Anthony Bourdain Perfectly Captures America’s Hypocritical Relationship With Mexico And Its People

“Our brother from another mother. A country, with whom, like it or not, we are inexorably, deeply involved, in a close but often uncomfortable embrace.”

With Mexico on the mind because of Cinco de Mayo, Anthony Bourdain took to Tumblr to talk about America's troubling relationship with its neighbor.

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Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, look after our children. As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy—the restaurant business as we know it—in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are "stealing American jobs". But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter's position—or even a job as prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, provably, simply won't do.

Via anthonybourdain.tumblr.com

He juxtaposed a drug war fueled by American appetites that has killed 80,000 Mexicans, with the richness, beauty, and culture Americans all too often don't see.

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He wrote about how his attachment and fondness for Mexico comes from the kindness he was given from its people.

"In nearly 30 years of cooking professionally, just about every time I walked into a new kitchen, it was a Mexican guy who looked after me, had my back, showed me what was what, was there—and on the case—when the cooks more like me, with backgrounds like mine—ran away to go skiing or surfing—or simply flaked," he wrote.

"I have been fortunate to track where some of those cooks come from, to go back home with them. To small towns populated mostly by women—where in the evening, families gather at the town’s phone kiosk, waiting for calls from their husbands, sons and brothers who have left to work in our kitchens in the cities of the North."

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