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Abstract
This essay argues that the film Tortilla Soup constructs a mediated culinary touristic experience for mainstream spectators who are invited to vicariously visit a Mexican American family. Analysis of the film's neocolonialist discourse demonstrates how the commercialization and appropriation of food culture mirror hegemonic tendencies to market and consume ethnicity. Tortilla Soup attempts to deconstruct homogenizing notions of Latinidad. Yet it straddles and ultimately collapses these divergent discourses through its treatment of food, sound, gender, and space. Ultimately, Tortilla Soup reaffirms hegemonic ideologies about Latinos/as that privilege whiteness and contain ethnic “otherness.”
Keywords:
A previous version of this project was presented at the 2004 National Communication Association Convention in Chicago.
A previous version of this project was presented at the 2004 National Communication Association Convention in Chicago.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers at CCCS for their critical insights and support. She would also like to thank Gisela Hoecherl-Alden, Naomi Jacobs, Kristin Langellier, Jay Mechling, Kent Ono, Sarah Projansky, and Nathan Stormer for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.
Notes
A previous version of this project was presented at the 2004 National Communication Association Convention in Chicago.
1. I use the term “spectators” to designate roles constructed by the film.
2. See Anne Bower, ed., Reel Food (New York: Routledge, 2004) and Gaye Poole, Reel Meals, Set Meals: Food in Film and Theater (Sydney, Australia: Currency Press, 1999).
3. Bower, Reel Food, 7.
4. Ana López, “Are All Latins from Manhattan? Hollywood, Ethnography and Cultural Colonialism,” in Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, ed. John King, Ana M. López, Manual Alvarado (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 78.
5. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002), 145, argues for the “fundamentally visual nature” of tourism. This gaze is not limited to white spectators; nor do I mean to imply that anyone of Euro-American descent would necessarily assume this gaze.
6. Michelle Habell-Pallán and Mary Romero, Latino/a Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 3. The much-debated term Latino bears a range of meanings and is politically charged. For some scholars, the term signifies “groups of people living in the United States who trace their ethnic roots to Central or South America.” Charles Ramírez-Berg, Latino Images in Film. Stereotypes, Subversion, & Resistance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 5. Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop. Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (Columbia University Press: New York, 2000), 193, describes the “Latino community” as “an ‘imagined community’…a compelling present-day example of a social group being etched and composed out of a larger, impinging geopolitical landscape.” He emphasizes that the concept of a “Latino community” tends to refer to a demographic, numeric presence, an instrument that serves government bureaucracies and marketers alike, and one that encourages stereotyped and distorted representations. Habell-Pallán and Romero discuss the “poly-cultural construction” of the term Latino/a that provides an “endless circulation from similarity to difference.” Latino/a Popular Culture, 4. Chon A. Noriega and Ana M. López, The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), x, understand the term “as a form of panethnic politics designed to redefine the national for the benefit of the specific ethnic groups subsumed under that term.”
7. David Hollinger Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 3, writes that a “postethnic perspective favors voluntary over involuntary affiliations, balances an appreciation for communities of descent with a determination to make room for new communities, and promotes solidarities of wide scope that incorporate people with different ethnic and racial backgrounds.” Much scholarship points to the historical formation of the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino.” See, for example, Suzanne Oboler, Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)Presentation in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Geoffrey Fox, Hispanic Nation: Culture, Politics, and the Construction of Identity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); and Marcele M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez, Latinos: Remaking America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
8. Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 50.
9. Mainstream US media as well as media targeted specifically to Latino/a audiences tend to collapse differences between cultural groups. See, for example, Rosa Linda Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) and Arlene Dávila, Latinos, Inc: The Marketing and Making of a People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
10. Molina Guzmán and Angharad N. Valdivia, “Brain, Brow, and Booty: Latina Iconicity in US Popular Culture,” The Communication Review 7 (2004): 205–21, explore the homogenization as well as the differentiation of Latinidad through Latina iconicity, a move that parallels my analysis of Tortilla Soup: “Latinidad is a category constructed from the outside with marketing and political homogenizing implications as well as from within with assertions to difference and specificity.”
11. Lisa Heldke, Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (New York: Routledge, 2003), xv.
12. Lisa Heldke, Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (New York: Routledge, 2003), xvi.
13. Kent Ono, “Power Rangers: An Ideological Critique of Neocolonialism,” in Critical Approaches to Television, ed. L. R. Vande Berg, L. Wenner, and B. Gronbeck (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 273, defines neocolonialism as “coordinated aspects of multiple levels of oppression (gender, class, sexuality, and race) as they have been historically handed down to those of us living in the United States from generation to generation […] Neocolonialism […] maintains the current state of power via representational means, utilizing such forces as television to justify present proprietary relations.”
14. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994), 45.
15. Greg Tate, ed., Everything but the Burden. What White People are Taking From Black Culture (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 14, explores the appropriation of blackness in a market-driven world where African Americans are “sold as hunted outsiders and privileged insiders in the same breath.”
16. According to Lucy M. Long, “Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness,” Southern Folklore 55 (1998): 181, culinary tourism is “the intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an Other, participation including the consumption—or preparation and presentation for consumption—of a food item, cuisine, meal system, or eating style considered as belonging to a culinary system not one's own.”
17. See, for example, Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz, ed., Eating Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); James L Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell, The Cultural Politics of Food (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Carole M. Counihan and Steven L. Kaplan, Food and Gender: Identity and Power (Newark, NJ: Harwood Academic, 1998).
18. See, for example, John Urry, The Tourist Gaze; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Martin Mowforth and Ian Munt, Tourism and Sustainability: New Tourism in the Third World (London: Routledge, 2003).
19. Nicholas De Genova and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, Latino Crossing: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2003), 3, 6.
20. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez, ed., Latinos: Remaking America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 176. More recent studies indicate that Latinos/as in general are received more favorably by the general US public. See, the Pew Research Center, “America's Immigration Quandary. No Consensus on Immigration Problem or Proposed Fixes,” 30 March 2006,http://peoplepress.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=274 (accessed 9 July 2006).
21. Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters, 53, points out that the Mexican–US border has been the subject of hundreds of films since the days of silent film. In both the US and Mexico, the border “figures as the trope for absolute alterity, a ‘no-man's land’ symbolizing eroticized underdevelopment—an untamed breeding ground for otherness and the site of unrepressed libidinal energies.” Like the metaphors that Santa Ana describes, these films configure Mexicans as “outcasts, degenerates, sexually hungry subalterns, and outlaws.”
22. Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising, xvii.
23. Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising, 27.
24. Fusco, English is Broken Here, 24.
25. Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York: Shocken Books, 2000), 183.
26. Dávila, Latinos, Inc., 163.
27. Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 254.
28. Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chavez-Silverman, Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,1997).
29. Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chavez-Silverman, Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England,1997). 30.
30. Halter, Shopping for Identity, 14, charts the profound impact of ethnic marketing on contemporary ethnic identities. She demonstrates how commercial culture functions both as subversive and hegemonic.
31. Halter, Shopping for Identity, 179. See also: Mary C. Beltrán, “The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive,” Cinema Journal 44, 2 (Winter 2005): 50–67.
32. Michael J. Weiss, “The Salsa Sectors,” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1997, www.theatlantic.com/issues/97may/count.htm (accessed 10 May 2003).
33. In writing the word Mexican, I bear in mind that this term is often used to signify a sort of authenticity that is highly constructed.
34. Mexican food has often functioned as an object of derision in mainstream US cinema and television. In addition to the Frito-Lay Frito Bandito and Taco Bell's talking Chihuahua, Mexican food and drink are often associated with low social class status and linked to “Montezuma's revenge” and thus to illness and impurity (Lethal Weapon I (Donner, 1987), The Magnificent Seven (Sturges, 1960), Unlawful Entry (Kaplan, 1992), Clear and Present Danger (Noyce, 1994)). Mexican restaurants in mainstream films often employ “illegal” employees (Lone Star (Sayles, 1996)). Numerous representations of tequila signify that characters have “bottomed out” (Born on the Fourth of July (Stone, 1989)).
35. Sur La Table consistently updates its website to reflect current food phenomena, and the site markets cooking utensils through ethnicity. The Tortilla Soup line was entirely Web-based.
36. Traditionally made of volcanic rock, the molcajete (mortar) and tejolete (pestle) are cooking tools invented by the Aztecs to grind chiles, spices, and herbs.
37. The “Border Girls” own the LA-based restaurants Border Grill and Ciudad and are former hosts of the Food Network's cooking show “Too Hot Tamales.”
38. Stephen Hunter, “Tortilla Soup: A Combo Plate. In Remake of Eat Drink Man Woman, the Food is the Star,” Washington Post, 21 November 2001, C12.
39. Rick McGinnis, “Tortilla Soup,” www.rickmcginnis.com/movies/tortillasoup.htm (accessed 10 July 2006).
40. Jodi Paper, “Oh, so delicioso!” 2001, The San Francisco Examiner, 24 August 2001, www.examiner.com/ex_files/default.jsp?story=X0824TORTILLA (accessed 10 May 2003).
