We recently connected with Fabiola Santiago and have shared our conversation below.

Fabiola, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

It was spring of 2016 in Oakland, CA. I was standing outside an upscale Mexican restaurant with a group that was demanding accountability from the restaurant for committing wage theft, stealing recipes from a Oaxaqueña, and engaging in other workplace violations. The previous year, I had just completed a research project on wage theft, uncovering the myriad of health problems that stolen wages leads to. That research helped pass a local ordinance in Los Angeles and the California state bill to curb wage theft. But there I was, standing outside the restaurant feeling defeated because even though there are laws and protections in place for workers, if they don’t know their rights, it’s as if they don’t have any. I worked in the restaurant industry for almost 10 years so I was very familiar with the exploitative industry.

Standing outside with workers demanding accountability also took me back to the first time I tried mezcal outside of a community setting. It was 2012 at a mezcaleria in Los Angeles, at the beginning of the mezcal boom. I was served mezcal by a person with absolutely no cultural connection to the spirit and in a cold demeanor. It completely contrasted to my understanding and relationship with mezcal as a spirit embedded in the communal lives of Indigenous people.

The question that followed me after these two experiences has been, “how do I preserve Indigenous Oaxaca’s culture?”

I was born in Oaxaca, my parents produced mezcal before we were forced to migrate precisely because there was no mezcal industry or market. This was in the 1980s. Less than two decades later, there’s mezcal guerilla marketing on the streets of LA, mezcal at trendy and upscale bars, and Mexican restaurants claiming to have Oaxacan food.

However, the majority of these businesses were engaging in cultural appropriation. And yes, that includes well-intentioned people that use their identity as permission to sell the culture. Cultural appropriation is also about selling elements of a culture, like mezcal, without it benefitting the people who are the stewards of that culture and that’s what I see in the mezcal industry and with the culinary contributions of Oaxaca.

So in 2019 I applied and was accepted to a food incubator in San Francisco. My concept was to launch a restaurant and mezcaleria, one that resembled cultural elements from back home. That’s why I named it Mi Oaxaca. But the COVID-19 pandemic and becoming a new parent quickly made me realize that I’d be doing something I didn’t have the capacity to do. I went back to Oaxaca for an extended period of time and that’s when I started sharing about the actual conditions in mezcal country through private tastings, social media, articles, and speaking engagements.

Then one day in the spring of 2022, I got an email from the Mellon Foundation asking for a pitch deck for my work at Mi Oaxaca. That’s when I laid out the plan to create an organization that preserves and promotes the indigenous lifeways that has allowed mezcal and Oaxaca’s culinary wealth to survive.

Last year, we piloted some of the programs. By using an intersectional lens along with my bicultural and binational experiences, Mi Oaxaca educates consumers and hospitality industry workers about the cultural significance of mezcal in pueblos that make it, the environmental, socio-cultural, and economic impacts of the industry on those pueblos, and encourage consumption of mezcales that still use Indigenous Traditional Knowledge in their production processes.

We are a start-up and we have other ideas in mind to preserve the Indigenous cultures of Oaxaca, but like a wild maguey (agave), we are taking our time.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am from the World Capital of Mezcal, Santiago Matatlán in Oaxaca, Mexico. I belong to the Indigenous Zapotecs of the Central Valley. My father migrated to the US in the mid 1980’s because the local mezcal economy in Matatlán plummeted and our family had no economic opportunities to help us thrive in our culturally rich home. He sent for the rest of the family to join him in Los Angeles, CA in the early 1990’s where we all remained undocumented for over 20 years.

Like many Oaxacan immigrants in Los Angeles, I was part of the food service industry. My 10 year experience in the industry helped me pay for college and graduate school; this was before undocumented students had any access to grants, scholarships, and other opportunities. In 2008 my mother was deported and two years later, so was my father. I graduated with my Masters in Public Health from UCLA in 2012 and got my green card in 2013.

Within a few months of getting my green card, I moved to Oakland for a work opportunity and because living in LA was too nostalgic and painful. I started Mi Oaxaca because I felt the absence of Oaxacan culture in the bay area. So I carry with me the values that my family instilled in me.

I’ve spent 15 years working at the intersection of community health and social change. I worked in non-profit organizations, as a consultant for public agencies, and in boutique social equity organizations providing research, evaluation, capacity building, and equity-design services. My work has helped change policies and design more equitable programs and plans. I bring all this to Mi Oaxaca as well.

I am the first in my family to graduate high school, college, graduate school, and now founding a social impact organization. The challenges of being the first in my family to do something have propelled me towards social equity and cemented my commitment to social movements and justice.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Mi Oaxaca’s initial purpose was to amplify the nuances that make Oaxacan food unique. I started La Cocina’s food incubator program in January 2020, just a few months before the COVID-19 shelter in place mandate. I had already been doing pop-ups and small catering gigs. My main dish was goat barbacoa with mezcal. I was excited and ready to do the second half of our commercial kitchen training.

However, with the northern California wildfires, the ever-changing COVID preschool protocols, and one of my work contracts coming to an end, I decided to move back to Oaxaca. That’s when I saw mezcal production grow exponentially. During a time when working-class people across the globe were experiencing precarity, many of those born within privileged groups were benefitting from the pandemic. So I started speaking up based on what I was seeing on the ground.

That was the moment I realized that educating people was a more important calling. I am a speaker, a community builder, and a social-equity co-creator. I bring up hard topics with directness and compassion. Pivoting has allowed me to be intentional about how I engage with the worlds and cultures I’m a part of. I knew I was on the right path when the Mellon Foundation reached out and initiated a conversation about the grant. It’s through that three-year grant that we are building the organizational foundation and infrastructure to grow our impact and sustainability.

As I’ve matured, I pivot when life gives me resistance and guides me towards places and people that bring ease. Now I look to be directed where I can use my acquired privileges and positionality to be of service while also feeling uplifted.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I deleted my instagram account in 2016, while I was pregnant and going through an emotionally and spiritually difficult time. Even back then when it was for personal use, I had an engaging community because I posted authentically. In 2019, when I decided to separate from my child’s father, I also made the decision to start a new account and do it to talk about all things Oaxaca, hence, Oaxac The Talk (@OaxacTheTalk).

I post to educate, raise awareness, encourage reflection, and sometimes share glimpses from my personal life because I also want people to know the human behind the messages. My intellectual traits encompass empathy, integrity, humility, autonomy, and courage with space for complexities and contradictions. I display these on social media and that’s what makes the content relatable, thought-provoking and reflective.

My social media accounts, both @OaxacTheTalk and @Mi.Oaxaca have generated in-person connections, collaborative partnerships, and built fellowship with Oaxacan and values-aligned people. It’s also because of the social media content that a relative nominated me for this interview opportunity.

When what I share resonates with people, they amplify those messages. This interaction validates that what I have to say is important. Especially on social media where we are bound to compare ourselves to others, engage in self-talk that deflates us, and sometimes validly feeling deflated because of the pesky algorithm, committing to authenticity, real talk, and honest perspective is what has kept a strong engagement and community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mioaxaca.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mi.oaxaca
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MiOaxaca.live
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/99041404/admin/feed/posts/
• Other: Founder’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/oaxacthetalk/ Founder’s website: https://oaxacthetalk.com/

Image Credits
Luis Hernadez (for main image)