No Immigrants No Spice

This piece was featured first on Oct 1 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

It started with a Trevor Noah bit.

“There should be a rule in America. You can hate immigrants all you want, but if you do, you don’t get to eat their food,” he says. “You hate immigrants, no immigrant food… No immigrants, no spice.”

Emergency room doctor Vibha Gupta was watching this clip during the first Trump administration. Her own family had come from India to Michigan, where she grew up, and it struck a chord with her living in the rich immigrant mix of the Bay Area.

“I wouldn’t say that I was a natural activist, but I work in Richmond and many—40, 50 percent—of our patients don’t have insurance and 30 percent maybe don’t have documentation,” she said. “So, I was seeing so much fear and the pathology that comes with it.”

Day after day, she saw heartbreaking situations. The construction worker coming in with a heart attack because he’d ignored his symptoms. Someone with a bad cut that they didn’t get treated because they are afraid of ICE only to have to show up to the ER because it got badly infected. “I was feeling so angry. What can I do? I’m just an ER doc,” she said. “We patch people together and send them back out into the wild.”

But the Trevor Noah bit gave her the seed of an idea. “That’s kind of how it started,” she said. “This is something that resonates with me and I’ll make a t-shirt.”

The design was simple, white letters on a black T that read: “No Immigrants No Spice.”

People loved the shirts and they loved the idea of organizing around the concept. Shouldn’t they do events? Vibha was in. “I was a total nerd on student council and the thing that I wanted to do was the pep assemblies even though I hated sports,” she said. “I always had fun doing outrageous events.”

No Immigrants No Spice produced several editions of a massive event called BBQ Without Borders featuring local chefs with roots all over the world alongside dance, storytelling, art, and more. The very first one raised $12,000 for Pangea Legal and the National Immigrant Justice Center. In 2023 and 2025, they raised almost $30,000 each event, which was distributed as microgrants to immigrants in need of a little help. No Immigrants No Spice is now an official 501c3 non-profit.

And they’ve got another event coming up called the Spicy Soiree featuring Palestinian-Syrian chef Reem Assil of Reem’s California and bites and desserts from Merkado’s executive chef Lorenzo Caamal. They’ve got a full dinner option or you can just join for the entertainment, which will feature Melissa Cruz, Zedan & Osman, and Diana Gameros with Raúl Vargas on cajón.

There will also be a Spicy Soiree market featuring immigrant owned and aligned makers, artists, and creators like Berkeley’s Bolita Masa, the Palestinian-Cuban pop-up Azucar, and the Middle East Children’s Alliance’s Shop Palestine store. It’s all happening October 10 from 5:30-10pm at Merkado.

It’s a perfectly Bay Area lineup for a perfectly Bay Area story. Just a person organizing for her neighbors, drawing people into a conversation about the value of everyone in our communities.

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Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum