Food, Culture, and Belonging in Mexican Chicago

This paper, titled “Food, Culture, and Belonging in Mexican Chicago” examines the role of food in the everyday lives of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in early twentieth-century Chicago. Much more than a source of nutrition and nourishment, immigrants and community leaders used food as a way to maintain cultural bonds to their ancestral homeland while assimilationists and immigrant advocates used food as a tool to help Americanize immigrants and their families. For Chicagoans, food, foodways, and the cocína mexicana were weapons to defend or abolish Mexican culture and a Mexican “way of life” in the Windy City. I argue that Mexican Immigrant and Mexican American working-class men and women who came to Chicago used food—in private and in public—to create and maintain a strong sense of community and to resist complete Americanization at home. Mexican food, or food that evoked the physical and cultural homeland, brought a sense of comfort, community, and satisfaction to immigrants who were under intense pressure to assimilate into the dominant “American” culture. In doing this, I will closely examines how Great Depression and wartime era Americanization pressures highlighted the role of food as “keeper” or “neutralizer” of immigrant culture. Private homes, boarding houses, pool halls, restaurants, and company dining halls were all disputed sites of Americanization and resistance. Changing attitudes by nativist and assimilationist groups in time of war or economic crisis meant that the emphasis Americanization and Americanizing foodways was in flux and correlated with the level of nativist fervor. Churches, mutual aid societies, federal and state relief organizations, and social workers used food and foodways to attract people and assert influence.

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