“The Slap Slap Motion of the Tortilla”: Taste and Race in the American Southwest in the New Deal Era

This paper explores the food of the American Southwest in the 1930s and uses the methodology of sensory history to analyze the ways in which race contributed to the taste of place in this modern American region. This sensory narrative draws on a close reading of the Federal Writers’ Project’s (FWP) popular guidebooks as well as the archive of the America Eats book project. Though scholars have paid close attention to the New Deal relief agency’s cultural work, a critical and sensory analysis of their pioneering food study is lacking.

When required to document the foods of their region, southwestern FWP workers first referred to so-called “Spanish-Mexican food”. Indeed, such foods provided a historical, folkloric, and sensory template unique to the region. While the Spanish-speaking population’s food was celebrated they paradoxically encountered increasing racial discrimination; “Mexican” appeared as a racial category for the first time in the 1930 census. Yet, the taste of race informed the taste of place and establishing Mexican food as southwestern dialectically participated in anchoring the region within the country. The FWP participated in a process of sensory heritage-making that animated the region’s developing tourism industry. Mexican food was not only entrenched in a local creolized sensory identity but also part of a tourist sensory economy that required and constructed an authentic perception of another race. Tasting Mexican food offered the sensory opportunity to perceive the race of a conquered people. A potent gender dynamic also animated the sensory construction of this domestic yet exotic taste. Daring to eat the spicy dishes prepared by Mexican women was a central experience of white male culinary tourism. Exploring the interplay of taste, place, race, and gender in the FWP’s archive allows a deeper and contextualized understanding of how the senses contribute to the making of race.