Saturdays of leisure and memories … : The Mexican market ‘La Pulga’ in the San Joaquin Valley (California)

Abstract

This research note aims to explore the links between food, memory, nostalgia and leisure through a series of weekly visits to an itinerant Mexican market in the United States. Taking an ethnographic approach to the market of La Pulga held in the city of Merced in California’s San Joaquin Valley, we consider how, in the Mexican–American transnational context, this market provides an opportunity for Mexican migrants to interact with other Mexican people, recreating similar social dynamics displayed in traditional food markets in Mexico. We argue that as well as being a food supply centre, this market may be viewed as a space in which Mexican migrants seek to recreate their homeland and to enjoy an alternative leisure experience. Thus, the visit to the market may be observed as a complex activity in which the senses, the social interactions between Mexican migrants and the consumption of food in a festive setting play a central role in enabling these migrants to break with their everyday lives. Likewise, we suggest that the visit to the market every Saturday not only constitutes a leisure activity, but also serves to construct the ethnic and collective migratory identity that links Mexican migrants with their homeland.

Keywords:

• market
• memory
• food
• nostalgia
• Mexican–American

Notes

1. A restaurant employee. Mexican by birth, he migrated to the USA 18 years ago.

2. According to data from the Census Bureau for the year 2012.

3. Our translation from the original Spanish.

4. A 56-year-old female Mexican sojourner migrant. She goes to the United States twice a year to visit her family. Each stay lasts one or two months.

5. California’s San Joaquin Valley: A Region in Transition. Congressional Research Service. The Library of Congress. 2005.

6. A Mexican postgraduate student.

7. A 42-year-old female migrant who has been in California for more than twenty years.

8. In the collective culinary memory nurtured by sensory experience, offering handmade tortillas indisputably implies a product of higher quality. For a more detailed discussion of the point of tension between machine-made and handmade tortillas from a historical perspective, see ‘¡Que vivan los tamales!’ by Jeffrey Pilcher (2001).