12/9/2013Dakota J. DominguezAmerican Frontiers Final Project
Resistance, Persistence and Fusion in Mexican-American Food
“I want to make tamales for Thanksgiving, too,” I say to
Nana through the phone, my grandmother on my father’s side. We
have been chatting about putting together Thanksgiving dinner. Me
in Washington, and her back home in Salida, Colorado. All of this
small talk has been leading up to me asking about tamales. When I
say I want to make them, Nana laughs and says, “Well hito, you
better get started!” It is two days before Thanksgiving.
The advice Nana gives me on how to prepare tamales is a
story about who we are as a family. She does not give me a recipe
with measurements and exactitudes, but offers me morsels of
culinary wisdom informed by a sensory understanding of cooking
and flavored with bits of family history and flourishes of
Spanish. Her understanding is based on a long tradition of making
tamales for special occasions with her mother, and I can tell
that preparing and eating tamales is a reminder of Mexican
identity. The long hours of hard work that making tamales
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requires is a testament to this act of cooking as an act of self-
affirmation. Nana wishes me luck as I embark on my first attempt
to make tamales.
Mexican-American foodways represent the persistence of
indigenous American cultural values and identity. The practice of
these foodways also represents a form of little recognized agency
for under-privileged people of indigenous heritage, particularly
working class women. The Raramuri ethnobotanist Enrique Salmón
writes, “My identity and culture as a Mexican is reaffirmed
whenever I eat tamales…My reaffirmation of identity and
connection to place is not a direct result of the tamales, but
comes from the processes that surround tamales, (p.8).” The
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the term foodways as “the
eating and culinary practices of a people, region, or historical
period.” Making and eating tamales is an example of this.
Feminist scholar Meredith Abarca describes the kitchen and
the cooking that goes on there as a decolonizing space, where
pre-colonial values have persisted for centuries, with Mexican-
American women keeping ancient culinary knowledge and cultural
values alive through the self-expressive art of cooking (Abarca,
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Voices from the Kitchen). When I make tamales I am participating in
something ancient. In southern Mexico, tamales have been eaten as
a food for special occasions since at least 250 BC (Pilcher,ꜟQue
vivan). Some of the ingredients, and the names of the festivals
have changed, but we still prepare and eat tamales to celebrate
together.
Some might ask, so what? Food and cooking are often seen in
American dominant society as relatively trivial. Given all of the
bloody conquest and domination that have gone on here in the last
500 years, how can a simple combination of ingredients and the
eating of tamales on Thanksgiving say anything profound about the
history of the Americas? To understand the answers to this
question, one must seek to look at the world from the perspective
of alternate worldviews and deconstruct colonial notions of
knowledge and power.
The notion that food is a trivial aspect of life or history
is simply an extension of a Western imperialist worldview that
seeks to trivialize everything. The trivialization of everything
comes from a culture of industrialism with its base of knowledge
in empirical science, where all things are seen as isolated and
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separated from everything else. Nature is seen as a machine with
simple parts that can be taken out and replaced by human
industriousness as needed. This way of thinking has led to
massive intrusions into natural systems such as hydro-engineering
and industrial agriculture. Alternatively, indigenous worldviews
and systems of knowledge point toward a deep underlying
interconnectedness of all things in the universe. The universe is
seen primarily as a flow of interdependent organic systems,
rather than isolated parts in a machine. In indigenous worldviews
human power is derived from seeking and accepting a place in the
grander scheme of these systems, rather than as the machinist
toying with the parts (Cajete, ed.).
In the same way that the force of industrialism has
trivialized food and nature, it has trivialized the knowledge of
the senses. Cooking is primarily a knowledge of the senses. One
must have a sensual understanding of how to get something just right
via their sense of touch, smell, and taste. Honing in these
senses is essential to the mastery of cooking anything well. In a
patriarchal/industrial society, smell, touch and taste have been
gendered as feminine senses and therefore disenfranchised and
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trivialized in favor of the all-powerful sense of sight and the
written word (Abarca 58-59). By making the male-dominated written
word the only legitimate source of knowledge, patriarchal
industrialism has attempted to silence and trivialize many of the
ways that indigenous culture, history, and sense of identity are
transmitted. Despite popular belief, however, traditions of oral
storytelling, and forms of sensory/bodily knowledge related to
food and culture have merely been trivialized and not destroyed.
