Cultivating borderland food memories, from field to screen

ABSTRACT

A documentary film producer situates key scenes for her work-in-progress film on youth, culture, and farming near the United States–Mexico border, Remembering How to Eat, in terms of theories of memory, place, and ecology; border studies; cinematic spectatorship; and sensory ethnography. The paper argues that documentaries about food and farming can help render a sense of place-based memory and identity, particularly on the border, which is typically characterized by mobility and transience. Such films can help cultivate a sense of food sovereignty in communities by rendering a multisensory engagement with the culinary and agricultural past. Such engagement includes not solely plants and farming processes but stories, recipes, and folktales. The paper lays the groundwork for a documentary cinematic aesthetic that gleans from these cultural materials a borderland sensorium that treats food and plants as active agents that compel us to act in certain ways. This approach can not only help transmit the multisensory, embodied knowledge of food and agriculture to future generations but sets up a politics that includes the plant world, often seen as mere background, in discussions about climate change that are crucial to our collective agricultural futures.

KEYWORDS:

• memory; place; ecology; food; border studies; cinematic spectatorship; sensory ethnography