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Abstract
By exploring how working-class Mexican women transform their home cooking abilities into an economic resource to support themselves and their families, this paper looks at the philosophical approach women give to their entrepreneurial efforts. In particular, I offer the concept of familial wealth as the conceptual process to articulate the value and meaning women give to the implication of owning a small business. Familial wealth recognizes the social, cultural, personal, and ideological benefits that owning a business offers not only women business owners and their immediate family, but also the community they serve. This community goes beyond a customer eating a meal or buying food at a public kitchen. As a scholar conducting research with women who own small food stands in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, my scholarship is also served by women's philosophical views about their work. It is through the methodology of charlas culinarias (culinary chats), which is an ethnographic approach of gathering women's culinary stories via the exchange of free-flowing conversations, that I have learned about the social meaning women give to their work. Their work practices allow me to address issues that show the interconnection of productive and reproductive labor, thus moving beyond the ideological gender distinctions these spatial labor locations have historically implied. Furthermore, working-class women's work ethics provide a potential model to shift or subvert the principal value of market-economy, which emphasizes success in terms of capital gain obtained by competitive means, to success based on providing substances and sources for community building.
Notes
Notes
1. All conversations, or charlas, took place in Spanish. I have decided to offer translations in consideration of non-Spanish readers and constraint of space. However, in moments where word choices in Spanish are integral to the analysis, I am leaving sentences in the original language, followed by an immediate translation. All translations are mine.
2. The gorditas served at Cecy's are particular to the region of Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Generally they are made with flour, not corn tortillas; they are grilled, not deep-fried; they are as big as a typical corn tortilla, not as small as hamburger buns. They are as thick as pita bread. Once cooked, they are sliced in half, just like pita bread, and filled with a guiso. Guisos are a main Mexican meal such as mole, picadillo, chile relleno, red or green beef stew, barbacoa, of course all of this comes with either beans or rice, or both.
3. Oftentimes, ruptures as moments of anguish and suffering create the impetus that pulls women into opening small food related businesses. In Gonzales' case it was losing her job as a housekeeper in a hotel. Other examples of these turning points, in the case of married women with children, include a husband's death, a divorce, a husband walking out on the family, or a husband's inability to provide for the family. While my work focuses mainly on this group of women, there are other reasons women become food entrepreneurs. In the case of GG's Bakery: Mexican Style Bread and Pastries, following in a father's footsteps and the desire for a space for creative expression were the initial motivations in opening a bakery.
4. For over ten years, I have been engaging in charlas culinarias with working-class Mexican and Mexican-American women and many of them have helped support themselves and family by selling food at one period or another of their lives. See CitationAbarca, 2001 and Citation2006.
5. Barbara Haber's Cooking to Survive: The Careers of Alice Foote MacDougall and Cleora Butler (2005) also addresses how these two women transformed their cooking skills into a means of surviving. Among the fundamental difference between Harber's work and one I am working on, is that Foote MacDougall and Butler left written records of their food stories.
6. Since this article forms part of a larger project, the comments I make about familial wealth are based on general observations from the seven groups of women with whom I have had charlas culinarias for the last few years.
7. I make no claims for this to be a ground-breaking question; other feminist scholars working on food studies explore such form of inquiry (CitationZafa 1996; CitationHaber 2006; CitationWilliams-Forson 2006). Feminist critical race/class theory has done much to unveil patriarchal, capitalist ideological mechanism that aim to sustain the split of production and reproduction (CitationHooks 1990; CitationRuiz 1998). My work is one more voice to reinforce how concrete and ideological notions of production/reproduction have always been a trenza (braid) for the majority of working-class women.
8. Women like Encarnacieón Pinedo, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert, and Cleofas M. Jaramillo wrote down family and regional recipes with the intention that their cultural heritage remained in the memory of future generations. The women cooks of puestecitos who cook family recipes are engaged in the same practice, except they literally keep cultural heritage alive on people's palate.
9. In Voices in the Kitchen, (Citation2006), Liduvina Velez's food voice and the stories she shares with it are central to the theoretical analysis of the entire book.