In the practiced and loving hands of Mexican-American women,
these ways of knowing have persisted. The power to re-harness
these ways of understanding the world comes not from re-inventing
them but from simply recognizing their strength.
In acknowledging the important implications of food and
eating in history, we are offered what food historian Jeffery
Pilcher calls a “view from below” of the stories of our
identities, our histories, that we may have thought were lost in
the industrial narrative. Similarly, historian John Super
expounds on how a study of food can illuminate our histories:
Food links the social and natural worlds in marvelously intricate
yet encompassing ways. Soil and water, belief and ritual, power
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and personality, all are a part of the history of food. Food
shapes and is shaped by society and nature. It intersects so many
points with the human experience that it can be used to study
everything from technology to culture. From this perspective, the
history of food simply becomes history. (John C. Super, Food,
Conquest and Colonization)
If history is re-enlightened by recognizing the stories and modes
of knowledge not written in books, but the stories told and re-
told by our families around the table, and the stories told by
the hands that prepare family recipes, a more enriched picture
may come to view.
Abarca refutes the notion that the stories that come from
women’s kitchens and from their food represent simply stories of
women placed in the kitchen as a form of control (p.26). In her
book Voices from the Kitchen, she explains how, by controlling the
kitchen as the heart of the family and home, Mexican-American
women assert forms of agency in their lives as well as tell their
own stories and express themselves through cooking. This is not
to say that the kitchen has not been a place of oppression for
women, but by only seeing the kitchen as a place of oppression,
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we miss the voices that are speaking through food, and miss the
history that is being told from the kitchen. Abarca writes about
food as information. It is a way of engaging with history, and
reaffirming our identities.
Enrique Salmón writes that food and the processes of
preparing and eating food are inextricably linked to an
indigenous connection to place: “The processes interconnect
family, landscape, collection knowledge, story, and an encoded
library of cultural and ecological knowledge, all of which
sustain and revitalize a sense of self and place (p.8).” Salmón
goes on to mention tamales again, in explaining his understanding
of food as historical and cultural information, “We have to eat
in order to survive; therefore, food becomes a medium through
which complex collective memories from generations preparing
tamales remains alive and intact (p.9).” As an indigenous and
Mexican person, Salmón understands food and the traditions
surrounding eating and preparing food as a means of transmitting
vital cultural information with regard to community values and
human-landscape interactions. Through the persistence of
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indigenous foodways, a whole way of understanding the world may
be transmitted.
How, then, have broadly-termed Mexican-American foodways
held on to indigenous worldviews and values through the past five
centuries of culturally destructive colonialism? Persistence has
been maintained through fusion in the face of conquest. Starting
on Columbus’ second voyage, the Spanish empire sought to
ecologically re-create Spain in the new world. Spaniards had no
interest in adopting indigenous foodstuffs or foodways because
all of this represented to them a barbaric native culture. The
Spanish associated deep essences of their culture with their
staple foods. Eating bread, cooking with olive oil, and drinking
wine all made you a good Spaniard. Wheat bread especially was
eaten daily and carried heavy religious associations in the
Catholic Church (Super). As it still is for Christians today, the
eating of bread at Holy Communion represented consuming the flesh
of Christ, the source of human salvation.
Similarly, indigenous American peoples treated maize as the
bedrock of their culture. Seeing it literally as flesh and
including it in many spiritual rituals and ceremonies. For the
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Aztecs, the empire that the Spaniards encountered on the North
American mainland, maize was entirely tied up in a shocking
ritualistic “feeding” of the gods through human sacrifice.
Sacrificed human bodies were put on maize fields to ensure that
rain would feed the plants, to in turn feed the people (Pilcher,
ꜟQue vivan). While few indigenous societies resorted to such
extreme measures as human sacrifice, maize and other staple food
crops held similar cultural and spiritual significance all over
the Americas.
