Long before La Valiente had a name, Mexican food was how my family cared for one another and built a life. Years before I was born, my mother made tamales, snacks, and sauces in Chicago while my father brought them to neighborhood Mexican grocery stores. Together, they created Telo, our first family food business.

Later, in Cerritos, San Luis Potosí, my mother taught me that Mexican cooking was never simply a collection of recipes. It was a way of tasting, adapting, and caring for others—knowledge practiced until it became instinct and passed forward through food.

I carried those lessons into my work as a cook and consultant, and into my study of Mexican cuisine. As that work took me around the world, I came to understand how deeply sauces carry the memory, techniques, regional identities, and distinct ways of building flavor that define Mexican cooking.

I created La Valiente to honor my mother Mariana Guerrero Herrera and my grandmother Marta Herrera Barrón, who shaped the knowledge I inherited—and, through them, the generations of women whose wisdom they carried. La Valiente shares that inheritance with those who grew up with these flavors, those reconnecting with them, and everyone who simply loves Mexican food.