Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements: Decolonial Perspectives

by Devon Peña (Editor), Luz Calvo (Editor), Pancho McFarland (Editor), Gabriel R. Valle (Editor)

Overview

Winner, 2018 ASFS (Association for the Study of Food and Society) Book Award, Edited Volume

This collection of new essays offers groundbreaking perspectives on the ways that food and foodways serve as an element of decolonization in Mexican-origin communities.

The writers here take us from multigenerational acequia farmers, who trace their ancestry to Indigenous families in place well before the Oñate Entrada of 1598, to tomorrow’s transborder travelers who will be negotiating entry into the United States. Throughout, we witness the shifting mosaic of Mexican-origin foods and foodways in the fields, gardens, and kitchen tables from Chiapas to Alaska.

Global food systems are also considered from a critical agroecological perspective, including the ways colonialism affects native biocultural diversity, ecosystem resilience, and equality across species, human groups, and generations.

Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements is a major contribution to the understanding of the ways that Mexican-origin peoples have resisted and transformed food systems. It will animate scholarship on global food studies for years to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610756181
Publisher:	University of Arkansas Press
Publication date:	09/01/2017
Series:	Food and Foodways
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	503
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Devon G. Peña is a professor of American ethnic studies and anthropology at the University of Washington.

Luz Calvo is a professor of ethnic studies at California State East Bay.

Pancho McFarland is an associate professor of sociology at Chicago State University.

Gabriel R. Valle is an assistant professor of environmental studies at California State University, San Marcos.

Table of Contents

Contents Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgments Introduction. Mexican Deep Food: Bodies, the Land, Food, and Social Movements / Devon G. Peña, Luz Calvo, Pancho McFarland, and Gabriel R. Valle Part I. Theorizing: Decolonial Food and Movements Poem. From Borderlands/La Frontera / Gloria Anzaldúa Chapter 1. Autonomía and Food Sovereignty: Decolonization across the Food Chain / Devon G. Peña Chapter 2. Indigenous Women in the Food Sovereignty Movement: Lessons from the South Central Farm / Rufina Juárez Chapter 3. Food Values: Urban Kitchen Gardens and Working-Class Subjectivity / Gabriel R. Valle Chapter 4. Del alivio y coraje la tuna nacera: A Re-membering of Land and Place / Silvia Patricia Solís Part II. Witnessing: Heritage Cuisines and Decolonial Foodways Essay. El Quelite / Teresa Vigil Chapter 5. Tracing Food Packs and Tuna Cans on La Línea: Food, Water, and Foodways during Transborder Travel / Consuelo Crow Chapter 6. Norteada/o en el barrio: Decolonizing Foodscapes in South Central Texas and Reclaiming Belonging / Lee Ann Epstein Chapter 7. Tortilleras, testimonios, y recetas: Decolonial Foodways from the México-US Borderlands / Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel Chapter 8. Chicos del horno: A Local, Slow, and Deep Food / Joseph C. Gallegos Chapter 9. Travels of a Diaspora Community: From La Sierra Madre y Tierra Caliente to the Pacific Northwest / María Guillen Valdovinos Chapter 10. Food, Class, Ethnicity, and Race in the Classroom: A Teacher’s Testimony / Julia Curry Rodríguez Part III. Organizing: Decolonial Movements for Food Autonomy Poem. “When Corn Silk Withers” / Tezozomoc Chapter 11. Fragmentary Food Flows: Autonomy in the “Un-signified” Food Deserts of the Real / Tezozomoc and the South Central Farmers Chapter 12. Growing Justice in the Fields: Farmworker Autonomy and Food Sovereignty / Rosalinda Guillen and C2C Chapter 13. “We Are Human!”: Farmworker Organizing across the Food Chain in Washington / Tomás Madrigal Chapter 14. Organic Intellectuals and Direct Action Fifty Years Past Chicago’s “War on Poverty” / Pancho McFarland Chapter 15. Sin maíz, no hay país: Mesoamericans and Civil Society in the Defeat of Monsanto / Adelita Sanvicente Tello and Araceli Carreón (Translated by Devon G. Peña) Chapter 16. Sodbusters and the “Native Gaze”: Soil Governmentality and Indigenous Knowledge / Devon G. Peña Conclusion Notes Bibliography Contributors Index

Editorial Reviews

We live in a time when a handful of global corporations and philanthrocapitalists are pushing for a nonsustainable, unjust, unhealthy, and undemocratic model of ‘One Agriculture, One Science.’ This paradigm is based on GMO monocultures and patent monopolies on seed and knowledge. This volume offers a diverse chorus of insightful voices from farmers, cooks, seed savers, plant breeders, organizers, farm workers, and scholar activists. Together they are creating alterNative worlds. Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements shows many of the vital pathways to decolonizing and postcaptalist futures offered by the unity of biological and cultural diversity in shaping food as a vital source of cultural and ecological resilience, social and economic justice, and democratic values.”
—Vandana Shiva


“This edited volume breaks new ground in exploring decolonial movements connecting food to territory, subsistence, labor, local knowledge, memory, and identity. … The book serves as an outstanding model in methodology, combining narrative and life history, recipes, theory, and poetry and blurring ‘the lines between activism, scholarship, farming, cooking, and eating.'”
Summing up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
—Choice Reviews, August 2018

From the Publisher