When staple grains, wheat and maize respectively, are seen
in this light as the flesh of the divine, and the literal and
spiritual source of the continuation of the people and their way
of life, the Spanish/Christian associations with bread and the
indigenous/Aztec associations with maize are similar in many
ways. In both worldviews, ritual eating and human sacrifice are
understood as being the source of the continuation and salvation
of the people. The difference being that in the Christian
worldview, the human sacrifice happened once, when Christ died on
the cross, and the eating of his flesh and blood has continued in
symbolic recognition of this event. For indigenous societies like
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the Aztec, the act of sacrifice and renewal must be continuous to
ensure plenty. With so many cultural associations bound up in
foods for both cultures, the stage was set for a competition
between the staple grains.
When the Spanish took control from the Aztec Empire, the
long drawn out work of cultural conquest began in earnest. The
planting of and tending of the wheat crop, and the adoption of
wheat bread was a cultural imperative for Spanish conquest
(Super). The Spanish believed that the hard work of tending to
the wheat crop would teach the stereotyped lazy Indians “a lesson
in European industriousness (Cajete, ed.)”.
Just as the Spanish felt a revulsion to maize as a
representative of a destitute and inferior culture, the
indigenous peoples they forced wheat on were repulsed by the
staple grain of the old world. Food historian Jeffery Pilcher
cites The Florentine Codex as showing what indigenous people thought
about wheat bread: “like famine food…like dried maize stalks.”
The Spaniards found that they could not even hand out their wheat
bread to beggars (Pilcher, ꜟQue vivan). When in 1680, in Spain’s
northern territories (modern day New Mexico), the indigenous
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Pueblo people revolted against the Spaniards and drove them
south, wheat was seen as a representation of an oppressive
culture. In the revolt, the Pueblo people burned all of the
Spanish fields of wheat (Pilcher, Planet Taco). Indigenous
Americans were not about to give up maize in favor of wheat. In
time, the Spanish missionaries recognized this, and attempted to
attach Christian religious values instead to the preparation of
maize. Missionaries taught indigenous women to make the sign of
the cross over the ground cornmeal masa every time they prepared
it for tortillas, a tradition that continues to this day
(Abarca).
The environment and the people of the Americas also changed
the way that the Europeans ate. This goes for both the Europeans
in Europe, and those settling in the Americas. Many fruits and
vegetables and staple crops such as potatoes made the voyage back
to Europe in a trans-Atlantic ecological exchange, and improved
European nutritional regimes and foundationally altered European
cuisines. Despite the best efforts of Spaniards settling in the
Americas to re-create the New World in the image of Spain,
certain crops simply would not take to the American soil and
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climate. For the Spanish cooking with olive oil equated to
respectable civilization, and cooking with animal fats as
barbaric, a belief that went back to the Romans (Pilcher, ꜟQue
vivan). Despite their best efforts, olive trees would not grow in
the new climate, but the pigs that they had brought with them had
found an un-exploited ecological niche in the Americas and were
running wild everywhere. In this way, indigenous Americans,
Spaniards, and mixed mestizo people took on the practice of eating
pork and cooking with lard, which has become a common fixture in
Mexican kitchens everywhere (Super).
In many regions of the Americas, the diseases brought by
early European explorers preceded the European settlers
themselves. Large areas of land that had previously been
inhabited and managed by indigenous peoples were left empty by
the scourge of Old World epidemics by the time the settlers
arrived. These open spaces allowed for European animals and
European land-management practices to flourish on a scale unheard
of in Europe. European cattle, pigs, and chickens exploited
vacant ecological niches and changed the diets of all people
living in the Americas. Meat from cattle and pigs became everyday
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sources of protein for indigenous, Spanish and mestizo people
(Super).