10. The combination of border consciousness and food studies solidify my commitment to become what Karon Olson and Linda Shopes call a “citizen-scholar-activist” who is rooted in her community (1991, 201). “By doing work where we have personal commitments,” say Olson and Shopes, “our academic contributions are more likely to come out of a personal, creative, politically engaged self, one that has a social—and not simply academic—purpose” (201). My scholarship is based in the places and spaces I call home: the kitchen and the border.
11. The editors of From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies (2006) argue that early food studies examined gender issues only in terms of women's pathologies. In resent border studies dealing with women, particular of Cd. Juárez, have focused on the disappearance and the deaths of women. While issues of women's pathological relationships with food and the epidemic of femicides demand much importance, we need to also address the ways women create and maintain life, community and a sense of personal social and cultural space.
12. The charlas culinarias joins other feminist ethnographic methodologies that gather women's stories through the lens of food as a powerful means of social and cultural expression: Carole M. Counihan's “food-centered life histories,” Ramona Lee Perez's “kitchen table ethnographies,” and Annie Hauck-Lawson's “food voice.”
13. Concept quoted from Ashley, Hollows, Jones, and Taylor's analysis in Food and Cultural Studies, 16–18.
14. The work of Arlene Voski CitationAvakian (1997) and CitationCarole Counihan (2004) also examines numerous ways food can function as a source of empowerment for women.
15. Sazón refers the ability a cook has to create flavorful food using the senses as the guiding principles. In Voices in the Kitchen, I speak of the sazón as the epistemology of the senses, as an embodied sensory-logic.
16. In Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food and Power (2006) Williams-Forson studies a similar form of exchange-value for African American people as she explores the historical and cultural importance of fried chicken. She specifically studies women's significant role in this part of African Americans' culinary history.
17. The fact that Gándara (and a number of other women in my project) choose to inscribe her initials as the official name of the bakery, I see it as a public act of self-definition and self-validation. Women's names, bodies, or body parts often predominate in the realm of food business—this is certainly the case in many Mexican restaurants. In many cases these function to promote the nostalgic feeling of “mamá's coking” or “home cooking” or promoting food through sexualized images of women's bodies. Because of these gender stereotypes, the act of self-naming, of claiming ownership of a public space becomes a conscious or unconscious act that challenges the power dynamics that create gender, ethnic and, in this case, occupational stereotypes, CitationWilliams-Forson (2001) addresses this issue in regards to African-American people.
18. In his study of Taipei women entrepreneurs, Simon points out how the ability to helps others as a result of owning a business was a major motivating factor for many of the women he interviewed. For him this is an action that challenges the values of liberal economics, “which is based on the market economy of rational individuals pursuing their own self-interest” (2003: 214). What women highlight in Simon's case, and what is also evident in my work, is the social dimensions that businesses often afford them, which they manifest into their ability to help others, beyond their own children.
19. Correlation between my re-training as to how I see the meaning of knowledge, of theory making, within the context of the charlas culinarias echoes much of the critical challenging questions raised in the collection edited by Sharna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai in Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (Citation1991).
20. Feminist and Buddhist principles significantly influence the theoretical and analytical process within my food studies research. Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (Citation1992), edited by Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke offer an excellent interconnection between these three concepts: food, feminism, and Buddhism.
21. Anthropologist E. N. Anderson sees the politics of academic institutions in the United States implicated in these consequences. First of all, he argues that the discipline of food studies was not only “dismissed as frivolous until the 1980s,” but also “studies of food consumption, in particular, were relegated to the academic Siberia of ‘women's field’.” Academic men interested in food study focus their work in “food production—agricultural science—[which] was [and is] a ‘men's field’.” The result has been that academic departments where food production is studied receive much research funding (2005: 36).
22. The exploration of how women use the “home” appeal as the main promotional device in managing a restaurant is discussed and analyzed by Jan Whitaker in “Domesticating the Restaurant: Marketing the Anglo-American Home.” Beside the obvious ethnic difference between the women in Whitaker and my own work, their socio-economic background is the most significant. Whitaker looks at middle-class women and their social values, my work is looking a working-class women.
