MORE THAN MOLE

The sweet and spicy resilience of a Westwood Promotora

She comes in as she always does, with her hair pulled tightly back into a seamless ponytail—ready to put her hands to work—and a shirt proudly sporting the neighborhood organization she has come to lead. Her voice is warm, her smile bright, and we’re greeted with a kiss on the cheek. She tells us about the new love that’s sprouting in her life—she’ll be a grandmother in a just a few weeks. We’re updated on her son, her daughter’s job and college classes, her boyfriend Miguel, and the changes she’s navigating in her role at work. 

We first met Yuri working for a local Denver non-profit. She was generally soft-spoken but spicy like the whole roasted jalapeños she would eat like candy at lunch. Yuri works full-time in her neighborhood as a lead Promotra, running the local co-op market and teaching her neighbors how to grow their own fruits and vegetables and cook healthy meals. It’s just a window into the seven year fight against health and economic disparity in Westwood—a latino neighborhood neglected by the city of Denver for generations, so much so that it’s been deemed a food desert and the death rate is one of the highest in the city.

Yuri spends her work days driving from home to home in her Denver Bronco’s adorned car, teaching her colleagues how to push mechanical rototillers twice her size through tough but fertile Colorado soil. She runs meetings and carefully lays out seeds. And later she puts on a suit and meets with big-wig funders and government officials, stars in her fair share of local news stories, and does it all in her second language. But it’s when she steps into the kitchen and teaches her neighbors how to put healthy twists on posole and tamales, or makes her famous mole, that she comes alive.

“I always liked cooking,” Yuri says assuredly, tying on her apron. Her mother was a school teacher outside her small village in the Guerrero state Mexico. She was the sole breadwinner of the house and would leave early and return late on the bus to provide for Yuri, her two younger sisters, and her grandmother. As the oldest daughter, Yuri woke up before her mother to make early breakfasts with her grandmother and handle household chores. In the afternoons she attended school and came home in time to help her grandmother with dinner.

“I learned to make mole with my grandmother,” she says, breaking open three varieties of dried chili pods to remove the tough seeds. “I was about eight when she taught me to cook. We never used recipes, though.”  At the time she began with simple things, like boiling dried beans, eventually adding more elements to her repertoire. Her aunt lived next door and was en even more esteemed cook. “I learned so much from her,” she notes as she rapidly fries the chiles, seeds, raisins, and spices in a thin layer of simmering oil. 

Long before tech-savvy millennials were googling mole recipes to blend up in their Vitamixes, Yuri tells us that women in Mexico were grinding the prized southern sauce in giant stone bowls full of jagged imperfections and remnants of meals past: molcajetes. Every dried chili and hard nut was smashed into the volcanic rock surface with a heavy stone. Hours were spent dissolving the tough ingredients into a thick sauce that would later stew vats of meat, poultry, and be sopped up with fresh tortillas. 

“We used a metate to grind our mole,” Yuri notes, comparatively glancing at the modern blender’s differences to the hand-crank machine, similar to a meat grinder, that she knew well. Mole was a common wedding gift in her village. Families gathered around bowls of chiles, peanuts, and cinnamon sticks to grind and fry in the outdoor burners. Hours were spent bent over gallons of fragrant sauce. It was the beginning of the whole wedding event, the commencement of the party. A fresh turkey was the star of the show, and as a delicacy, it was a luxurious gift for the couple as well as a celebratory meal for the community. 

Yuri was just 15 years-old when she ate that familiar mole on her own wedding and only 16 when she had her first little girl. After the wedding, she moved into her in-laws’ home, a simple house with no running water. She giggles slyly, pouring the fragrantly spiced garlic mixture into the blender along with a toasted tortilla and chunk of dry bread, as she tells of sneaking over to her mother’s house to shower, do laundry, and wash cloth diapers in secret. If her mother-in-law had known, it would have shamed her family. 

She blends the mole, adding water to start up the motor. “With the matete the mole came out more like a paste and would keep for months. My mom used to send it to me from Mexico when I left home.” Just two short years after marrying, and at the ripe age of seventeen, Yuri and her young family of three immigrated to the U.S., leaving their close families and everything they knew for a chance at a better life. 

But her experience of the “American Dream,” like it is for many, was taxing. Her family of three became a family of five, and soon after she was left a single mom when she and her unfaithful husband separated and he moved back to Mexico. “I was always worried about my son because he never had a good male role model, no one in his life he could call with certain questions.” She pours the mole into a deep pan and adds a few blocks of dark chocolate, her eyes glistening from the brief moment of unforeseen emotion.

The the shifts in her family structure left her brokenhearted and financially burdened. She didn't speak English and needed to find a job. So she took classes and worked three separate gigs. Her kids started working as soon as possible to keep everyone fed, housed, and in school. Economic stability as a single parent without child support is far from easy, and more so without connections—every step in another language, every corner ridden with cultural differences and prejudices.

Spend a moment cooking mole with Yuri and you may just see a mother of three first-generation college graduates or students with steady job. You wouldn't know that her past was sprinkled with dangerous border crossings, a fight for survival, and an absent legal and immigration system that didn't recognize her rights as a single mother to leave a cheating man—all before the age of twenty. You’d likely not know about the decades of loneliness, constant sacrifice, and a line of fear that’s wedged itself into the underpinnings of her day-to-day. She's the first to crack a joke, the first to lighten the mood after a hard conversation. She can weep with her friends when bounty hunters capture fathers in their front yards, but will laugh even deeper with them as they dance ranchera in the community kitchen. She’s spent a life teetering resilience and despair, with the former winning out more often than not.

As the mole simmers in its final stages, she asks for our Tupperware—we were told to come armed. Instead, I snag a plate and a stack of tortillas and dish us out some snacks. The sauce is piping hot, a deep chocolate adobe, and as perfect as ever. Spicy and tangy, velvet and sweet, the mole hits every taste bud with such balance and texture that it becomes almost impossible for us to stop shoveling sopping tortillas into our mouths. Eventually we regain control, and as we fill our Tupperwares I can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Not just for the mole I’ll be eating all week, not just the privilege of hearing her a few more pieces of her story. But grateful to know that there are fierce women like Yuri who exist in the world—who call us to be resilient, to fight incessantly, and then to slow down and make a big celebratory pot of mole.