Charlas Culinarias: Mexican Women Speak from Their Public Kitchens

Abstract

By exploring how working-class Mexican women transform their home cooking abilities into an economic resource to support themselves and their families, this paper looks at the philosophical approach women give to their entrepreneurial efforts. In particular, I offer the concept of familial wealth as the conceptual process to articulate the value and meaning women give to the implication of owning a small business. Familial wealth recognizes the social, cultural, personal, and ideological benefits that owning a business offers not only women business owners and their immediate family, but also the community they serve. This community goes beyond a customer eating a meal or buying food at a public kitchen. As a scholar conducting research with women who own small food stands in El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, my scholarship is also served by women's philosophical views about their work. It is through the methodology of charlas culinarias (culinary chats), which is an ethnographic approach of gathering women's culinary stories via the exchange of free-flowing conversations, that I have learned about the social meaning women give to their work. Their work practices allow me to address issues that show the interconnection of productive and reproductive labor, thus moving beyond the ideological gender distinctions these spatial labor locations have historically implied. Furthermore, working-class women's work ethics provide a potential model to shift or subvert the principal value of market-economy, which emphasizes success in terms of capital gain obtained by competitive means, to success based on providing substances and sources for community building.