Gastronomic Nostalgia: Salvadoran Immigrants' Cravings for Their Ideal Meal

Abstract

Immigrants typically express cravings for the food of their homeland, but for undocumented and temporarily documented Salvadoran immigrants living in the United States, the hunger for their traditional cuisine is particularly poignant. To cope with a history of food scarcity in El Salvador and their documentation liminality in the United States, Salvadoran immigrants in this study crave symbolically rich foods. Salvadoran women provide these foods by recreating for their families an ideal Salvadoran meal into which they “groom” meanings of an imagined past and a hoped for present and future. Salvadoran immigrants' cravings, more cultural than physiological, are not readily satisfied, thus contributing to the overconsumption of food and the high rate of overweight among first-generation Salvadoran-American children.

Keywords:

• Salvadorans
• immigrants
• food deprivation and war
• cravings
• nostalgia
• food habits
• food symbolism
• child obesity

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Pre-doctoral Research and a University of Massachusetts Graduate Fellowship.

Notes

¹During the mid-1980s until the time this study was conducted, Salvadoran immigrants' public presence and political power was minimal. In fact, the community was mostly clandestined, and Salvadoran restaurants in Somerville were “culinary imposters,” masquerading as Mexican establishments to provide “culinary sanctuaries” to undocumented Salvadorans. Over the last decade, as increasing numbers of Salvadorans have become documented, Salvadorans have become more visible and their political activities more apparent. For example, the Embassy of El Salvador web site lists over 170 Salvadoran immigrant community organizations across the U.S. Today, there are large, visible Salvadoran ethnic communities in many American cities, and the general public is becoming familiar with Salvadoran cuisine.

²See Montes Mozo and Garcia Vazquez (1988) for the impact of Salvadoran remittances on their sending communities in the 1980s. Currently, Salvadoran immigrants send 2.5 billion dollars annually to their families back home (Coutin 2010).

³Due to an out of court settlement between the American Baptist Church and the U.S. government about claims that the U.S. government summarily denied Salvadorans and Guatemalans political asylum, Salvadorans were given the opportunity to reapply for political asylum.

⁴During the years of this study, Salvadorans in Somerville could be undocumented, temporarily documented, or documented. Temporary documentation included many categories, including temporary protective status (TPS/DED), political asylum re-applicant (ABC), suspension of deportation applicant (NACARA), or a visa holder. Documented immigrants were typically either classified as legal aliens (green card holder) or naturalized citizen. Salvadorans' U.S. born children, like all persons born on U.S. soil, are American citizens. Each of these classifications determines a Salvadoran's access to strategic resources, including whether they have the right to be visible.

⁵There are several Salvadoran traditional beverages, including refrescos (fruits with water and sugar), licuado (fruits blended with milk) or horchata (made from rice flour, seeds, cinnamon, sugar, and vanilla). However, gaseosas, particularly Coca Cola, has middle class caché in El Salvador as well as in the United States.

⁶Grant McCracken (1986, 1988) theorizes how consumer goods are already embedded with meaning from a culturally constituted world. He posits that people extract these embedded meanings through grooming goods. The very act of polishing a sports car, for example, bestows the cultural meaning of the car on the owner. I contend that Salvadoran women groom meaning into food, thus making it available to be extracted through its consumption.

⁷As opposed to Salvadoran immigrants' dialogue about the taste of food, Americans engage in “nutrispeak.” Nutrispeak, I posit, is a nutritional and biochemical food discourse. Americans often discuss a food's calorie content and nutrient components, saying something is “high in calories” or “high in cholesterol” or “has omega 3 fatty acids.” For an analysis of this phenomena and its relationship to modern forms of power, see Stowers 2003.