It is essential to keep in mind that indigenous people were
not simply victims of a European ecological and cultural
conquest. The view of history from the kitchen allows us to see
how indigenous people demonstrated agency and adaptability in the
face of great change. Many European foods were readily taken on
by indigenous people and incorporated into ancient foodways not
by forced assimilation, but because people liked the way foods
like beef and pork tasted and these new sources of nutrition made
for healthier people. Indigenous people saw the ways that new
foods could be incorporated into old recipe structures to make
them better, and substituted ingredients with the new foods if
the old ones became less readily available. For indigenous people
an example of this is the adoption of European chickens as simply
a substitute for the indigenous turkey. This practice of
substitution making new culinary traditions was also true for
Spanish cooks, who substituted indigenous ingredients for ones
not available. Spanish rice, traditionally made with saffron, was
made with chili peppers in the New World (Pilcher, ꜟQue vivan).
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Indigenous and mestizo Americans made new foods their own.
They were able to incorporate new ingredients without losing a
sense of connection to older identity and knowledge. As Enrique
Salmón might say, they were still “eating the landscape”, only
accepting and adapting to the ways that the landscape truly had
changed as a result of colonization. This adaptability has
ensured cultural survival. As John Super aptly puts it, “Like a
great river able to accept water from many tributaries without
changing course, Indian diets increased in volume and variety,
though the staples remained the same. Adequate food supplies
helped Indians combat new biological and social threats of the
conquest.” The fact that many elite Spanish men relied on Native
women to cook for them, and others married into indigenous
families, ensured that the process was one of cultural fusion and
adaptation rather simply one of conquest and domination (Pilcher,
Planet Taco).
Abarca explains how Mexican-American women as a “colonized
people” exercise agency through cooking today and in history by
quoting the philosopher Lisa Heldke:
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“cuisines are always a patchwork of borrowing and lending,
undertaken at various conditions of liberty and bondage.” The
borrowing and lending helps her consider “the possibility that members
of a culture may be responding to colonization as [people] who are
deciding for themselves whether and how they will incorporate the
strange foods that are making their way into their community.” I
believe this to be true because people stripped of economic and
political power remain “active agents whose sense of self is projected
on to and expressed in an expansive range of cultural practices.”
By cooking forms of indigenous knowledge, Native women
counter-balanced colonial methods of domination in subtle yet
profound ways.
For mixed persons of any multiple heritages, the kitchen
represents a space for profound reconciliation (Abarca). I think
of the Thanksgiving dinner mentioned earlier, the one for which I
prepared tamales. The tamales themselves, being filled with beef
or pork meat and cooked with lard, represent a history of
cultural and ecological colonialism as well as a deep statement
of indigenous identity. My roommate also served a dish honoring
his Moroccan heritage, representing his own background of
immigration and cultural mixing. The turkey we harvested locally
and the apples we cooked it with represent our attempt to honor
an agricultural heritage of the state of Washington, which is
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itself a result of cultural and ecological exchanges. The white
wheat dinner rolls and the apple pie my mother and grandmother
baked for the meal are made from the old recipes of English and
German pioneers in California. The culinary histories present in
this one feast are expansive and profound; they cover realities
of conquest and imperialism as well as fierce statements of
indigeneity. And yet our two families can sit down and enjoy this
food together and find a strength and community in the sharing of
our heritages.
“I have always mentioned to anyone within earshot that mole
is nearest to the type of intricate foods that Mesoamericans
consumed when Europeans first floundered their way into North
America. Mole is a complex dish fully representative of the
landscape and agricultural system cultivated by Central
Americans. The list of ingredients and the numerous steps
involved in producing even a simple mole are multifaceted enough
to cause any culinary student to pause. (Salmón)”
Mole is considered by many to be a dish that is
distinctively and authentically Mexican through and through.
Enrique Salmón insists that mole most effectively represents the
genuinely indigenous foodways of the past in its style and
structure, but a closer look at the history and legend
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surrounding mole speaks more to a profound cultural fusion and
persistence. Mole is served as a sauce or stew flavored with any
number of ingredients, but most prominently chili peppers and
unsweetened cacao.
Food historian Jeffery Pilcher sees the history of mole
differently than Salmón, in that he sees it primarily as a
Spanish food influenced by indigenous ingredients. Pilcher
explains that the structure of the sauce mirrors the cuisines of
Spain with its base of broth and flavoring with nuts. He also
draws attention to the fact that Spanish cooking at the time of
colonization was severely influenced by Muslim foodways after
centuries of Muslim rule in Spain, and that the culinary
architecture of mole is more a representation of middle-eastern
Muslim cooking styles than of either genuinely Spanish or
indigenous (Pilcher, Planet Taco, ꜟQue vivan). This represents
the profound complexity of cultural influences and historical
connections when it comes to eating any food.
