Jasmyne Muñoz chops papaya in a small kitchen filled with late-morning light and the smell of burning sage and spices. Next, she gives the fruit a light dusting of cinnamon.
“One of my most favorite things is ground cinnamon,” she said. Her grandma used to make tea with it. “It would just go into all of the rooms and that’s how I’d wake up sometimes.”
These are the kinds of connections she encourages kids at the Bernalillo County Youth Services Center to make – between family and food, and food and culture – in weekly visits where she brings prepared dishes that deviate from what the center serves.
Kids in juvenile detention facilities miss out on a lot going on in their communities and families. That includes grandma’s cooking.
The program Muñoz conducts through South Valley community organization La Plazita brings culturally relevant foods to a youth detention center. It is not about teaching them how to cook, necessarily, but to help them maintain a relationship to their cultural heritage and learn about food as medicine.
“If we think about that, getting the same thing over and over again. What does that do to a person? What does that do not just physically, but mentally and emotionally?” Muñoz said.
She’s at La Plazita Institute, preparing to go to the detention center later to share a meal and talk about food with kids.
She also helps with a gardening program, and she brings them treats from the La Plazita garden, like carrot juice.
She says food is one more way that kids in detention are cut off from their families and communities.
“It’s a great door-opener to sharing experiences, through food. After I share myself with them, they feel comfortable to share, also, which is something they don’t really get,” Muñoz said.
Food is really good for that, said Danielle Lipow, a senior associate with the Juvenile Justice Strategy Group at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a nonprofit that works with children.
“You can ask pretty much any community-based organization in the country – How do you get people to open up? And they will say feed them,” she said. “It's just sort of a universal truth of being human.”
She said a program like the one from La Plazita – where kids are learning about food from a cultural standpoint, but not necessarily in the context of job training – is really rare, but shouldn’t be.
There are some federal standards for what youth detention centers serve, but a lot is left up to states and municipalities.
“Which means that there is a lot of flexibility in how that's executed, and how systems partner with community-based organizations to introduce food as a cultural element, as a source of nourishment and connection to family and folks back home,” she said.
Lipow said that also means states can make it hard to get fresh food into a facility. La Plazita works with the Youth Services Center to bring in food from its garden and it can do that because the facility has a lot of freedom in deciding what it serves.
But that’s a small piece of what the kids eat.
And that over-reliance on institutional kinds of food has a bigger impact on kids of color, because they are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system, according to Kim Libman with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“Some of the evidence shows that people come out with worse health outcomes than they go in, and that should not be the case. At minimum, people should come out as healthy as they go in,” she said.
Libman said that’s a missed opportunity, especially in a facility where meals are programmed.
“Kids who end up in juvenile justice facilities, they’re often coming into the system with trauma backgrounds. Sometimes they're coming from a history of food insecurity,” she said.
Libman said they could benefit from programming that not only gives them better access to food, but helps them build a better relationship with it in ways that fit their identities, which they already might be missing out on because of food insecurity.
“Kids and families are not consulted in the regulations. From an equity, cultural competency and dignity perspective, if we were talking about any other population, there would be, I think, some avenue for that,” she said.
Albino Garcia is the founder of La Plazita and started the food and urban farming program. He said his intention was to help kids currently or previously in detention, or at risk of being detained, by encouraging connections between them, the land and the South Valley community.
“For years, we've been trying to break out of incarceration and now we're trying to break back in just to have access to our people,” he said.
He has worked on this program for a couple of decades and said it’s harder to get a community-based program like this in the door than one that’s run by a clinic or a corporation.
“We're people who have been products of that trauma that exists and that they're perpetuating, but we get a different kind of respect,” he said.
Adrian Rodriguez works with La Plazita, and he got to know the organization through the food program while he was in detention. His best food memories are in his grandma’s kitchen.
“My grandma is from Mexico, so I eat a lot of Mexican food, like enchiladas, tamales, whenever she cooks them during the holidays,” he said.
He is 18 and said he has been in and out of the juvenile justice system since age 13. It was an isolating time.
He says the food is fine, kind of like school cafeteria food. But the first time he met Jasmyne, she brought elote, and that meant a lot to him. It was an entry point into La Plazita, which has helped him in a lot of ways.
“You don’t really think that anybody cares, you know? And there’s people out there who do care, and they’re fighting on your behalf,” he said.
That’s given him firmer footing outside of the juvenile justice system.
Mia Casas contributed reporting to this story.
This coverage is made possible by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and KUNM listeners.
