The avocado is a collaboration, not a competition between nations. Mexicans and Americans worked together to get the industry off the ground
By Monique F. Parsons
Feb 9, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)
Americans buy about 250 million pounds of avocados around the time of the Super Bowl, more than any other season. Most are grown in Mexico.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
If you find yourself at a Super Bowl party on Sunday, chances are good there will be a bowl of guacamole on the table. Americans buy about 250 million pounds of avocados this time of year, more than any other season. Most of the stickers on the black pebbly fruit say: “Avocados from Mexico.”
How did a subtropical fruit indigenous to the cloud forests of Latin America end up as a centerpiece snack for the U.S. football championship?
As President Donald Trump trades barbs with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum over immigration, guns and drug cartels, and threatens tariffs that could send avocado prices soaring, it’s a question they’d be wise to consider.
My family has grown avocados in the foothills of Carpinteria in Santa Barbara County for three generations, and I grew up seeing Mexico as a competitor. Long before the Mexican industry paid millions for catchy Super Bowl ads, California growers pitched guacamole to football fans to mark the opening of our season.
But the avocado, it turns out, is a collaboration. Mexicans and Americans worked together to get the industry off the ground.
Your Super Bowl party might taste differently if not for men like Adolfo Rodiles, whose ranch filled with more than 3,000 specimen trees near the Popocatépetl volcano outside Atlixco, Mexico, was an inspiration to early California growers. Or Alejandro Le Blanc, a Mexican citizen of French descent who owned the Mother Fuerte, the tree that produced California’s first viable commercial avocado. Le Blanc generously shared fruit and budwood, and shortly before his tragic death in the late 1930s, wrote a heartfelt letter to California avocado growers, commending their “courteous words of appreciation” and celebrating the “genuine spirit of cooperation” between the two nations.
Henri Gilly’s Hacienda Xahuentla also drew pilgrims to Mexico from California, including avocado man Carl Crawford, who brought Gilly budwood from Southern California trees, and Archibald Shamel, a U.S. Department of Agriculture physiologist who spent years studying Mexican avocados in hopes of finding summer-bearing varieties for introduction to the United States.
Thanks to such pioneers, my grandmother planted a diversity of seedling trees — Fuerte, Nabal, MacArthur, Hass — on our Santa Barbara County ranch after World War II, joining a regional quest to find the ideal variety for California. She also joined the California Avocado Society, a nonprofit group that welcomed international members and in 1973 gave an honorary board seat to Mexican agriculturalist Salvador Sánchez Colín, a former Mexican governor who founded Mexico’s first research center dedicated to the avocado.
Of course, to borrow a catchphrase from my hometown’s annual avocado festival, it hasn’t all been “peace, love and guacamole.” The USDA quarantined Mexican avocados in 1914 to keep weevils out of American orchards. Mexico’s efforts to end it launched a bitter “avocado war” in the mid-1990s, complete with lawsuits, a public smear campaign and allegations about double agents. Mexico eventually triumphed over the Californians, agreeing to fund an elaborate pest inspection scheme administered by the USDA. When the Washington Post asked the rivals to submit recipes for a pre-Super Bowl guacamole contest in 1998, the Mexicans won that, too.
Despite political skirmishes, collaboration continues to this day. California-based distributors operate packing houses in Mexico. The USDA hires Mexican entomologists, some of whom dodge bullets and violent drug gangs, to inspect orchards and packing houses in Michoacán state to keep American farms safe from seed weevils and other pests. Mary Lu Arpaia, the foremost avocado expert at UC Riverside, hosts an “avocado brainstorm” for international researchers every four years in conjunction with the World Avocado Congress, a convention where Mexican and American scientists, marketing experts and growers join colleagues from dozens of countries to plan the avocado’s future.
For anyone who has the “Avocados from Mexico” jingle stuck in your head, there’s cross-border cooperation to thank for that, too. A Dallas-based nonprofit run by the Mexican avocado industry spends millions annually — more than $68 million in 2023 — marketing avocados to Americans in compliance with a federal marketing order that assesses 2.5 cents for every pound of avocados sold. This effort, overseen by the USDA, has fueled a nationwide demand for avocados, a hunger so great that all the avocados grown in California satisfy less than 12% of it.
Like the nation’s avocado cravings, the industry’s challenges, from enforcing environmentally sustainable farming practices to stopping violent drug gangs, can’t be met by one country alone.
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While Trump threatens to tax Mexican imports and continues racist taunts like renaming the Gulf of Mexico, Mexican President Sheinbaum notes that 75% of the guns confiscated in Mexico are illegally smuggled from the United States. She’s also threatened to retaliate with tariffs of her own.
It’s unclear where all this will lead, other than raising the price of your guacamole, but politicians can learn from the humble avocado’s story. We’re better off working together.
Monique F. Parsons is a journalist and California avocado grower. She is the co-author, with Sarah Allaback, of “Green Gold: The Avocado’s Remarkable Journey from Humble Superfood to Toast of a Nation,” available May 20 from Counterpoint Press.
