Cocinas Públicas: Food and Border Consciousness in Greater Mexico

Abstract

Food is fundamental to the workings of identity and belonging, power, and social change. This special issue of Food & Foodways addresses such critical concepts by exploring cocinas públicas of Greater Mexico. We locate this investigation of Mexican foodways within the contexts of social hierarchy, spatial division, political economy, narrative, identity, and place. Articles in this volume address some of the following questions: How do public foods and public kitchens impact our conceptualizations of gender, class, ethnicity, and age as well as regional, national, and transnational identities? How are individual and collective identities, communities, and economies shaped, contested and negotiated through public food practices? In what ways do the production and consumption of food intertwine the public kitchen with the domestic kitchen? In what ways do these spaces oppose or contradict each other? How do the production, distribution, and/or consumption of food in public spaces impact regional history, cultural politics, and globalization? How does the frame of “Greater Mexico” contribute to our understandings of these processes? Finally, what can the study of Mexican food in public spaces teach us about cross-cultural, cross-class, and intergenerational contact and conflict? The articles included here address many of these issues while providing new directions for thinking about border consciousness through the examination of food, cooking and cuisine.

Keywords:

• sabor
• sazón
• Culinary–cultural theory
• Culinary ethnography
• Food consciousness
• Transcultural foods

Notes

Notes

1. “Paladar,” which means palate or a taste, is the name of Aaron Sánchez's restaurant in the Lower East Side in New York. “Paladar” is also a Cuban word that refers to small restaurants operated out of private houses.

2. See, for example, the works of Ohnuki-Tierney (1993) on Japan, Mussell and Brown (1984) on ethnic/regional food in the U.S. 1984, and Pilcher (1998) on Mexico.

3. In Consuming Geographies, cultural geographers Bell and Valentine (1997) formulate a scaled series of contexts—body, home, community, city, region, nation, global—for “thinking through food” (12) and culture. Although the authors acknowledge overlaps in these categories, here we propose a theory of culinary intersections with our exploration of a border model for food studies.

4. The concept of “puestecito” literally translates to little public places.

5. Government initiatives to contain and sanitize street commerce are reminiscent of Mary Douglas' work in Purity and Danger: cleanliness is ensured by imposing order, putting people and things in their proper place (Douglas 2002).

6. James Holston's The Modernist City, particularly chapter 4, “The Death of the Street,” and Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies are especially useful for theorizing social life in the margins of urban space and governmental regulation. In this model, people, not institutions, are the center of social life and the condition of marginality is a bridge to the future.

7. Previous works fill in some of the gaps. For example, there is abundant literature on agricultural policy (Alvarez 2001; McDonald 1994, 1997; Sheridan 2001; Stanford 1994), farm and food processing labor (Barndt 2002; Torres 1997; Wells 1981, 1990; Zavella 1987, 1991), men's public food work (Alvarez 1994, Gutmann 1998; Montaño 1992; Limón 1989), the history of the Mexican food industry (Pilcher 1998; Aboites 1989; Bauer 1990), festival, ritual, and food symbolism (Sandstrom 1991) and indigenous populations (Stephen 2001). All of this, of course, rests on a rich foundation on Spanish language scholarship on Mexican food traditions (esp. Long-Solís 1997), and innumerable volumes on Mexican cookery and its Tex-Mex and Southwestern variants, not to mention popular literature (Esquivel 2001; Chavez 2006) and music (Otálora 1999).