I’ve been watching Eva Longoria: Searching for Spain and Pati Jinich Explores Panamericana with mixed feelings. I am on record as being an unapologetic, gushing fan of director, actor, producer, and Latina superstar, Eva Longoria. I followed her through Mexico in her Searching for Mexico series on CNN. If she did a series titled, Eva Longoria: Searching for Lint in Her Coat Pocket, I’d watch it because I’m a diehard fan.

Pati Jinich, best-selling cookbook author and TV host of PBS’s long-running, popular series, Pati’s Mexican Table is another favorite of mine. Jinich has a great on-screen persona, but is there any Latina TV personality who looks more like a gringa than Pati Jinich but sounds more Mexican than she does? I enjoy her infectious charming curiosity  when she ventures out finding new Mexican cuisines.

But so far for my personal Mexican taste buds, Eva and Pati have encountered mostly ho-hum cuisines on their very different food journeys

The historical and gastronomical fact is we Mexicans took Spanish food stuffs; beef, pork, lamb, flour, rice manteca, and citrus and other fruits, incorporated them into an already outstanding diet and turned it into the world’s most popular and delicious cuisine. I don’t see people lining up for tappas and sangria. But you can find snotty, stuck-up Parisians in France eating tacos from Mexican food trucks (holding them incorrectly) and foregoing their overrated wine for good Mexican beer.

¡Hay Dios Mio! We even improved the language they gave us! Who can understand the Catalan Spanish that comes out of the mouths of Spaniards with that lisp, cotton balls  in their mouths, dropping the “S” off the end of words, jamming words together and shooting them out in rapid machine gun bursts of nouns, vowels, and verbs.?

We Mexicans modified, moderated and improved the pronunciation of Spanish so that Mexican-style Spanish is the foreign language of choice to learn and despite what Trump says, it is the “official” language of most of America and the world.

Eva for the most part, seems to be living la vida loca in Spain, but occasionally she puts on a brave face when she is offered unappetizing Spanish food.  But she smiles graciously, takes a small bite, swallows and washs it all down with glasses of wine.

Meanwhile Pati, up in the frozen tundra of North Alaska and The Yukon and living the vida of Nanook of the North, suffers eating seal fat, moose meat and other Alaskan delicacies. Although she has been treated to some delicious Alaskan salmon, crab and other seafood treasures, Pati has also  bravely tasted unappetizing  items like seal fat, whale blubber and moose meat with her typical grace and humor.

Surprisingly, Pati has found Latino culture and people up in the frozen tundra of the Great White North.  Eva, for her part, has taken us back to the Mothership of all Latin American countries and reminded us of the Arab, Middle Eastern and African culinary, cultural and musical influences that flourished in Spain for centuries and were brought to us buy the Spaniards during The Conquest.

But what both these two food / travelogue programs emphatically demonstrate is the influence and global dominance of Hispanic culture that came to Mesoamerica from Spain, took root there and blossomed into the worlds’ most vibrant, colorful and delicious cultural expression.

Gore Vidal once characterized the grater Southwest, but especially the Tex Mex Border from El Paso to Brownsville, as The Occupied Territories.

How about if Eva and Pati team up and do a Latina Lewis & Clark type exploration of The Occupied territories on their next food / travelogue series? They will certainly encounter a helluva lot tastier food and easier to understand Spanish.

Eva Longoria: Searching for Spain – Sundays at 9 PM ET On CNN

Pati Jinich Explores PanaAmerica – PBS, Check for Dates and times

Streaming on Amazon Prime video 

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