Maria Christina to move in with them. At 65 she had started having dizzy spells so they wanted to keep an eye on her. Carmen made an appointment with a neurologist for her. 

One day María Christina had just finished sewing a mariachi jacket. She ironed it, hung it up and stepped into the bathroom. She told Carmen… 

MARIA DEL CARMEN: A sister of mine's gonna come pick me up to take me to the doctor. And I said, okay. And, um, she was in the shower and we just heard a big noise.

Turns out she fell and cracked her skull. Two weeks later Maria Christina died in the hospital.  

MARIA DEL CARMEN:  It was life changing. She would always tell us ‘when I, when I die, don't, don't cry, just have a big party.’ And we ended up having a, a funeral for her and where mariachi's traveled throughout the state to play for her…it was very beautiful to, to hear the music, you know, and them honoring her. 

Just three months after her mom died, Carmen had her second baby. This time without her mother to comfort her, she felt lonely and isolated and quickly fell into a depression. 

MARIA DEL CARMEN: I was missing my mom. I was still grieving, you know, I was grieving deeply and even though I had a brand new baby, I didn't have her with me at that moment. Not having my mom with me, not having the support and support in a sense from my mom. You know? Like I no longer had her there.

Her husband suggested getting out of town for the weekend so they left the kids with family and drove to San Diego. But that wasn’t what Carmen needed. When they got there she spiraled into a darker place and did what so many of us do when we’re spiraling. She logged into social media.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: We were in a hotel room in San Diego and I started a long, um, message via Facebook to people just pretty much telling 'em I needed help, I needed support, I needed community. And, um, for me, I think just writing it out was a good way to release what I was feeling at the time. Um, and then I saw messages coming in of people wanting to support, you know, like, let's just meet up for coffee when you get back. Let's just get some food or something, you know? First time I've ever experienced anything like this to where, you know, I knew I needed to call, put out a call for support, for help. And so, um, I put that call out and maybe within a week or so we had, we were meeting up for coffee at, um, a local coffee house downtown. And the first meeting, there was maybe about 10 of us that showed up with babies in hand, or just friends who wanted to show up and support.

The group of women would meet up every two weeks for coffee. Every time they met more women would show up.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: We ended up having to move to a different coffee house cuz we were pretty much overtaking the the small one. And we went to a larger one down the street.

They talked about parenting  and health issues and Carmen discovered the thing that was missing from her life was something called “comadrismo.”

MARIA DEL CARMEN: We say comadre, the term comadre means comother. And traditionally when a birth, the, the midwife or the comadrona, what they were called, it actually comes from a word of comale. And so comale, this was the person who would help birth the child and then became their godmother essentially.

Together the group of women identified their needs: things like community support, traditional knowledge, and what they call “womb health” or reproductive health. They decided to call themselves the Cihuapactli Collective, which means women’s medicine. 

MARIA DEL CARMEN:  We wanna heal our bodies, our births, our what we carry as women has been impactful on us to where our bodies are not being affected in different ways and connecting mental health to physical health, to our reproductive health. And so how can we help one another? 

The collective decided to host an event. They called it an Ancestral Womb Wellness Gathering where they brought in elders and healers to give workshops. They planned for the dozen or so women that had been regularly meeting and their families. 

MARIA DEL CARMEN: We ended up having, uh, 200 people show up... We had 200 people in one day afterwards we're like, Wow, ‘what did we do?’ 

As the collective was developing Carmen discovered she was pregnant again but in her 16th week she miscarried. She and Brian were devastated and when it came time to go to the hospital, they looked to the collective for support.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: The women of the collective stepped in. Um, one of them was my midwife there to advocate. Cuz again, not knowing, not ever having been through this experience, you know, she really helped us navigate the hospital system and knowing what we could do, what can't we can't do, and things like that. And I had at one point maybe eight women in my room, trying to do either massage or aromatherapy… We had the different healers and different people there to support on hand to help me physically with, um, what we call a 'cerrana' or a closing of the bones postpartum. 

