Chef Silvana Salcido Esparza’s memoir ‘La Hija de la Chingada’

Award-winning chef Silvana Salcido Esparza has spent her life breaking barriers and challenging the status quo. In a new fearless and deeply personal memoir, Esparza pulls back the curtain on her journey not just as a chef, but as a Mexican, a woman, a lesbian and an immigrant’s daughter, navigating a culinary industry and a society often hostile to her very existence.

Esparza is best known for her groundbreaking restaurant, Barrio Café. She closed it in 2024 and moved to Mexico with her wife. She still spends a lot of time in Phoenix, where she is a mentor and an activist. She is a James Beard Award® Semi-finalist and a finalist a total of nine times. Esparza joined us on “Arizona Horizon” to discuss.

“I come from 800 years of baking from Spain through Colonial Mexico, and I saw my father in a bakery, I saw his father in his bakery, and baking wasn’t for me, but the importance of Unesco’s world heritage food like Mexican is and you can intertwine both as one panaderia y cocinar,” Esparza said.

She said by age 15, she knew she wanted to cook for her career because she had a carnitas business at her father’s bakery and decided to go to culinary school later, which brought her to Phoenix.

“I backpacked through Mexico for a greater part of a year, and when I came back after getting the traditional blessing of the cooks, Las cocineras de Mexico, I knew what I had to do. I had to correct the erroneous perception North Americans have of what Mexican food or cuisine is as well as the culture, and I set out to do it one plate at a time,” Esparza said.

Esparza said she wrote a rough draft of the book last year and decided to self-publish the book this year.

If you would like to see Esparza speak and sign her books, she will be at the Phoenix location of Changing Hands Bookstore on Friday, April 18, 2025.