Culinary Mestizaje

Racial Mixing and Foodways across the United States

Rudy P Guevarra, Jr editor Felipe Hinojosa editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Texas Press

Publishing:22nd Jul '25

£27.99

This title is due to be published on 22nd July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Culinary Mestizaje cover

How cross-racial and ethnic communities have created new culinary traditions and food cultures in the United States.

Culinary Mestizaje is about food, cooking, and community, but it’s also about how immigrant labor and racial mixing are transforming established US food cultures from Hawai’i to the coast of Maine, South Philadelphia to the Pacific Northwest. This collection of essays asks what it means that Chamorro cooking is now considered a regional specialty of the Bay Area, and that a fusion like brisket tacos registers as “native” to Houston, while pupusas are the pride of Atlanta.

Combining community scholarly insights, cooking tips, and recipes, the pieces assembled here are interested in how the blending of culinary traditions enables marginalized people to thrive in places fraught with racial tension, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the threat of gentrification. Chefs and entrepreneurs matter in these stories, but so do dishwashers, farm laborers, and immigrants doing the best they can with the ingredients they have. Their best, it turns out, is often delicious and creative, sparking culinary evolutions while maintaining ancestral connections. The result is that cooking under the weight of colonial rule and white supremacy has, in revealing ways, created American food.

Culinary Mestizaje broadens the parameters of mestizaje to include Cajun, Japanese Mexican, two-spirit, Hawaiian, Acadian, Filipino, and other cultures and identities, to offer a novel and noteworthy contribution to the field. In the culinary landscape that often fetishizes the “authentic” and the “pure,” this volume offers a critical examination of hybridity in an expansive and inclusive appraisal of hemispheric foodways. The contributors explore many ways in which mestizaje can enrich the conversation surrounding national food movements and aesthetic currents, decolonizing their academic research by bringing first-person narratives and recipes into their writing. This is brilliant work that deserves a place of honor on your bookshelf. -- Paloma Martinez-Cruz, The Ohio State University, author of Food Fight! Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace

ISBN: 9781477332566

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 454g

216 pages