A Culinary Quest: Peruvian Women Entrepreneurs in Southern California Negotiating Home and Belonging

• In Event: Gendered Migration and Displacement

Abstract

Latina and Latino immigrants in the United States today face a variety of challenges in the process of integration into a society and labor market embedded in a stratified American social structure rooted in white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy. However, Latinas and Latinos exercise various forms of agency and develop a range of strategies in their endeavor to overcome these structural constraints. One such strategy, which both documented and undocumented immigrants undertake, is entrepreneurship.

The paper is related to my ongoing PhD project in Latin American studies and focuses on Peruvian women entrepreneurs on the culinary market in Southern California. It explores how the women negotiate home and belonging through culinary entrepreneurship and adopts an intersectional lens to understand what role intersecting social locations like gender, race, ethnicity and class play in these processes. I also examine the importance of legal status and business formality, and how these women create homes for themselves, their families and the Peruvian community through culinary entrepreneurship, as well as how the food-spaces they create can function as both unifying and contested sites. I will discuss findings from data collected during fieldwork, August 2017-June 2018, based on life histories of 35 female entrepreneurs, in-depth interviews with key informants in the Peruvian community and organizations, as well as participant observation. The discussion will be informed by an emerging approach to immigrant integration, focusing on migration as a home-making process, moving beyond the two dominant theoretical approaches: assimilation and transnationalism.

Author

• Ann C Corrales-Øverlid, the University of Bergen