Comedor Azul is a group of three multidisciplinary artists, Amaris Cruz-Guerrero, Joaquín Stacey-Calle, and Leslie Gomez-Gonzalez, who live and work in Miami and Los Angeles. Our project consists of a blue table that travels to different communities in an effort to share, listen, and sit together. 

Our practice is centered on reintroducing foods through the decolonization and reimagining of sharing these meals and the collective effort to nurture and ground as we aim for an idealized future in which we design ways to foster regenerative ideas, systems, and processes that are ultimately designed with our humanity in mind and with full respect and harmony with Nature.

We gather and breathe the same air. Our feet touch the same floors/soils/grasses. A meal is prepared and shared during our gatherings as it is as necessary to eat together as it is to breathe together.

Our goal is to reintroduce the ways we look at food, talk about food, source food, cook food, eat food, and share food. This allows us to be in living relationship to food- a reclaiming of Black and Indigenous food knowledge from our motherlands: Republica Dominicana, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, and Ecuador. Our mission is to nurture, educate, and build community. We center kincentric ecology, intersectional ecofeminism, food sovereignty and amplify the voices and stories of historically marginalized peoples like Black and Indigenous communities.

At our heart-center is a space that cultivates self, and community healing and care. We plan to celebrate radical joy, honor our ancestors and intergenerational community. And most importantly, provide a safe, inclusive and compassionate space that is actively seeking liberation for all. This Is a human-nature relationship. The land has to get to know us first in order to proceed. The notion that we are not separate from nature but an integral component. By “eating the landscape,” we are intentionally gathering our ingredients, preparing the food, and in communication with the land and people.

Many grandmothers and grandfathers have dedicated their lives to the practice and preservation of ancestral knowledge. It is our birth right to reclaim our ancestral knowledge, and we must go east and slowly; because we will never recover from colonization. However, we are on a path towards resilience and sovereignty. This is more than a project. This is a practice that connects us to a source that is greater than ourselves. We are collectively manifesting and visioning a world where we can connect with the land and our cultural identity. We want to engage with Miami’s diverse population which is primarily made up from the Caribbean, Central America, South America and the First Nations such as The Seminole Tribe of Florida and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. We want to connect to those who are in need of nutritious food, to those who are in need of work, to those are the symbol of the agricultural community, to farmworkers and their families, to sustainable business, to activists, and to local women gardeners. We want to engage with those who are willing to listen and share traditional wisdom- the rest of the community and beyond.

Land Acknowledgement

We acknowledge that the territory now known as “South Florida” has been the traditional homeland of Native nations, including the Calusa, the Tequesta, and today the Miccosukee and the Seminole. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all First Nations people present today.