After she came home Carmen thanked her healers and friends by cooking and delivering food to them.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: I did run myself pretty, pretty thin postpartum trying to do this for community, but I was also managing my grief at the time in trying to, to push forward the, the way I knew. And that's how like, my mom would just cook food, help other people do what we can, you know, And I was doing the same thing.

It was around this time that Carmen was diagnosed with stage four liver disease. So she changed up her diet, became vegan and adjusted her mother’s recipes.

Several months passed before Carmen and Brian decided to try again for another child. This time Carmen discovered she was carrying antibodies, so the doctor told her that her chances of keeping the baby to full term were slim. 

MARIA DEL CARMEN: I was seeing doctors twice a week for this pregnancy and one of the doctors said, Well, next week if, if you're still pregnant, then we'll do this. You know, like they would just, that's how they would speak to people, you know.

Even though her doctors ordered her to bed for three months postpartum, Carmen remained optimistic. Knowing she was at risk of gestational diabetes she stayed true to eating healthy ancestral foods. And when it came time to deliver she called in reinforcements. 

MARIA DEL CARMEN: Somebody was there for my husband, somebody was there for me. Um, and they were switching off every three hours or so for the women of the collective. Um, oh yeah, they were amazing.

She carried the baby to term, but Carmen wound up needing an emergency C section.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: I was so scared and immediately taken to the, or usually I had been used to, every time I had a c-section, my husband was there with me the whole time. This time they started without him … And so all I remember then was being woken up and I'm feeling everything cuz I'm now in recovery. And, um, they didn't give me pain medication. I felt the slit through my body. I felt everything. Then I had a nurse come up and try to grab some colostrum, um, from my breasts for the baby. And I'm yelling because she's just squeezing, you know, my breast.

It was a painful recovery but this time she knew what she needed thanks to the healers and elders who’d come to talk to the collective and thanks to her mother. She thought back to how her mom had cared for her with her first birth, her soothing words, her healing foods.  

MARIA DEL CARMEN: Knowing what, for my other births and what worked for me postpartum, knowing the dishes my mom had made for me, I was like, okay, I need a caldo, which is like a stew, but I want just all vegetables. I would have to instruct, but it was all using my mother's recipes, knowing the, the, what she had used with me in the past. And so I really do feel like this is, community care, having the strong community care is what helped me survive. 

Carmen believes it was through the healing foods made by her comadres that she was able to heal herself. After weeks of receiving their food and care there was no sign of liver disease, hypertension or diabetes.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: Everything was gone. I no longer needed to be on any medication. I no longer needed, um, diabetes medication. And it was just really, for me, it was an affirmation of food being used as medicine and healing my body with that. Um, my husband within a month he's like, ‘we need to help other people. Like how can we help other people?’ And within a month we had a food truck and that was the birth of sana sana foods and sanar in Spanish means to heal. 

…Just like the old song her mom used to sing when she fell down (shortened of course). Carmen had taken her traumatic birth experiences and built an indigenous women’s collective and a thriving food business. And she’d done it all in a way that honors her mother. 

MARIA DEL CARMEN: Like, yes, I experienced a lot of trauma, you know, to my body and, and my spirit during my birthing process for my children, but let's keep going. How do we help others? How do we move forward? How do we make this better? You know, how how can I help others not go through this?

Today she’s passing on her mother’s teachings to people around her and her own daughters. At a recent Sana Sana cooking demonstration her oldest was anxious to teach others what she knew.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: At five years old and showing people how to make tortillas. She was showing them how to grind the corn and then taking them through a, a dough making station to then placing their tortilla on a comal or like a hot plate. 

As Carmen was passing out the food she had cooked she noticed one man took a bite, closed his eyes, and smiled.

MARIA DEL CARMEN: He just said, You just reminded me of my mom <laugh>. And so that was al uh, for me, that's another affirmation, right? Of that's me re bringing my mom into the space, you know, and bringing her teachings in with me.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

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