Cocinas Públicas: Food and Border Consciousness in Greater Mexico

Abstract

Food is fundamental to the workings of identity and belonging, power, and social change. This special issue of Food & Foodways addresses such critical concepts by exploring cocinas públicas of Greater Mexico. We locate this investigation of Mexican foodways within the contexts of social hierarchy, spatial division, political economy, narrative, identity, and place. Articles in this volume address some of the following questions: How do public foods and public kitchens impact our conceptualizations of gender, class, ethnicity, and age as well as regional, national, and transnational identities? How are individual and collective identities, communities, and economies shaped, contested and negotiated through public food practices? In what ways do the production and consumption of food intertwine the public kitchen with the domestic kitchen? In what ways do these spaces oppose or contradict each other? How do the production, distribution, and/or consumption of food in public spaces impact regional history, cultural politics, and globalization? How does the frame of “Greater Mexico” contribute to our understandings of these processes? Finally, what can the study of Mexican food in public spaces teach us about cross-cultural, cross-class, and intergenerational contact and conflict? The articles included here address many of these issues while providing new directions for thinking about border consciousness through the examination of food, cooking and cuisine.