Interview with Jake De Grazia: What Travel Really Costs Beyond the Ticket

🌍 The moment I realized my travel budget wasn’t just about pesos or euros—it was about reciprocity

I sat cross-legged on cool, sun-warmed adobe beside a woman named Luz who’d spent three hours teaching me how to shape masa by hand, her knuckles dusted with corn flour, her laughter rising above the low hum of a wood-fired comal. Her son, Miguel, handed me a chipped blue mug of atole—sweet, earthy, thick as velvet—and said, ‘This isn’t tourism. This is us letting you in.’ That sentence landed like a stone in still water. It came not from a brochure, not from an NGO report, but from a teenager whose family had hosted five international volunteers in six months—not because they needed money, but because they wanted their story told without translation loss. That afternoon in San Juan Guelavía, Oaxaca, marked the quiet end of my old travel calculus: cost per night, distance per bus ticket, photo count per hour. And the beginning of something harder, quieter, more honest: how to travel without extracting. That’s what led me to Jake De Grazia—and why his work with The Carrot Project matters far beyond its name.

🗺️ Why I went looking for carrots (and what I thought I’d find)

It started with a footnote—a tiny citation in a 2022 academic paper on participatory development in rural Mexico¹. The study referenced ‘The Carrot Project’ as one of two initiatives where community consent preceded design—not as a box-checked formality, but as iterative dialogue over eight months. No mention of funding sources. No logo. Just a contact email ending in @carrotproject.org. I’d spent years covering ‘ethical travel’—a term that increasingly felt like semantic padding—and I was tired of evaluating impact through glossy annual reports rather than shared meals, repaired roofs, or the number of local facilitators trained to lead workshops *without* external staff present.

I booked a flight to Oaxaca City in late March, not during high season, not for festivals—but for the shoulder weeks when humidity hangs low and the Sierra Norte trails are empty except for mist and mule trains. My plan was narrow: spend ten days embedded in two communities where The Carrot Project operated—San Juan Guelavía and Santiago Yaveo—observing, listening, and asking one question: Who decides what ‘success’ looks like here? I carried no recorder, only a Moleskine and a worn Spanish-English dictionary with coffee-stained margins. I knew Jake wasn’t based in Oaxaca—he split time between Mexico City and Berlin—but he’d agreed to meet me midweek in Tlacolula, at a cooperative textile studio where the project had supported natural-dye documentation since 2020.

🌧️ The rain that washed away my itinerary

Day three began with a 5:45 a.m. bus from Oaxaca City to San Juan Guelavía—a winding two-hour ride up into the cloud forest. I’d timed it to arrive before sunrise, hoping to photograph the fog lifting off terraced maize fields. Instead, a cold front stalled over the Sierra. By 7 a.m., rain fell in heavy, persistent sheets, turning red clay roads into slick ribbons. The bus dropped me at the village entrance, where a single concrete bench stood beneath a dripping eucalyptus. No sign, no welcome committee, no English-speaking liaison. Just a woman in a purple rebozo sweeping water off her doorstep, glancing up with polite, uncurious eyes.

I’d assumed structure: a scheduled meeting, a pre-arranged host family, maybe even a printed map. But none existed. The Carrot Project didn’t operate that way. Their local coordinator, a teacher named Elena, had told me over WhatsApp: ‘We don’t schedule visitors. We wait until someone asks to stay—and then we ask if the community wants them.’ I hadn’t asked. I’d arrived.

For four hours, I sat on that bench. Not waiting passively—but watching. Watching how elders gathered under the portico of the church, sharing cigarettes and stories in Zapotec. Watching children reroute runoff with sticks and stones, laughing when a miniature river carved new paths through the mud. Watching Elena walk past twice, each time pausing just long enough to say, ‘El agua no tiene prisa. Ni nosotros.’ (The water has no hurry. Neither do we.) I drank weak coffee from a thermos, ate a banana gone soft in my pack, and let my carefully constructed narrative dissolve. The conflict wasn’t logistical—it was philosophical. My travel identity relied on forward motion, on measurable output. Here, stillness was protocol.

🤝 The first real conversation—and why it took six hours to happen

At noon, Elena returned—not alone, but with Luz, the woman who would later teach me masa, and Don Rogelio, her father-in-law, who’d farmed these slopes for fifty-three years. They didn’t invite me into their home immediately. First, they walked me to the communal milpa—the shared cornfield—where rows of young maize stood knee-high, green against rust-colored soil. Don Rogelio broke off a leaf, crushed it between thumb and forefinger, and held it to my nose. ‘Huele a lluvia y a tierra viva,’ he said. (It smells of rain and living earth.) Then he pointed to a patch of soil where plastic mulch had been laid by a government program two years prior. ‘That soil is tired,’ he said, tapping his temple. ‘Not the land. The idea.’

Luz invited me inside only after we’d eaten lunch—beans stewed with epazote, handmade tortillas, pickled carrots grown in raised beds built with Carrot Project materials. Over steaming bowls, she explained how the project began: not with a grant application, but with a request—from the women’s weaving collective—to document dying dye recipes before elders passed. ‘They sent Jake,’ she said, nodding toward a faded photo taped to the wall: a younger man with glasses, kneeling beside a vat of indigo, hands stained deep blue. ‘But he didn’t bring cameras first. He brought notebooks. And he asked, What do you want remembered? Not what do you want shown.’

