Cookin’ Up Identities: Cultural Practice, Cultural Production and Chicago’s Mexican Restaurant Workers

• In Event: 422 - Regular Session. Ethnography/Ethnographic Studies 1

Abstract

This article analyzes how cultural practices and cultural production—in the case of male Mexican restaurant workers producing non-Mexican food, while working in kitchens defined by French, Italian, and American cuisine— opens up new possibilities, identities, and lived realities. Exploring cultural practices and cultural production allows us to illuminate how identity is constructed, negotiated, and experienced in everyday life. While many of the Mexican men who dominate the kitchens of Chicago’s restaurant industry feel cut off from their “native” cuisine, being caught up in a diaspora and living far from their home country, some have found a “home” and an “identity” in their occupation of producing other cuisines. Where Mexican cuisine is no longer the dominant cultural food-medium in which they occupy themselves (professionally or personally), Mexican cooks embrace another culinary tradition and make that tradition their own. Whether that tradition is French, Italian, or American cuisine, a culinary tradition that is significant and meaningful both structures their world in terms of the orientations and investments that are the fabric of their everyday lives. It also opens up their horizon of possibilities in terms of their identities, and life experiences as they come to make that previously foreign tradition their own.

Author

• Black Hawk Hancock, DePaul University