Food Across Borders

Edited by Matt Garcia, E. Melanie DuPuis, and Don Mitchell

Rutgers University Press

The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes “American” in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from “the line in the sand” that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between “our” food and “their” food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between “us” and “them.”

The stories told in Food Across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

A 'Taco Truck on Every Corner'? Well organized and well written, Food Across Borders takes a broad inter-ethnic, transnational, and transhemispheric approach to its subject. The book is a welcome reminder and fresh interpretation of the central role that food plays in American politics and society at every level from production to consumption. José M. Alamillo, author of Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town

This important volume reminds us that eating necessarily involves the movement of foodstuffs, meanings, and bodies across borders, both intimate and geopolitical, and that 'building a wall' is no solution. Julie Guthman, author of Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California

Essays on such topics as negotiating nostalgia in family-owned and small-scale Mexican restaurants in the United States. Chronicle

A Conversation with Food Across Borders editors Matt Garcia, E. Melanie DuPuis, and Don Mitchell Meant to be Eaten

MATT GARCIA is a professor of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies, and history at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He is the author of From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement.

E. MELANIE DuPUIS is a professor and chair of environmental studies and science at Pace University, New York, and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author or editor of numerous books including, Dangerous Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice.

DON MITCHELL is a professor of cultural geography at Uppsala University in Sweden, and is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University in New York. He is the author or editor of numerous books including, of They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape and the Struggle of Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California.

Contents
List of Maps
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Food Across Borders: An Introduction
E. Melanie Dupuis, Matt Garcia, and Don Mitchell
Chapter 2: Afro-Latina/os’ Culinary Subjectivities: Rooting Ethnicities through Root Vegetables
Meredith E. Abarca
Chapter 3: “Mexican Cookery that belongs to the United States”: Evolving Boundaries of Whiteness in New Mexican Kitchens
Katherine Massoth
Chapter 4: “Cooking Mexican”: Negotiating Nostalgia in Family-Owned and Small-Scale Mexican Restaurants in the United States
José Antonio Vázquez-Medina
Chapter 5: “Chasing the Yum”: Food Procurement and Thai American Community Formation in an Era of Free Trade
Tanachai Mark Padoongpatt
Chapter 6: Crossing Chiles, Crossing Borders: Dr. Fabian Garcia, the New Mexican Chile Pepper, and Modernity in the Early Twentieth-Century US-Mexico Borderlands
William Carleton
Chapter 7: Constructing Borderless Foods: The Quartermaster Corps and World War II Army Subsistence
Kellen Backer
Chapter 8: Bittersweet: Food, Gender and the State in the US and Canadian Wests During World War I
Mary Murphy
Chapter 9: The Place that Feeds You: Allotment and the Struggle for Blackfeet Food Sovereignty
Michael Wise
Chapter 10: Eating Far from Home: Latino/a Workers and Food Sovereignty in Rural Vermont
Teresa M. Mares, Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland, and Jessie Mazar
Chapter 11: Milking Networks for All They’re Worth: Precarious Migrant Life and the Process of Consent on New York Dairies
Kathleen Sexsmith
Chapter 12: Crossing Borders, Overcoming Boundaries: Latino Immigrant Farmers and a New Sense of Home in the United States
Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern
Chapter 13: (Re)Producing Ethnic Difference: Solidarity Trade, Indigeneity, and Colonialism in the Global Quinoa Boom
Marygold Walsh-Dilley
Notes on Contributors
Index
Contents
List of Maps
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Food Across Borders: An Introduction
E. Melanie Dupuis, Matt Garcia, and Don Mitchell
Chapter 2: Afro-Latina/os’ Culinary Subjectivities: Rooting Ethnicities through Root Vegetables
Meredith E. Abarca
Chapter 3: “Mexican Cookery that belongs to the United States”: Evolving Boundaries of Whiteness in New Mexican Kitchens
Katherine Massoth
Chapter 4: “Cooking Mexican”: Negotiating Nostalgia in Family-Owned and Small-Scale Mexican Restaurants in the United States
José Antonio Vázquez-Medina
Chapter 5: “Chasing the Yum”: Food Procurement and Thai American Community Formation in an Era of Free Trade
Tanachai Mark Padoongpatt
Chapter 6: Crossing Chiles, Crossing Borders: Dr. Fabian Garcia, the New Mexican Chile Pepper, and Modernity in the Early Twentieth-Century US-Mexico Borderlands
William Carleton
Chapter 7: Constructing Borderless Foods: The Quartermaster Corps and World War II Army Subsistence
Kellen Backer
Chapter 8: Bittersweet: Food, Gender and the State in the US and Canadian Wests During World War I
Mary Murphy
Chapter 9: The Place that Feeds You: Allotment and the Struggle for Blackfeet Food Sovereignty
Michael Wise
Chapter 10: Eating Far from Home: Latino/a Workers and Food Sovereignty in Rural Vermont
Teresa M. Mares, Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland, and Jessie Mazar
Chapter 11: Milking Networks for All They’re Worth: Precarious Migrant Life and the Process of Consent on New York Dairies
Kathleen Sexsmith
Chapter 12: Crossing Borders, Overcoming Boundaries: Latino Immigrant Farmers and a New Sense of Home in the United States
Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern
Chapter 13: (Re)Producing Ethnic Difference: Solidarity Trade, Indigeneity, and Colonialism in the Global Quinoa Boom
Marygold Walsh-Dilley
Notes on Contributors
Index

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