Latina/o™: Performing the Authentic in Cardenas Markets

In this paper, I will consider how the supermarket’s physical landscape engages in performing certain notion of Latina/o or Mexican consumer authenticity. In keeping with the theme of “Deliberating Latina/o Studies,” I... [ view full abstract ]

In this paper, I will consider how the supermarket’s physical landscape engages in performing certain notion of Latina/o or Mexican consumer authenticity. In keeping with the theme of “Deliberating Latina/o Studies,” I look to the supermarket as an often promiscuous site of identity formation, where various narratives of an authentic Latina/o product are consumed. While previous studies of supermarket are often broadly polarized between consumer behavior reports and top-bottom ethnographic studies, my paper will function at the grassroots level of supermarkets, with a clear focus on one supermarket chain—Cardenas Markets-- in a specific geographic locale—the Inland Empire region of Southern California (Dávila). I propose looking at how Latina/o identity, in all of its permutations, exists and also packaged, sold and consumed within this context.

The spectacular nature of Cardenas’ layouts, advertisement, and sensory elements resonate with me as a form of performance. Moreover, I am intrigued by seeing how these material environments toggle through Mexican constructions of authenticity—as dictated by the historical realities of Southern California migration—and how disjuncture in the narrative demonstrate other articulations of ethno-racial identity. In particular, I focus on the section of the store known as the ethnic food aisle. What I propose as occurring within the ethnic food aisle in particular is how the space performatively hails customers of all ethno-racial background to engage with its products. Central to this analysis is detailing what kind of Latina/o subject is constructed commercially, and how that does or does not affirm with the variegated populations of the local community.

In this paper, I use ideas of “disidentification” (from José Muñoz) and “scriptive things” (from Robin Bernstein) to explore the various ways in which consumers interact with the aisle. These ideas help make sense of how bodies move in relation to its scriptive suggestions of an authentic Latino product. Melding ethnography with a material culture analysis, I put forward the ethnic food aisle as a site that undergirds the question of positionality for ethno-racialized subjects in consumer culture. Looking at products, decorations, and layout, I suggest that the way the ethnic food aisles hails functions as a form of disidentification for shoppers. While ideas of an authentic Latina/o product are present, these costumers’ doo not merely accept or reject these authenticity narratives. Rather, I affirm that in embodied practice, consumers rework codified cultural logics to compose a multi-tiered narrative of Latinidad. With this, my paper offers the everyday materiality of a supermarket as an important locus for critical studies of race and ethnicity, consumer culture studies, and various other interdisciplinary fields—a complex site mandating an inherently undisciplined approach.

Citations:
Bernstein, Robin. "Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race." Social Text 27.4 101 (2009): 67-94.
Dávila, Arlene. Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. Vol. 2. U of Minnesota Press, 1999