41. James Stark, “At the Movies: Tortilla Soup,” Gastronomica 2, 1 (2002): 100.
42. Robin Balthrope, “Food as Representative of Ethnicity and Culture in George Tillman's Jr.'s Soul Food, Maria Ripoll's Tortilla Soup, and Tim Reid's Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored,” in Reel Food, ed. Ann Bower (New York: Routledge, 2004), 112.
43. California's Proposition 187 denies public social services, publicly funded health care, and public education to people who are suspected of being illegal immigrants. These immigrants come predominantly from Mexico. For a detailed discussion, see Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
44. Negrón-Muntaner, Boricua Pop, 247–48, examines how the Puerto Rican Barbie, and Ricky Martin “address and seduce American consumers in ways not available to darker-skinned boricuas.” Martin's hips are a “social lubricant, introducing seemingly foreign material into the (American) cultural bloodstream.” She attributes part of his ability to assuage discomfort on the part of white Americans to his “upper-class blanquito (‘little white’) status.”
45. Amy Bentley, “From Culinary Other to Mainstream America: Meanings and Uses of Southwestern Cuisine,” Southern Folklore 55 (1998): 244.
46. A term by James Crawford, Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of English Only (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992).
47. Extensive scholarship charts the gendering and racializing treatment of Latinos/as in US media. Guzmán and Valdivia, “Brain, Brow, and Booty,” 206, write: “Latinos are generally devalued and feminized, and Latinas fall beyond the margins of socially acceptable femininity and beauty.” See also: Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman, Tropicalizations; Rosa Linda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen. Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and MeXicana Encounters; Flores, From Bomba; Habell-Pallán and Romero, Latino/a Popular Culture; King, López, and Alvarado, Mediating Two Worlds; Negrón-Muntaner, Boricua Pop; Noriega and López, The Ethnic Eye; Clara E. Rodríguez, ed., Latin Look: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the US Media (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); Ramírez-Berg, Latino Images; Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism.
48. Southwestern cuisine describes the cuisine of the US–Mexican borderlands. It is the “offspring of Native American and Mexican foods and spicing […] combined with European-American elements.” Bentley, “From Culinary Other,” 238–239.
49. Bentley, “From Culinary Other,” 243.
50. Ashley et al. note an increase in the visual aestheticization of food on cooking television, a tendency that I see in food films. Bob Ashley, Joanne Hollows, Steve Jones, and Ben Taylor, ed., Food and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 2004).
51. Michael O'Sullivan, “Tortilla Soup,” The Washington Post, 23 November 2001, WE 43.
52. Jon Azpiri, “Tortilla Soup,” All Music Guide, www.mmguide.musicmatch.com/album/album.cgi?ALBUMID=1205655&AMGLENGTH=full (accessed 10 July 2006).
53. Fusco, English is Broken Here, 29, contends that appropriation, never apolitical, is often a form of symbolic violence.
54. Dávila, Latinos, Inc., 218, writes that “ethnic marketing in general—not solely Hispanic marketing—responds to and reflects the fears and anxieties of mainstream US society about its ‘others,’ thus reiterating the demands for an idealized, good, all-American citizenship in the constructed commercial images and discourses.”
55. Tate, Everything but the Burden, 14.
56. Bentley, “From Culinary Other,” 242.
57. Dávila, Latinos, Inc., 219.
58. I do not wish to assert that there is any kind of essentialized authentic cuisine. Cuisines change and are influenced by a wide range of forces. Thus, one might speak more appropriately of traditional cuisines.
59. Bentley, “From Culinary Other,” 247.
60. Dávila, Latinos, Inc., 124. So-called “positive images” of Latinos/as support dominant relationships of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Marketing privileges lighter-skinned Latinas.
61. Dávila, Latinos, Inc., 124. So-called “positive images” of Latinos/as support dominant relationships of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Marketing privileges lighter-skinned Latinas. 172.
62. Anita Mannur, “Model Minorities Can Cook: Fusion Cuisine in Asian America,” in East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, ed. Shilpa Dave, Leilani Nishime, and Tasha Oren (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 74–75.
63. Anita Mannur, “Model Minorities Can Cook: Fusion Cuisine in Asian America,” in East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, ed. Shilpa Dave, Leilani Nishime, and Tasha Oren (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 16.
64. Chon A. Noriega, “Internal ‘Others:’ Hollywood Narratives ‘about’ Mexican-Americans,” in Mediating Two Worlds. Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, ed. John King, Ana M. López, Manual Alvarado (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 52.
65. See, for example, Nicholas Kanellos, Thirty Million Strong: Reclaiming the Hispanic Image in American Culture (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1998); Rodríguez, Latin Looks.
66. Molina Guzmán and Valdivia, “Brain, Brow, and Booty,” 211.
67. See, for example, Ana López, “Are All Latins from Manhattan? Hollywood, Ethnography and Cultural Colonialism,” in Mediating Two World: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, ed. John King, Ana M. López, Manual Alvarado (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 78; and Shari Roberts, “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat: Carmen Miranda, a Spectacle of Ethnicity” Cinema Journal (1993): 3–23.
68. See, for example, Molina Guzmán and Valdivia, “Brain, Brow, and Booty”; Negrón-Muntaner, Boricua Pop; Mary C. Beltrán, “The Hollywood Latina Body as Site of Social Struggle: Media Constructions of Stardom and Jennifer Lopez's ‘Cross-over Butt,’” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 19 (2002): 71–86.
69. Molina Guzmán, “The Symbolic Colonization of Hybrid Bodies Through Popular Narratives of Latinidad,” Conference Papers, International Communication Association, 2003 Annual Meeting, San Diego, 4.
70. Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters, 49, argues that Lone Star (Sayles, 1996) affirms dominant hierarchies of race “through a white, benevolent, patriarchal gaze.” Like Tortilla Soup, Lone Star is situated in a multilingual, hybrid cinematic world that is “driven by a deeply colonialist and phallocentric project.”
71. In her discussion of Rosie Perez, Angharad Valdivia, A Latina in the Land of Hollywood and Other Essays on Media Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 105, points out that Latinas with accents almost always are cast as working-class.
72. Elizondo (Martín) is of Basque and Puerto Rican descent. Peña (Leticia) is Cuban-American, but the film insinuates that her accent is Mexican. As my colleague Gene Delvecchio pointed out, Leticia's accent does not sound like the accent of a Mexican Spanish speaker talking in English, but rather has a much more guttural quality. The casting of non-Mexicans in the major roles tends to lump different Latino/a groups together rather than to differentiate linguistic and cultural specificity.
73. Most other main characters in the film are not of Mexican descent. Obradors (Carmen) is Argentine, Mello (Maribel) is French and Portuguese, and Hortensia (Welch) is English and Bolivian. Only Marie (Yolanda) and Rodriguez (Orlando) are of Mexican descent.
74. Latinas “have been portrayed as either frilly senoritas or volcanic temptresses.” (Rodríguez, Latin Looks, 2.) Shohat and Stam point out that mainstream US America tends to “associate Latin America, and especially Latin American women, with verbal epithets evoking tropical heat, violence, passion, and spice,” Unthinking Eurocentrism, 183. See also Molina Guzmán and Valdivia, “Brain, Brow, and Booty”; Beltrán, “The Hollywood Latina Body”; and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “Jennifer's Butt,”Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 22, 2 (1997), 181–94.
75. Angharad Valdivia, “Stereotype or Transgression? Rosie Perez in Hollywood Film,” Sociological Quarterly 39 (1998): 394, refers to the polarized images of Latinas: “in contrast to the rosary-praying maids or devoted mothers, we get the sexually out of control and utterly colorful spitfire, an image quite specific to Latinas.”
76. David Giammarco, “Raquel Welch: The Goddess Factor,” Cigar Afficionado July/August 2001, www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/CA_Archives/ (accessed 18 May 2003).
77. López, “Are All Latins” 77.
78. Elizondo, Obradors, Ripoll (the film's director), Menendez and Blasi (Screenplay writers) and Rodriguez were nominated for ALMAs.
79. Casting is often a political issue. For example, Jennifer Lopez's casting as Selena led to protesting on the part of some Mexican Americans who disapproved of a Puerto Rican being cast as a Mexican American. Negron-Muntaner, Boricua Pop, 230.
80. Halter, Shopping, 131.
81. Beltrán, “The Hollywood Latina Body”; Negrón-Muntaner, Boricua Pop.
82. Dávila, Latinos, Inc., 111.
83. A Good Year (Scout, 2006); No Reservations (Hicks, 2007); and The Food of Love (Chelsom, 2007). Steve Chagollan, “Eat Drink Make Movie: Hollywood's Next Course,” New York Times, 9 July 2006, AL7.
84. Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, “Paul Simon's the Caveman,” in Latino/a Popular Culture, ed. Michelle Habell-Pallán and Mary Romero (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 157.
85. Davila, Latinos, Inc., 124.
86. Sharmila Sen, “Cooking Up Food Studies. Studying Women and Food,” Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, Boston University, 7–11 June 2006.
87. Joanne Finkelstein, “Dining Out: The Hyperreality of Appetite,” in Eating Culture, ed. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
88. Chagollan, “Eat Drink.”
89. Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: Food Sex Identities (London: Routledge, 2000), 2.
90. Sidney W. Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 7.