Public schools, private foods: Mexicano memories of culture and conflict in American school cafeterias

Abstract

In this article I present and explore the school cafeteria childhood memories of four Mexicano (Mexican-origin) adults as illustrations of the importance of the school cafeteria as a complex public eating space for ethnic minority students. For students from non-dominant groups, the school lunchroom is more than just a place to eat lunch, it is a place where assimilative food pressures and peer relationships collide, forcing children to negotiate a home-school cultural divide through food and eating choices. The stories and memories of the adults considered here reflect the various ways they as Mexicano children balanced the social and class dynamics of the school lunch program and the potentially disparate food norms and dietary lessons of the school institution, those of their school peers, and those they knew from their own homes and communities. In addition, their stories had nutritional implications as well—specifically how school food served as a daily “American food” contact point for them as children, and how the school lunch catalyzed changes in their childhood food habits and those of their families. Personal accounts like those presented here display the significance and complexity of the American school cafeteria as a problematic “public” eating space for Mexicano children and a need for nutritionists, educators, and food service professionals to consider this setting in discussions of multicultural schooling and dietary acculturation.

Notes

Notes

1. I use the term Mexicano broadly here, to refer to persons residing in the US who label themselves as Mexican in origin, regardless of their birthplace. Therefore in this study Mexicano encompasses Mexican origin adults living in the U.S., as well as Mexican immigrants as well as second, third or later generation Mexican-Americans. I acknowledge that ethnic and cultural labels are slippery terms, and that there is a wide diversity (and discourse) of religion, class, region, indigenous association, and/or nation-state that could be found within a group of people that all call themselves Mexican-American or Mexican.

2. Mexican-American dietary acculturation patterns present a challenge to community nutritionists, as both positive and negative aspects to their acculturation process have been identified (Satia-Abouta 2002; Kaiser 2001). For example, choosing lower fat dairy products is a positive consequence to acculturation, but the elimination of nutrient rich traditional dishes such as beans lowers their fiber intake, and increased consumption of snacks and readily available convenience foods such as sweets, fruit juices, and sodas contributes to higher fat intakes. Other studies have shown variance of acculturative food patterns upon immigration due to geographic factors, such as proximity to ethnic supermarkets, or living in or near an “ethnic enclave”, a tightly knit community of the same cultural background (Aldrich et al. 2000). Furthermore, immigrant families even from the same country of origin have varying levels of education and socioeconomic backgrounds, which may strongly influence resulting dietary patterns upon immigration to the U.S. (Aldrich et al. 2000).

3. The names of the four individuals have been changed to protect their identities.

4. The work of Peter McLaren, Douglas Foley and Julie Bettie are all good examples of the application of performance theory to children's ritualistic and expressive behaviors at school. Grounded in Erving Goffman's work on social performance and Judith Butler's notion of performativity, performing school can have many physical/bodily manifestations: whether you show up to school at the proper time, what classes or “tracks” you choose, whether you dress according to school norms, how you choose to wear your hair, whether you have piercings, or speak ‘proper’ English. These performances also assume an audience, which can be school officials and teachers or other students. For an overview of this genre of work, see Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity, eds. Bryant K. Alexander, Gary L. Anderson, and Bernardo P. Gallegos, 2005.

5. I use the term “border crossing” in accordance with Delgado-Gaitan and Trueba's work Crossing Cultural Borders: Education for Immigrant Families in America (1991). Here they describe at length the skills immigrant children and their families must use to cross-linguistic, social, and cultural borders that separate the interlocked yet disparate spaces of school, home, and community.

6. I gratefully acknowledge the editorial assistance and counsel of the co-editors of this issue of Food and Foodways, as well as the four anonymous reviewers for their useful comments that improved the manuscript. I wish to also thank the four participants for candidly sharing their stories and memories with me, and for their comments on drafts of this paper.