Vancouver, BC · Mexico City → Canada
Heirloom corn, memory, and the work of keeping tradition alive.
Luis is the founder of Xinachtli, a small-batch tortilla project here in Vancouver. He grew up in Mexico City, surrounded by corn that tasted like something alive — complex, aromatic, grounding. When he moved to Canada, he realized how much he missed it. Not just the flavour, but the feeling of home tied to it.
Most tortillas in North America are made with industrialized corn: hybrid, processed, grown with chemicals. Luis wanted something different — something closer to what he knew. So he began importing heirloom, high-altitude corn from Mexico and making his own tortillas.
Over the past six years, he’s also been growing these traditional varieties at the UBC Farm, on a small plot run by Maya elders. It’s slow work, patient work — work rooted in care.
Photographing him felt like watching someone open a series of tiny treasure boxes. Every husk had its own shape, its own colour. Some soft, some sharp, some almost luminous. There’s something humbling about seeing how much history can live inside a single ear of corn.
Luis’s work sits at the intersection of longing and craftsmanship: when you miss something deeply, you find ways to bring it back into the world. His tortillas — the textures, the smell of warm masa, the quiet rhythm of pressing them — carry that story.
This series, The Immigrant Table, is about exactly that: how food becomes a bridge between where we come from and where we are now. How memory shows up through taste. How something so simple can hold so much.
Luis’s work is one of those rare things that feels both old and new at the same time. I’m grateful to have photographed it — and excited to share the next stories soon.
