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<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>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<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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: \u201cAvocados from Mexico.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s a question they\u2019d be wise to consider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the avocado, it turns out, is a collaboration. Mexicans and Americans worked together to get the industry off the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 Popocat\u00e9petl 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\u2019s 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 \u201ccourteous words of appreciation\u201d and celebrating the \u201cgenuine spirit of cooperation\u201d between the two nations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Henri Gilly\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks to such pioneers, my grandmother planted a diversity of seedling trees \u2014 Fuerte, Nabal, MacArthur, Hass \u2014 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 S\u00e1nchez Col\u00edn, a former Mexican governor who founded Mexico\u2019s first research center dedicated to the avocado. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, to borrow a catchphrase from my hometown\u2019s annual avocado festival, it hasn\u2019t all been \u201cpeace, love and guacamole.\u201d <\/a>The USDA quarantined Mexican avocados in 1914 to keep weevils out of American orchards. Mexico\u2019s efforts to end it launched a bitter \u201cavocado war\u201d 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<\/a> in 1998, the Mexicans won that, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 Michoac\u00e1n state to keep American farms safe from seed weevils and other pests. Mary Lu Arpaia, the foremost avocado expert at UC Riverside, hosts an \u201cavocado brainstorm\u201d 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\u2019s future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For anyone who has the \u201cAvocados from Mexico\u201d jingle<\/a> stuck in your head, there\u2019s cross-border cooperation to thank for that, too. A Dallas-based nonprofit run by the Mexican avocado industry spends millions annually \u2014 more than $68 million in 2023 \u2014 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%<\/a> of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like the nation\u2019s avocado cravings, the industry\u2019s challenges, from enforcing environmentally sustainable farming practices to stopping violent drug gangs, can\u2019t be met by one country alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n About Opinion<\/p>\n\n\n\n Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight<\/strong> are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect<\/strong> the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read more about our transparency and ethics policies<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s also threatened to retaliate with tariffs of her own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s unclear where all this will lead, other than raising the price of your guacamole, but politicians can learn from the humble avocado\u2019s story. We\u2019re better off working together. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Monique F. Parsons is a journalist and California avocado grower. She is the co-author, with Sarah Allaback, of \u201cGreen Gold: The Avocado\u2019s Remarkable Journey from Humble Superfood to Toast of a<\/em> Nation,\u201d<\/a> available May 20 from Counterpoint Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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…. Continue reading