Foodmaps: Tracing Boundaries of ‘Home’ Through Food Relations

Abstract

This paper aims to explain food mappings as a methodology to research spatial-temporal aspects of food relations as experienced from the cultural perspectives of people in specific communities. It proposes the concept of foodmaps as a useful tool to trace gendered boundaries of home among working class immigrant communities. I ground this discussion through sample foodmaps taken from fieldwork among Dominican communities in New York City and reflections on Dominico-Mexican food alliances. I conclude with some implications of food mappings, suggesting directions for future research on Greater Mexico and “Latino” food studies in the US.

Keywords:

• Dominican food practices
• Dominico-Mexican food alliances
• foodmaps
• place-memory

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the collaborators in my fieldwork study for permission to use their words and images. I thank Carole Counihan, Meredith Abarca, and Ramona Lee Perez, for their sharp and kind revisions. To them and to Melissa Salazar I also thank for their interest in food mapping methods that inspires and challenges me to continue refining this tool. To Brian Stross I thank for his time and patience reading the first draft. To Anna Jones, thank you for the kind help with grammar and syntax. To Jean Duruz for suggestions that helped me improve an earlier draft.

Notes

Notes

1. For a similar usage see, Barndt, Deborah. 2002. Tangled Routes: Women, Work, and Globalization on the Tomato Trail. Lantham, MD. Rowman and Littefield. Informed by African Diaspora theory, I mean by roots specific foodways that Dominican families bring with them as they struggle for spaces of home in NYC. Routes are actual geographic trajectories, movements within and outside of neighborhoods and households, as well as the narrative memories and relational traces we leave as migrants in our search for shelter and senses of home.

2. Based loosely on Mohanty (2003) and Ahmed (2000), I define home as a place-specific historical relation, an experience, and a narrative site.

3. Donna Haraway's term (1991), the way I interpret it means that socio-cultural boundaries do not pre-exist but are conditioned by the life projects of situated subjects, in daily interactions and negotiations with institutional agendas and historical power regimes.

4. These apparent—subtly gendered—dichotomies of the “miniature” personal-domestic and the ‘gigantic’ political-public implicate each other as they dwarf and magnify matrixes of power and agency. As Susan Stewart (1996) has suggested for other kinds of narrative memory-work such as keeping souvenirs and collecting.

5. Mintz (1997), Douglas (1997), Counihan (1999), Christie (2003), Bentley (1998), and Williams-Forson (2006) document the emergence and transformation of food substances and their meanings in social context as they are produced through cultural histories of specific people and places.

6. Mohanty (2003), Ahmed (2000), Duncan (1996), Visweswaran (1994), Scott (1992), and Massey (2001) focus on spatial-historical aspects of marginalization, foreground personal experience as mediated through narrative testimonial practices, and pay attention to race/class/gender in the historical and present struggles of third world populations.

7. Cognitive mapping has been used successfully especially by feminist cultural geographers (Rocheleau 1995), in studying women's agricultural and environmental local knowledge of food production, and for cognitive and memory mappings of kitchen spaces (Christie 2003). Also a new wave of social historians uses mapping to study local neighborhood histories and senses of place, revealing through multiple voices many layers of one single area (Hayden 1997). Bioregionalists (Aberley 1993) have developed participatory regional and home mappings focusing on ecological environments. These ecological mappings and their uses have theoretical implications if one tailors this method to trace ethnographically cultural regions of home.

8. Foodmaps are always situated from the perspectives of the people that are drawing such maps. Hence the parallel maps that I produce through my fieldwork documentation and in my academic narratives have specific partialities. I engage with food research as a Dominican “native” anthropologist, and as a visual artist with an interest in material culture and its representation. I consider these cultural locations as partial and privileged perspectives (Haraway 1991) requiring critical awareness. Researchers are cultural workers, meaning that what we produce as academic narratives are also cultural representations and creative projects. That is why I consider important to at least pay attention to our own foodmaps, at least as a self-calibrating device since we are the main instruments of inquiry.

9. The emphasis on communities, instead of ethnic group points to the diversity of formal and informal networks that arise across ethnic and geographical lines in neighborhoods, cities and states that have a sizable Dominican population. The Dominican population for example, in NYC is very diverse; among the seven families I worked with only two had intersecting networks. They navigate different food routes and places in the city, socialize and create communities with different sectors of Dominican and other Latino groups and local organizations.

10. In contested and contradictory spaces such as migration and displacement, people experience a need to invest specific artifacts such as food, plants, or songs with “commemorative vigilance” (Bardenstein 1999; Bal 1999). Memory work is created through cooking practices and food narratives, and both are actively re-invented from the present; they are interpretive, imaginative, and in constant negotiation between forgetting and remembering, excluding/including. Acts of remembrance occur through the confluence of nostalgic (affective), traumatic, and critical memory (Sturken 1999; Bal 1999, Spitzer 1999).

