Cooking up Hope: Minoritized White Women and their Hope for Equality in Miami's Latinx Dominated Restaurant Industry1

Abstract

AbstractIn Miami, the US racial category of “white” is being re‐defined to include light skinned Latinx immigrants. In the process, US‐born white Miamians find themselves displaced from the top of Miami's social hierarchy as light skinned Latinx immigrants take over these social positions. This racialized Latinx social re‐positioning is particularly visible in Miami's restaurant industry where the developing social hierarchy leaves white women restaurant workers juggling their white privilege and their traditional gendered roles, with this playing out most profoundly amongst those who occupy “back of house,” or kitchen jobs, where they become both racial and gender minorities.Through the case study of Geena, a white female cook, I will explore the extent to which the precarity of privilege motivates white women to be audacious actors of resistance in a racialized, hetero‐patriarchal restaurant industry. Using an intersectional framework to analyze Geena's lived experiences, this paper focuses specifically on the degree to which her ideas of hope are shaped by class, language, ableism, and sexual orientation. As I will demonstrate through Geena's case study, ideas of hope allow white women to reposition themselves as white saviors, effectively reasserting and reifying whiteness as a superior social category.