This story aired in the November 14, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.
For Oakland’s Marlene Rojas, starting a food business came with formidable barriers. She had neither the formal training nor the capital to launch a business. AND her immigration status limited her access to culinary school and business classes. She was stuck.
But then Marlene discovered a training program built to help people like her.
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In the Garden
I meet Marlene Rojas in East Oakland. It’s a sunny day and she’s wearing a white linen shirt and a blue baseball cap.
“So we are at the Cesar Chavez Community Garden and this community garden is run through the city of Oakland, but pretty much it’s run from us, our family,” Marelene says.
Marlene and her family have been tending to this garden for about two years now. Both her young daughters, her husband Anthony and two small dogs are here today.
As we walk through the garden beds, Marlene describes the food she’s growing, “So this is the beans and this is some corn. They're like, you know, just starting to come up.”
These are the ingredients Marlene uses when she cooks.
She continues, “Here we have some kale, but we also plant, I think, more corn. So they're, there,” she points at a garden bed, “as you can see, like, some of the stuff is starting to come up, but, you know, it'll take time. Here is, you see, this is how it starts, so it's from the seed.”
For Marlene, knowing where her food comes from is important. It’s part of her ethos. She cares about the food systems that surround us – who grows the food, where it originates, and if the workers who grow it are treated well. In the past, Marlene has been exploited at work. So when she set out to start her own small food business, she decided she would do things differently.
Marlene’s Work Experience
She switches over to Spanish to explain. Marlene says that her story is complicated, she went through a lot of exploitation since she came to the United States. She wells up with tears as she recalls her past.
She tells me, she migrated to the US at age 16 and began working in fast food restaurants. She worked 40 hour weeks for very little pay. Whatever she did earn, she handed over to her husband at the time.
Then one day, she met someone who introduced her to an organization working to immigrants like herself. She says she learned a lot when she joined this group, why people like her migrate, why they’re forced to leave their countries of origin.
Marlene grew passionate about this kind of work, organizing to support immigrant’s rights. She participated in multiple groups including one with farmworkers who are women. It was all fine until she noticed some familiar patterns in her own workplace.
She says the experience wasn’t good. As she and others tried to improve working conditions for farmworkers, her own workplace was repeating those systems of oppression and exploitation internally.
Marlene recalls a specific instance that altered her ability to continue working this job. She asks that we keep her experience private. It's personal and too painful, but what happened was an abuse of power, the kind she was working so hard to improve for others. This experience is why she retreated from organizational work. It’s also what drove her to want to work for herself, to be self-sufficient.
During the pandemic, Marlene and her family began to sell tacos at a small farmer’s market. Now remarried, Marlene had the encouragement of her new husband, Anthony, to look into what it would take to start her own food business.
She figured school was the right start - get professional training, take business classes, but Marlene learned that she didn't qualify for any financial aid because of issues tied to her immigration status.
She says she was in the program, even had her classes picked out, but when it came down to financial aid, she found out that the California Dream Act didn’t apply to her – a law meant to assist immigrants, like Marlene, who came to the US as children with things like financial aid for higher education.
So she unenrolled, but things weren’t looking completely over for Marlene. She says she used the skill she developed as an organizer. She researched programs and activist groups until she came across a match, a small non-profit nestled in Oakland’s Chinatown.
Oakland Bloom
“Our goal is really just getting oriented and on the same page around some of the basics,” says Diana Wu, the Executive Director of Oakland Bloom, an organization that helps people, like Marlene, start their own food business.
We’re standing around inside of Oakland Bloom’s restaurant located 8th street. “So I guess just as an introduction to the space, Oakland Bloom was able to really take over this space in the summer of 2020,” says Diana.
I’m here with Marlene and a handful of other people getting oriented to the kitchen and the front-of-house where Oakland Bloom hosts its incubator program known as the Open Test Kitchen. Marlene is part of a cohort participating in a year-long training program where chefs learn the skills they need to launch their own food business.
Diana mentions that, “Over the first four months, it's more intensively, different workshops for chefs to develop their visions of their businesses.” Things like logo development, branding, curating menus, testing recipes, scaling those recipes for different venues like farmer’s markets, catering events, or pop-ups, “and also a lot of it is storytelling and how people tell the stories behind their food behind their businesses,” she adds.
A majority of Oakland Bloom participants are working-class immigrants, refugees, and BIPOC women. Diana tells me, the program is curated to meet these participants where they’re at. They receive things like child care support, transportation reimbursements, workshop stipends, and interpreters. The goal is to make the pathway to business ownership for chefs from marginalized backgrounds more accessible than it normally is in this industry.
Diana says, “A lot of restaurants here are really driven by these investor models where investors hold the majority of ownership.” She adds that with business models like these, there’s little opportunity for ownership and growth amongst the workers. That’s why Oakland Bloom is introducing healthier business models to the chefs. The kinds of models that reflect livable wages, long-term sustainable employment, “that offer a new vision for food businesses that are not so extractive, but really more connected to community and connected to like different sources of foods and more in line with, like, the future we want to see.” The kind of future Marlene wants to embody.
Marlene’s Pop-Up
Today, I’m meeting Marlene at an event in the Laurel neighborhood of Oakland. We’re in the backyard of a hair salon, there’s live music. Marlene is here selling food.
She’s telling me she’s just gotten back from a conference of farmers who work towards food sovereignty, which just means empowering local farmers and communities to grow their own food in a way that is healthy for the earth and for the people who eat it. She’s actually selling popcorn she purchased from one of these farmers, but that’s just a snack, Marlene is here today to sell sopes.
“The sopes, it's like a tostada, but it's like a thick tortilla. So I make like three different kinds. One is chicken tinga, and the other is vegan chorizo with a lot of pumpkin seeds and cauliflower,” she explains.
Someone overhears Marlene explain sopes and orders a few. Marlene gets to cooking, she warms up the thick corn tortilla on a flat griddle for a few minutes, then she loads it up with beans and chicken.
Part of Marlene’s routine tonight is spent explaining how to eat sopes, a really homey traditional dish familiar to Mexicans. Marlene’s business centers on ancestral Mexican cuisine. Her business is called Tsiri, which is the Indigenous Purepecha word for corn, the central ingredient in her dishes. She says her food is made with love and with locally sourced ingredients, she wants people to feel like they’re eating at home, at their kitchen table with their mom or their abuelita.
The Future of Tsiri
Marlene’s not entirely sure of all of her goals for Tsiri, but she is certain about a few things. She says, part of what she wants to do is work with the people who grow the food. When she visits farmers markets for example, she wants to know if the vendors are the workers or the owners. It’s her way of building the kind of relationship with food she cares about so much.
Marlene also wants to create a space where she’s safe, where she and other women can work without the stress of harassment or exploitation. A space where respect is felt amongst the workers. She says this is just what many immigrants do – create their own spaces and become their own bosses.
With so much pivoting in her life, Marlene remains optimistic. She says, paths will always reveal themselves, if you search for them.