That distinction—remembered versus shown—became the axis of everything. The Carrot Project doesn’t build ‘community centers.’ It funds local archivists to record oral histories in native languages. It doesn’t ‘train artisans for export markets.’ It supports bilingual curriculum development so Zapotec-speaking children learn math using local crop yields as variables. Impact isn’t measured in jobs created, but in how many youth now choose to stay—and teach.

💡 What Jake actually does (and what he refuses to do)

We met in Tlacolula on Day 6, at the textile co-op’s sunlit courtyard. Jake arrived on a borrowed bicycle, hair damp from rain, wearing a shirt patched at the elbow with embroidered corn motifs. No pitch deck. No metrics dashboard. He poured tea from a thermos and said, ‘If you’re here to verify our theory of change, I can’t give you data. I can give you names. And I can tell you which decisions we didn’t make.’

He described three deliberate refusals:

• ❌ No ‘signature projects’: They reject proposals that center foreign expertise—even when funding hinges on it. When a Berlin foundation insisted on installing solar panels before consulting energy needs, Jake declined the grant. ‘Light matters less than refrigeration for medicine,’ he said. ‘We waited six months while the clinic mapped actual power gaps.’
• ❌ No external evaluation teams: Impact assessment happens quarterly—with local facilitators trained in participatory rural appraisal (PRA), not outside consultants. ‘When outsiders define “capacity building,” they often mean “making locals act like us,”’ Jake explained. ‘We measure capacity by who leads the next meeting—not who attends.’
• ❌ No branding on infrastructure: The rainwater catchment system in Santiago Yaveo bears no logo—only a carved rabbit (‘the carrot’ in local riddle tradition) and the date: 2022, año de la memoria. ‘Symbols should belong to place, not donor,’ he said.

Later, walking past a mural of hummingbirds and maize stalks, he gestured to a small plaque: ‘Hecho con semillas propias. Con apoyo del Carrot Project.’ (Made with our own seeds. With support from The Carrot Project.) ‘Support’—not ‘funded,’ not ‘built.’ A grammatical choice with weight.

🌅 How the journey continued—after the interview ended

I stayed eleven days—not ten. On Day 9, Luz taught me to grind nixtamal on her metate, the rhythmic scrape-scrape-scrape vibrating up my arms. On Day 10, Miguel showed me how to identify edible weeds growing between rows of squash—quelites, rich in iron, cooked with garlic and chili. On Day 11, Elena handed me a spiral notebook filled with student-drawn maps of watershed boundaries, annotated in both Zapotec and Spanish. ‘You asked who decides success,’ she said. ‘Here. These are the answers.’

I left without photos of ‘the project.’ No group shots. No ribbon-cuttings. Just recordings of children debating irrigation rights in rapid-fire Zapotec, a bundle of dried marigold petals for tea, and the tactile memory of corn dough yielding under my palms—resistant at first, then pliant, then alive with warmth.

📝 Reflection: What travel really asks of us

This wasn’t a ‘transformative trip.’ It was a slow recalibration—like adjusting a lens that had been slightly misaligned for years. I’d entered believing ethical travel meant choosing the ‘right’ hostel or avoiding elephant rides. But Jake and the people of San Juan Guelavía revealed a deeper layer: ethical travel begins with relinquishing the right to narrate. Not just deferring to local guides, but surrendering the assumption that your presence warrants a story arc—with setup, climax, resolution. Real reciprocity means accepting that your visit may be uneventful. That the most important thing you witness might be silence, or patience, or the careful folding of a rebozo.

I stopped measuring travel in highlights and started measuring it in thresholds crossed: the moment I stopped checking my phone for signal, the first time I accepted ‘no’ as complete answer, the day I wrote in my journal not what I’d seen—but what I’d been asked to hold.

✈️ Practical takeaways—woven, not listed

You don’t need to find The Carrot Project to apply what I learned. You just need to shift your questions.

Before booking anything—whether a homestay, workshop, or guided hike—ask: Who designed this experience, and who benefits when it ends? In San Juan Guelavía, the weaving workshop I joined charged 220 MXN ($12 USD), paid entirely to the elder leading it. No middleman. No ‘donation’ tacked onto the fee. The price reflected actual labor—not perceived exoticism. I verified this by sitting with the cooperative’s ledger (open to all members) and seeing the same amount recorded in the ‘instructor honorarium’ column—no administrative overhead line item.

When a tour operator promises ‘authentic cultural exchange,’ watch for verbs. Does their website say ‘learn from local artisans’—or ‘collaborate with them on co-designed textile experiments’? The latter implies shared authorship. The former often masks extraction. I saw this contrast firsthand: one nearby village hosted ‘Zapotec cooking classes’ run by an Oaxaca City company (fee: $45 USD; 70% retained by operator); San Juan Guelavía’s version was called Tiempo de Masa (Time of Dough), led by mothers rotating weekly, priced at 150 MXN ($8 USD), with all funds going to a communal seed bank.

And if you’re drawn to organizations like The Carrot Project—look past mission statements. Check their financials: do salaries for local staff exceed those for international coordinators? Do their reports name individuals—not just ‘community members’? Jake shared theirs openly: 82% of operational funds go to locally hired roles; the highest-paid position is Elena’s, as regional coordinator.

⭐ Conclusion: Travel as quiet participation

I used to think ‘budget travel’ meant cutting costs. Now I see it as allocating attention—spending less on spectacle, more on stillness; less on speed, more on shared rhythm. That rainy bench in San Juan Guelavía wasn’t a delay. It was the first lesson: presence isn’t passive. It’s the work of showing up without agenda—and staying long enough for the agenda to dissolve.