Cocina Abierta's Year Long Residency at Victoria Community Regional Park

Cocina Abierta is currently stationed at Victoria Park in Carson, California. We were commissioned by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and Los Angeles Parks and Recreation to spend a year investigating how food can deepen cross-cultural alliances in the park. Our approach has been to try to immerse ourselves in park culture as much as possible by attending the parks various sports games and dance classes, while simultaneously building relationships with park staff, coaches, and park users. We've contributed to community potlucks, built an advisory council for the project, and organized recipe swaps in the park to engage park users in conversations about the food traditions they cherish. 

During the research and development phase, we kept our ears close to the ground in search of community members that were known for their cooking skills or their tendency to feed others. This research led us to propose the development of a community cooking show in the Victoria Park kitchen which began filming in May. Five community cooks were selected and paired up with restaurant workers from the Cocina Abierta Collective to film five separate cooking shows. Each show features a community cook showing a restaurant worker how to make a dish from start to finish, as well as a profile that depicts the community member engaged with their particular park community (e.g. softball, basketball, ballroom, etc.). During the cooking show portion of the profile, the restaurant workers serves as co-host, asking questions about technique, food history, cultural upbringing, and their relationship to the park. The profiles will be screened for the larger park community this fall.