The folk legend that Mexican and Mexican-American people
tell about the invention of mole may say more than either of
these experts in explaining what mole represents, a testament to
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the truth in oral tradition. Abarca retells the legend in her
book Voices from the Kitchen, based on the versions told to her by her
Mexican relatives. The legend goes that long ago, a group of nuns
in a rural convent in Puebla, Mexico were
preparing for a visit by a Spanish noble. They
wanted to make something special for him to eat
so they prepared a sauce including many old world
ingredients. After all, Spanish colonial
authority still valued European foods as
culturally superior to indigenous foods for
centuries after the initial conquest. The
Spanish caste system exemplified by the castas paintings
represented indigenous and mixed peoples of lower classes
alongside indigenous foodstuffs. The castas paintings were a clear
reminder that ethnic mixing and the foods associated with it,
relegated people to lower socio-economic castes (Pilcher, ꜟQue
vivan).
The legendary nuns of Puebla wanted to prepare a more
Spanish-influenced food for the visiting noble, because Spanish
foods represented upward mobility and Spanish colonial values.
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Figure 1 Castas Paintingfrom Colonial Spanish America
This accounts for perhaps the structure of mole as well as the
inclusion of non-indigenous ingredients in mole recipes such as
garlic, coriander, cumin, and raisins. It is also probable that
the nuns of native heritage were already entirely used to complex
mixtures of ingredients from a culinary heritage of complex
sauces reaching back before the arrival of the Europeans, and
that taking on the task of making an acceptable dish for the
Spanish noble was not such a challenging endeavor. The crux of
the legend, though, is when the stew is finished and simmering in
the pot, a mischievous nun pours cacao powder, the ancient
indigenous drink, into the sauce, changing all of the flavors and
asserting something altogether new (Abarca). When cooking mole I
always feel I should only add the chocolate when no one is
looking. In this legend, the dominant chocolate flavor in mole
announces, “I am still here.” Preparing and eating mole
recognizes colonial influence, but is overwhelmed by an assertion
of resistance. The flavors of mole retell this story of cultural
strength, the ability to resist and to adapt to new influence.
Mole becomes primarily a form of flavorful information, and those
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who prepare it are speaking; telling their own history in a
language of the senses.
It may be difficult to see all of this intricate cultural
history underneath the messy heaps of chili sauce, iceberg
lettuce and cheese found in most Mexican restaurants in the
United States today (Pilcher, Planet Taco). But this
representation of Mexican food is also a result of interplay of
cultural adaptation and fusion with colonial and imperial forces
of conquest. The model for what has become the widely understood
and globally dispersed version of Mexican food was built on
templates of indigenous reaction to Spanish colonial and
indigenous southern Mexican culinary influences as mestizo
culture spread north to the modern day American Southwest
(Cajete, ed.). Pueblo people in the regions of New Mexico and
Arizona encountered the concept of the tortilla and the food crop
of wheat around the same time, and started making flour tortillas
as a response to these new culinary influences. The result today
is the white-flour tortilla wrapped burritos popular all around
the United States. Further complicating the culinary heritage of
modernly understood industrialized Mexican cuisine in the U.S. is
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the inclusion of rice and beans, which is a result of mestizo
adoption of Caribbean slave cooking traditions (Pilcher, Planet
Taco).
The fewer ingredients present in the Mexican restaurant menu
items of today is in many ways simply a result of the indigenous
cooking styles of the northern Spanish frontier, which sought
many innovative ways to cook a small amount of available food
resources. This was a response to environment, and an
understanding of landscape. This was how Pueblo people knew how
to cook. The Anglo-American immigrants who came to the Mexican
borderlands in the 19th century took the indigenous Pueblo take
on the mixed indigenous-Spanish foods that had come from southern
Mexico, and fused it with their own understandings of cooking.
