For as long as she can remember, Kylie Amigon Mojica, 18, has enjoyed the sweet flavors of candies like Reese’s Pieces, which are easily found in Boyle Heights, her densely populated Latino neighborhood east of downtown Los Angeles. In the spring, she tasted cacao, the source of chocolate. She was surprised at its bitter taste. The cacao made her wonder what made the candies she grew up with so sweet.
“What is in it?” Amigon Mojica said she asked herself. “Is it harmful? Is it causing changes in our body?”
Amigon Mojica said she had always noticed that people in her neighborhood are unhealthy — unable to walk, easily out of breath and dependent on motorized wheelchairs. At Roosevelt High School, where Amigon Mojica graduated this year, she and other students learned about the history of common foods in their community through a program led by Chicano painter Omar G. Ramírez. It was through that program that she got her first taste of cacao and began to connect the types of foods people were eating with how they might be a cause of the health problems she saw.
In California and across the rest of the country, Latinos are at high risk for type 2 diabetes, a chronic disease caused by high blood sugar levels. Excessive weight, lack of exercise, and diets of processed and sugary food are all contributing factors. Research calls for targeted public health interventions that raise awareness about diet, health and diabetes. A mural project at Roosevelt High School is one such targeted intervention.
Two years ago, Ramírez began using murals at the school as a way to get students to think critically about what they were eating, and why, so they could adopt healthier lifestyles. The first mural, now on display in Roosevelt’s cafeteria, depicts the importance of corn as a native food of the Americas. Students are now completing a mural about the origin of chocolate.
They began by learning about cacao’s origin as a Mesoamerican drink that was exclusive to royalty and was fermented and roasted in a time-consuming process. Now, cacao is a globally marketed commodity added to candies, which are laden with sugar, preservatives and dyes. Learning this has already led the young artists to give up packaged candies. They hope to inspire others at their high school and in the surrounding community to also question the way that the foods they routinely eat affect their health.
The cacao mural consists of 12 4-foot by 2-foot panels. The panels chart the history of cacao through the Columbian Exchange, or the process by which people, goods and diseases traversed the Atlantic Ocean between the 16th and 18th centuries. The mural acknowledges the role of labor in Africa and includes a final panel where the students state what they learned in the process — what Ramírez calls their artist statements. He realized it was important to not leave the artists and observers with a sense of helplessness, but to instead give them a path to improve their health and their own relationship with food and take ownership of both.
To better understand cacao, the group went to South Los Angeles to learn about and participate in the hours-long process of fermenting and roasting the raw beans. Then the group traveled to the city of San Gabriel to a private grove of cacao trees.
Santos Beltran, 18, who graduated from Roosevelt in the spring and will start at the University of California, Irvine, in the fall, said he has always been aware that sugary foods surround him — in neighborhood stores and even at school, where students sell candy out of their backpacks to earn money. But when he became aware of how excessive sugar and preservatives were in those snacks, he saw how quick, low-cost access to junk food made it easier for people to make unhealthful choices.
“It’s our environment: We’re exposed to convenience stores, and convenience is the problem,” Beltran said.
Lack of access to healthier food, or food apartheid, is part of the problem in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights. In addition, Latinos suffer food insecurity, or the lack of regular, healthful meals. Food insecurity is a precursor to diabetes and chronic illness.
Young Latinos are disproportionately susceptible to type 2 diabetes and prediabetes. Diabetes among Latino and Black youth in Southern California increased at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kaiser Permanente researchers found.
The cacao mural is scheduled to be installed at Roosevelt this month. The young artists said the mural’s completion will not be its end. All are hopeful the mural will prompt classroom and community lessons on health and the history of food.
Karen Sanchez Morales, 17, will be a senior at Roosevelt High in the fall. Sanchez Morales said she’d like to study food research when she goes to college. Specifically, she’s interested in teaching people how to make healthful substitutions to their diets, like using yogurt instead of sour cream in baking.
Sanchez Morales hopes the mural will make her classmates curious about the natural origins of foods versus what is easy to buy in the neighborhood. Sanchez Morales learned that foods like chocolate “used to be pure; now it’s weirder,” she said. Food doesn’t have to be pure, but it doesn’t have to be weird. Food should not contribute to chronic illness. That’s the lesson Sanchez Morales and other students said they have learned. At Roosevelt, making murals is now a health intervention.
