Amplifying Immigrant Voices

Ramirez says the experience of working on Throwdown! With Bobby Flay both crystallized her desire to attend culinary school and illuminated her path toward activism. “I knew from the get-go that one of my missions was to be a voice for my community,” she says. “When you’re working at a restaurant and you don’t have the right immigration status, you feel invisible. And you feel like you don’t have a voice and you feel like you don't have any kind of rights.”

Ramirez briefly competed on MasterChef before enrolling at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, where she completed a nine-month night program while working for minimum wage as one of the first hires at Eataly. There, the executive chef only spoke English, while all the line cooks spoke Spanish. Ramirez employed her bilingual skills to translate, while also bolstering the staff’s morale. “I was trying to figure out a way to combine my love[s] for food and media and advocacy and activism,” Ramirez says of that time. “I’ve always been that person. Early on my mom had me volunteering and giving back to our communities; it’s an essential part of what we do.”

Ramirez then spent four years in New Zealand, where she taught a garden-to-table program at local schools and served as a judge on My Kitchen Rules New Zealand, both experiences that helped shape her philosophies as a chef and her culinary point of view. Next, she wrote her first cookbook, La Latina: A Cook's Journey Through Latin America, and then became the only chef in Food Network history to simultaneously host programs in both North and South America. While in New York during the height of the pandemic in 2020, Ramirez shifted her focus to activism. She played a pivotal role with World Central Kitchen, helping deliver over 100,000 meals daily to frontline workers and underserved communities and preventing the closure of more than 250 New York restaurants, which earned her recognition as a COVID Hero by the City of New York. 

Applying for the fall 2025 cohort of JBF’s Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change® came at a particularly opportune time. Ramirez had started going to the Hill with Justice for Migrant Women, giving her exposure to advocacy work at a federal level, but found that she needed more direction to respond to her most pressing questions: “How do we uplift voices? How do we show the importance of immigration and immigration reform for our industry?”

“[Chef] Bootcamp really gave me a lot more tools to go about this and different paths, what I was doing and not doing, and seeing,” Ramirez says. During the three-day program, Ramirez and her fellow chefs received policy and media training from industry and political experts and attended educational sessions about pressing food-system topics such as conservation programs to mitigate the impact of climate change, work permits for immigrants, and tariffs. One of the most powerful experiences for Ramirez was getting to hear from a government affairs expert, who helped her understand the role that chefs play in sharing their stories to educate elected officials on what impact their restaurants and the food system. 

“It’s so important that we understand how politics works so we can advocate for the change and things we need, especially in our industry,” Ramirez says. “Programs like Bootcamp really help you get over the fear and help you understand how this works. That was life-changing for me."