Join us for a very special culinary event at Claremont Branch when Chef Dilsa Lugo, owner of Los Cilantros in Berkeley, demonstrates how to make tamales at home. Chef Dilsa specializes in home-style Mexican dishes based on her family's recipes and prepared with responsibly sourced, local ingredients. Learn more about Chef Dilsa and Los Cilantros at https://lapena.org/los-cilantros-restaurant/
Space for this presentation is limited to 20- please call the Claremont Branch Library to reserve your space: 510-981-6280.
This event is offered in partnership with La Cocina in San Francisco. Since 2005, La Cocina has focused exclusively on small business incubation, with a vision to increase inclusivity in the food industry and offer equitable opportunity for living-wage work and asset generation.
Working-class women of color and immigrant women, many of whom are skilled cooks, have traditionally experienced a comparative lack of opportunities in the formal job market, including in the formal foodservice industry. Being excluded from the mainstream job market and the formal food industry has prompted many low-income women to start their own, informal food enterprises.
These women, who sell homemade food on the streets or out of their homes, have learned to make their businesses profitable and sustainable on a very small scale. However, as low-income entrepreneurs they face large risks and significant barriers to entry into the formal food industry due to insufficient financial and social capital.
These and other barriers deprive working class food entrepreneurs from the opportunity to build assets through formalizing their businesses. This underscores the need for an environment, such as La Cocina, where working class food entrepreneurs can access the resources they need in order to survive the crucial start-up phase and become functioning parts of the local economy. Read more about the work of La Cocina at https://www.lacocinasf.org/mission
This program is made possible by a generous gift from the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library.