11. I also created seven questionnaires on food socialization, which became mostly a guide to myself to make sure I was getting all the aspects of food relations I needed. I occasionally will use questions from them that they will answer orally as we went about the day. I found however, that what obtained were bare bone answers, without the richness and food-memory details present in the ones gathered through spontaneous interactions.

12. This reveals a similar phenomenon in the transnational roots of national cuisines in the Caribbean identified by R. Wilk in the case of Belize.

13. “La bandera pa mi e'arró, habichuela y epageti, pa que rinda y alcanse pa' má gente … ese e' el plato principal nuestro … mi bandera la acompaño con lasaña tambien … yo licuo mi s'habichuela, asi la hacia mi mamá, con poquito grano, y asi yo la cocino, con mucha crema … yo le empecé a añadir cerely aqui, dicen que muy saludable … esa e'la bandera que yo entiendo, pero trae contradicione con la version de otra gente …”

14. “…mi familia no bucó fundita con arró habichuela, y leche en polvo, de esa que daba el gobierno de Balaguer, por principioje' que se jugaba con el hambre del pueblo…”

15. “… yo me gano mi propia entrada, chiripiando aqui y allá … yo doy má de 100% pa' mantené el hogar a flote … como un barco cuando se tá undiendo siempre hay una forma de salbarlo… … yo trabaje en factoria, immigracion venia, y lo primero en juir eran lo jefe, porque no tenian papele … en Sto. Dgo. trabaje en la zona franca y en telecomunicacion … en la zona franca uno tenia que comer en la calle, como un perro, asi era el lunche. … ahora trabajo de niñera en mi casa, tengo siete carajito a mi cargo … eto trabajo y eta ciudad matan a uno, pero … si el enemigo no me mató, eto tampoco me va a matá …”

16. “Cuando llegué aqui me asombré de vé gente llorando en lo trene, yo me decia, diantre! que le pasará a esa gente… un dia fui yo la que rompí a llorá en el tren 4, asi, sin que me importara quien me viera… ahora e'que yo entiendo, ay!, e'que la gente arratra tanta tritesa en eta ciudá… siempre pensé en regresar, no me imagine eto, ete frio, eta baina, cuatro parede tó el tiempo… vine con un ojetibo, pero una cosa se ganan y otra se pierden… y ya soy ciudadana, lo hise po mi's'joj…”

17. Thanks to Ramona Lee Perez for reminding me of the importance of immigrants' traumatic experiences of new climatic environments. More elaboration on the specific ways participants experience this syndrome can't not be discussed in the space of this paper.

18. There are some interesting distinctions here. Recaito in DR is the herb Arenguim fetidum (a new word plant), what may be called culantro in Mexico. In DR verdura or verdecito refers to cilantro leaves (Coriandum Sativa) an old world herb introduced in the Americas by the Spaniards during colonization.

19. For a great discussion of ‘convivencia diaria’ (daily interactions of women across pan-ethnic lines) Ricourt & Danta (2003)Hispanas de Queens: Latino Pan-ethnicity in a NYC Neighborhood.

20. “no!, yo no sabia cociná mangú, pero mi marido mejicano lo probó un dia en un retauran dominicano y le gujtó, me preguntó si yo lo sabia hacé… ya aprendí a cociná comida mejicana, me encanta hacé taco lo domingo, y al niño le gujtan tambien…”

21. “… yo prefiero el moro… pero a mi mejicano le gutan su habichela, siii, entonce la cocino para él… mira, ahora en el altar de la cocina tengo dó virgene, la de Guadalupe y la de la Altagracia, así lo dó no sentimo bendecido…”

22. See Mintz's work for analysis of the emergence of food systems in the Caribbean, Sophie Coe America's First Cuisines (1994) for Mesoamerica. Read also Abarca (2006) pp. 96–100 for a wonderful interpretation of mole as a foundational meal in Mexico.

23. Arjun Appaduari's concept of ethnoscapes is of great usefulness here if taken beyond a theoretical nicety. See Jean Duruz's Eating at the Borders: Culinary Journeys, for a nuanced use of this concept.

24. Place-memory implicates here spatio-temporal positions. I define place as a geopolitical and socio-culturally produced location. Since places are experienced from culturally specific personal histories one place (such as a neighborhood in the Bronx) has many possible representations. A definition of space as “social relations” (Duncan 1996) seem to be the most productive in analyzing how places from kitchens to streets are produced in the present through historically specific political relations. These definitions are key to me for mapping transformations of food, place-memory and gendered migrant cultural histories.

25. The use of “scape” in home, food, etc., is meant to highlight the focus on place-space.

26. For example, I have two pilot projects in progress, one mapping learning trajectories (through formal and informal education) and the other a local history project of East Austin, as mapped through community gardens.