Inspired by the injustices happening at our borders, local cook and writer Gabrielle Eitienne has teamed up with Black Joy PopUp and Alerta Migratoria NC for Breaking Bread & Borders, a pop-up dinner with a mission to cultivate a safe, healing space to share stories and find solutions. The event will be held from six to eight this evening at Cocoa Cinnamon’s Chapel Hill Street location. All proceeds will benefit Alerta Migratoria NC, which helps reconnect displaced migrant families.
Eitienne was inspired to create the pop-up after seeing an Instagram post by her friend, Victoria Bouloubasis, a local journalist, documentary filmmaker, and former INDY food editor.
“The pop-up was spawned from an Instagram post by Victoria regarding the Collectivo Liminal prints for pre-sale; the funds from the prints were being donated to two organizations helping families separated by ICE,” Eitienne says. “At that moment, the idea of helping became very tangible, and I proposed the idea to do a pop-up focused on selling food and the prints to Alerta Migratoria NC.”
For the dinner portion of Breaking Bread & Borders, Eitienne drew on her culinary storytelling experience to create an Afro-Latin fusion menu, collaborating with Neydit Vay-Almaraz, a woman who, with the help of Alerta Migratoria NC, was reunited with her children last August after being wrongly arrested and jailed. Together, the women will prepare dishes like African rice horchata shots as well as tamales made with field pea masa and filled with slow-cooked molasses morito pork shoulder, and Vay-Almaraz will also share her story.
For more information, visit Black Joy PopUp’s Facebook event page.