Culinary Mestizaje: Racial Mixing and Foodways Across the United States

How cross-racial and ethnic communities have created new culinary traditions and food cultures in the United States.

Culinary Mestizaje is about food, cooking, and community, but it’s also about how immigrant labor and racial mixing are transforming established US food cultures from Hawai’i to the coast of Maine, South Philadelphia to the Pacific Northwest. This collection of essays asks what it means that Chamorro cooking is now considered a regional specialty of the Bay Area, and that a fusion like brisket tacos registers as ＂native＂ to Houston, while pupusas are the pride of Atlanta.

Combining community scholarly insights, cooking tips, and recipes, the pieces assembled here are interested in how the blending of culinary traditions enables marginalized people to thrive in places fraught with racial tension, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the threat of gentrification. Chefs and entrepreneurs matter in these stories, but so do dishwashers, farm laborers, and immigrants doing the best they can with the ingredients they have. Their best, it turns out, is often delicious and creative, sparking culinary evolutions while maintaining ancestral connections. The result is that cooking under the weight of colonial rule and white supremacy has, in revealing ways, created American food.

Felipe Hinojosa is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M. He is the author of Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture, which won the Américo Paredes Award from the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College, and a coeditor of the book Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945.

Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. is professor of Asian Pacific American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He is the author of Aloha Compadre: Latinxs in Hawai’i and Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego.