An estimated 10% of the U.S.’ Mexican population now resides in the Midwest, where food practices play a stabilizing role in the adjustment process of peoples experiencing the consequences of geographic and social displacement. But food is also a gateway through which non-Mexican peoples may engage with previously unfamiliar culinary traditions, and potentially gain an appreciation for the presence of Mexican heritage that is so heavily maligned in mass media and journalism. My paper proposes that Mexican restaurants and bars may well provide the safest way to “do” Mexicanness in the Midwest region by providing a situational moratorium on animosity toward Latino, mestizo, and indigenous people: a zone where the fantasy of homogeneity is lifted as diners of all stripes revel in the sensual spell of steamed tamales and fresh salsa. My study investigates mobile food trucks as well as three separate brick-and-mortar restaurant establishments in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois to understand the potential of these spaces to activate the cultivation and promotion of mestizo consciousness, and also to interrogate the limits and policing of mestizo culinary activity in the Latino Midwest.
Remote from the borderlands negotiation of identity that flourishes in the Southwest of the United States, Mexican gastronomy takes on a different valence in areas where the historical patrimony and civic participation of Latinos are only now emerging. While my research reveals “Mexican food” to be a contested and polarizing territory, two major themes among observers appear with consistency. The first is the reality that Mexican cuisine within the United States, whether in traditionalist, experimental, or massified dimensions, is marked by conditions of coloniality, with the “Mexican” designation signifying both Spanish and indigenous clashes as well as the vertical orderings of U.S. capital. Another consistent theme surfacing across Mexican foodscapes is the centrality of maize (corn) to Mexican and Chicano cultural identity. Indeed, Roberto Cintli Rodriguez’ Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas (2014) sustains that, more than a sum of numerous wars of invasion, it was the seven-thousand-year old maize culture that connects Mexican peoples to their hemispheric indigeneity and represents the core expression of cultural knowledge and cohesion. In the Midwest, rather than aligning identity in accordance to the maize-based Mesoamerican civilizing project found in the Southwest, my findings reveal that restaurant owners are more likely to conceive their contributions either in terms of capitalist productivism or cultural ambassadorship.
My research draws on interviews conducted with business owners and patrons, restaurant criticism, and the growing body of literature on Mexican and Chicano foodways represented by Luz Calvo, Gustavo Arellano, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Roberto Cintli Rodriguez, Tassoulla Hadjiyanni and Kristin Helle, among others. The Mexican dining experiences examined here collaborate with the themes highlighted in this year’s conference by deliberating new sites of solidarity and aesthetic currency: the Mexican restaurant in the Midwest alternately provides both outlet and quarantine for the mestiz@ identity in the central states.
Cultural Studies , Social Science--Qualitative , Chicano/a -- Mexican
