Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized food as a critical lens for cultural analysis. In Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies: Defining the Subfield (2020), Lara Anderson and Rebecca Ingram emphasize its role in constructing identities, establishing power relationships, and articulating resistance. Similarly, Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative (2021) highlights food’s function in narratives of migration, displacement, and national identity. This session builds on these discussions by uniting scholars examining food in literature, cinema, and historical texts, contributing to the growing field of Food Studies within Hispanic cultural analysis.
This panel features three distinct yet complementary presentations that examine food as a means of survival, resistance, and critique across different cultural contexts—Mexican-American foodways, Spanish literature and cinema, and borderland narratives.
Surviving the Borderlands: Food, Gender, and Shifting Identities in Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft
This presentation explores how food shapes cultural identity and resistance in Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft (2014). Set in the volatile Texas-Mexico borderlands of 1859, the novel highlights the precarious lives of Mexicans, Texans, Native Americans, and Black slaves in a space defined by shifting power dynamics. Drawing on feminist border theory and food studies, this paper examines how women use culinary practices to preserve cultural memory and build alliances across ethnic boundaries. The preparation of traditional dishes like mole and tamales becomes an act of resilience, allowing marginalized communities to maintain their identity amid cultural erasure.
Resistance through Food in Encarnación Pinedo’s El cocinero español
This study examines El cocinero español (1898), the first published Mexican-American cookbook, as a historical artifact reflecting cultural resistance and adaptation. Written during a period of political and social transformation following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Pinedo’s cookbook serves as both a culinary guide and a declaration of cultural identity. This paper analyzes how El cocinero español resists U.S. settler colonialism, challenging dominant narratives of race, class, and national belonging. By framing the cookbook within Chicano studies, this presentation demonstrates how culinary practices serve as acts of defiance, adaptation, and survival, shaping Mexican-American identity through food.
Disturbing Meals: Scatological and Morbid Representations of Food in Spanish Dark Comedies of the 1960s
This presentation examines the grotesque depiction of food in Spanish dark comedies of the 1960s, challenging official Francoist modernization narratives. These films disrupt traditional associations of food with care, pleasure, and social bonding, instead linking consumption to bodily decay, excrement, and death. By juxtaposing scenes of frugal and lavish dining with grotesque imagery, these films critique the contradictions of Francoist ideology, exposing how economic prosperity was built on systemic repression. This analysis reveals how food operates as a metaphor for both material and symbolic violence, demonstrating the unsettling intersections of consumption, control, and authoritarian power.
The session will be structured to maximize scholarly engagement and audience participation. Each presenter will have approximately 18 minutes to deliver their paper, followed by a moderated discussion. The session will conclude with a 15-minute open discussion period, allowing attendees to ask questions, draw connections between the presentations, and engage with broader themes in Food Studies and Hispanic cultural analysis. The panel will encourage interdisciplinary dialogue by integrating perspectives from literary studies, film studies, history, and cultural anthropology.
This session brings together scholars from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, ensuring a multifaceted exploration of food representation in the Hispanic world. The selected presentations examine food across different historical periods and cultural contexts, from 19th-century Mexican-American cookbooks to contemporary borderland narratives and Francoist cinema. By addressing issues of gender, race, migration, and political oppression, the panel highlights how food functions as both a material necessity and a symbolic site of power struggles.
By engaging with recent scholarship and expanding the scope of Food Studies in Hispanic cultural analysis, this panel contributes to an ongoing conversation about how food narrates histories of resistance, identity formation, and cultural transformation. Ultimately, this session underscores food’s significance as a dynamic and contested site of meaning in the Hispanic world, demonstrating its continued relevance in contemporary academic discourse.