Pati Jinich explores PanAmericana

Premieres Nov. 9, 2026, on PBS. Arizona brings Pati into the Sonoran Desert, a landscape that has shaped the lives, traditions, and foodways of people who have farmed it for four thousand years. In Tucson, chef and artist Feng-Feng Yeh reveals the legacy of Chinese immigrants through the Chinese Chorizo Project, tracing the more than one hundred Chinese-owned grocery stores that once anchored the city’s Mexican barrios. Poet Laureate Logan Phillips guides Pati through Barrio Viejo, a neighborhood at the intersection of history and modernity, showing her what the city bulldozed in the 1960s, then hands her a notebook before an open mic. Pati hikes into the desert with chef Aaron Lopez, who forages what he cooks and works with a seed bank holding eighteen hundred varieties of desert crops, most of them developed by Indigenous farmers over thousands of years. Musician Brian Lopez shares how the desert inspired him to create a new musical genre known as Desert Noir. At the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, where a freeway separates one of the wealthiest cities in the Southwest from the reservation beside it, former pitcher DJ Carrasco is bringing young baseball players of all tribes together to form the first National Indigenous Team. The journey concludes in Nogales, where sixty percent of America’s winter vegetables cross the border, and Yoli Soto and her organization Borderlands Produce Rescue intercept millions of pounds headed for a landfill and get it back to families across the borderlands. Pati ends the season at the crossing, looking south into Mexico.