I am delighted to share with you this interview with Claudia Hernández Castillo in the third episode of Voces desde y para los mercados. This and previous episodes are available on this website or my audio.com page.

Claudia is a market trader in Mexico City and a passionate advocate of public markets’ preservation. For almost two decades, Claudia has built the bridges that have brought the arts into the markets for the benefit of her fellow market traders and local residents. Her work has transformed marketplaces into opera and theatre stages as well as places where children and adults can learn music or how to make short films.

Claudia’s interview is an immersion in the long process and grassroots work necessary to bring marketplaces to the centre of the city’s cultural policies. She is an inspiring example of marketplace activism, full of an enthusiasm rooted, as she explains, in the intimate relationship that market traders develop with what others might see as simple, functional commercial infrastructure. Thus, in this episode, we also learn from Claudia about her work to preserve the traders’ oral history and the public markets’ culinary tradition through photography, short films, and social media.