Community kitchens are nothing new in Mexico. They are part of a long history of popular mobilization, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, when Mexico City’s outlying neighbourhoods were growing rapidly.
After the devastating earthquake that struck the capital in 1985, many communities had to reorganize to survive.
While the men worked in the city, groups of women occupied the land, negotiated with the authorities and helped build their neighbourhoods themselves. Others looked after basic daily needs: feeding the family, caring for the children and maintaining social cohesion.
Today’s comedores comunitarios grew out of this legacy.
Essential but largely unrecognized work
In 2009, Mexico City officially launched a community kitchen program based on the right-to-food principle. The government provides a regulatory framework and partial funding, while citizen committees—mainly composed of women—organize meal preparation and distribution.
The purpose of the program is to improve access to food: each full meal sells for about 11 pesos, less than one Canadian dollar. However, although it is a government program, it relies heavily on the volunteer work of the women who run the kitchens.
The women find the premises, manage the staff, buy the food, prepare up to 350 meals a day and keep the place running. Yet this work isn’t recognized as formal employment: it doesn’t come with a stable salary, social protections or labour rights.
“This public policy reproduces gender inequalities by shifting a heavy workload onto women without any real institutional recognition,” Montambeault said.
Much more than a kitchen
The community kitchens don’t just feed people; they have become social spaces where people come regularly and form bonds. The women running the kitchens hear about conditions in the community—the hardships experienced by families, the violence, the isolation.
Gradually, these women start wearing many hats—not just as cooks and managers but also as mediators, confidantes and guides. They refer women to legal or psychological resources, inform people of government programs, or simply lend an ear.
“These women can be considered ‘care entrepreneurs,’” Montambeault said. “Their role goes well beyond preparing meals; they serve as intermediaries between the government and communities that are often cut off from public services.”
Hands-on research
To understand the role of the community kitchens from the inside, the research team took an ethnographic approach. Over a two-year period, they visited 16 kitchens and conducted in-depth interviews with about 20 women.
At three kitchens, they did more immersive research through repeated field visits, participant observation, meal preparation alongside the women and lengthy conversations about their life stories.
The researchers concluded that even without full access to citizenship rights, these women experience citizenship concretely through their community engagement.
“Working in the kitchens allows them to acquire important skills such as managing a team, resolving conflicts, drawing up a budget and coordinating large-scale food production,” Montambeault said. “But above all, it gives them a sense of social purpose, recognition and belonging.”
The participants describe the work as demanding, sometimes exhausting, but deeply rewarding. They say they feel heard, respected and capable of making a difference in their community, Montambeault added.
