Pati Jinich Explores PanAmericana

Pati Jinich travels from the northernmost city in the United States, Utqiagvik, to the remote island community of Halibut Cove in southern Alaska - discovering that subsistence living transcends all differences. She learns that living in this frontier region instills Alaskans of all backgrounds with a deep connection to the ebbs and flows of their natural environment.

Pati Jinich explores the sister cities of Alaska's capital, Juneau, and the capital of Canada's Yukon Territory, Whitehorse. In these remote cities, she finds a pioneering culture of artistry and entrepreneurship and small, tight-knit communities that produce big characters forging unique lives adjacent to the unforgiving wilderness.

Pati Jinich ventures to Alberta, where the rugged peaks of the Canadian Rockies give way to the wide-open prairies of Canada's heartland. It's a place where cowboys and immigrant communities work together in the constant creation of a new Canadian identity - showing what's possible when traditional ways and fresh perspectives coexist.

The next leg of Pati’s Pan-American journey begins in Montana and Wyoming. On the Blackfeet Reservation, the return of buffalo, foodways, and a nearly lost language. In Missoula, rescue dogs with a purpose and food help rebuild lives in a new country. Women entrepreneurs take over Main Street in White Sulphur Springs, and a community wool mill steadies sheepherding families in Buffalo, Wyoming.

Pati travels through Colorado into New Mexico, finding the Rio Grande near its headwaters. The legacy of jazz endures in Denver, mining lore lives on in Breckenridge, and craft beer sustains a family farm in the San Luis Valley. A couple builds an adobe home in Taos, teachers empower the next generation through food in Española, and Sephardic Jews emerge from a legacy of secrecy in Albuquerque.

Arizona brings Pati into the Sonoran Desert, which has shaped lives, traditions, and foodways for centuries. In Tucson, the legacy of Chinese chorizo, a poet gives Pati the mic, a chef forages the desert, and a musical genre known as Desert Noir. The first national Indigenous baseball team forms in Salt River, and a woman is on a mission to rescue produce headed for the landfill in Nogales.