That is, to fry and cover meals with cheese and gravy. This is
what is commonly understood as Tex-Mex or Cal-Mex. This is where
we get crunchy taco shells and deep fried chimichangas (Pilcher,
Planet Taco).
After these culinary infusions had taken place, Anglo-
Americans readily accepted broadly termed “Mexican Food” and
formalized and industrialized this one version. Once it was
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accepted, the selling of Mexican food by Mexican people, mestizo
and indigenous alike, became an avenue of self-determination.
There are many ways that the standardized mystique of American
Mexican restaurants perpetuate negative stereotypes of Mexican
and Mexican-American people through decorations of stereotypical
sombrero-wearing Mexican peasants drinking tequila and sleeping
under saguaros, and a homogenized representation of relatively-
non-nutritious Tex-Mex food as genuinely Mexican (Pilcher, Planet
Taco). However, as we have seen, there is still a rich cultural
history embedded in even these foods, and a voice of indigenous
resistance remains a part of the story of our dinners, if only we
choose to recognize it.
To conclude, I want to bring you to my Nana’s kitchen table,
where to me, all of this is most true. The family home in Salida,
Colorado where my grandparents live has a very obvious front door
on one side of the house. In all my life I think I have seen that
front door opened only once. The front door opens into the living
room where the couch and television reside, but no one ever walks
in that way. That door is so insignificant as an entryway that
furniture has been placed in front of it. Instead, the front door
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of the house has become what would have been the back door. The
doorway is opened into a domestic space. You walk past the
washing machine, the dryer, and the refrigerator to enter Nana’s
kitchen, where a big table dominates the space. This table is
where each meal of the day is taken, and where nearly all the
times in-between are spent. This table is where the family is
reunited and reconstituted, where stories are told and memories
made. This table is where we reaffirm who we are as a family.
Simply sitting at this table to pass a few hours drinking coffee
or to listen to my dad and his sisters tell funny stories about
when they were kids, or especially to eat some of Nana’s green
chili, is an act of reaffirming my identity.
Abarca writes of spaces within the home being gendered by
colonial forces in the same way that the senses have been
gendered, relegating smell touch and taste, senses of the
kitchen, gendered as being feminine and inferior. In a
patriarchal architecture, the kitchen is a place where women are
put in their place simply to produce trivial food. The kitchen is
placed in the back of the house, away from what visitors might
see when they enter the home, often a masculinized space of a so-
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called living room. But as we have seen, women continue to have a
voice from the kitchen even if it is placed out of sight, through
the stories told in the foods they choose to produce there. There
are ways that women still control the family and the home even
from this coded-as-trivial space of the kitchen.
In the case of my grandparents’ home, the house has been
flipped, asserting very clearly that the kitchen, my Nana’s
place, is the beating heart of the home and of the family. All it
takes is simple recognition of what something so simple as the
location of the kitchen table, or the nuanced skill involved in
preparing tamales may represent to bring into focus the true
power of these things in the face of a dominant colonial
narrative. Choosing to actively recognize the historical
implications of eating, and seeing how foodways represent
alternative modes of knowledge that are all around us is itself
an act of de-colonial descent by anyone who chooses to do so. By
changing the way we think about food, we can change the world.
Works Cited
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Abarca, Meredith E. Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World
from Working-Class Mexican and Mexican American Women. Texas A&M
University Press, 2006. Print.
Cajete, Gregory ed. A People’s Ecology: Explorations in Sustainable Living.
Santa Fe, New Mexico: Clear Light Publishers, 1999. Print.
Merriam-Webster. "Foodways." Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster,
2013. Web. 08 Dec. 2013.
Pilcher, Jeffery M. ꜟQue vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of
Mexican Identity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1998. Print.
Pilcher, Jeffery M. Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.
Salmón, Enrique. Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food,
Identity, and Resilience. Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press,
2012. Print.
Super, John C. Food, Conquest, and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century
Spanish America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1988. Print. Texas A&M University Press, 2006. Print.
Photos:
Figure 1:
http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Images_Olmec/Paint
ings/Casta_8.jpg
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