Food Across Borders

Food Across Borders

Matt Garcia (Editor), E. Melanie DuPuis (Editor), Don Mitchell (Editor), E. Melanie DuPuis (Contributions by), Matt Garcia (Contributions by), Don Mitchell (Contributions by), Meredith E. Arbaca (Contributions by), Katherine Massoth (Contributions by), José Antonio Vásquez-Medina (Contributions by), Tanachai Mark Padoongpatt (Contributions by), William Carleton (Contributions by), Kellen Backer (Contributions by), Mary Murphy (Contributions by), Michael Wise (Contributions by), Teresa M. Mares (Contributions by), Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland (Contributions by), Jessie Mazar (Contributions by), Kathleen Sexsmith (Contributions by), Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern (Contributions by), Marygold Walsh-Dilley (Contributions by)
$46.74
Publication Date: October 17th, 2017
Publisher:
Rutgers University Press
ISBN:
9780813591964
Pages:
290

Description

The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes “American” in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from “the line in the sand” that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between “our” food and “their” food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between “us” and “them.”  

The stories told in Food Across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.   

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
 

About the Author

MATT GARCIA is a professor of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies, and history at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He is the author of From the Jaws of Victory:  The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement.  

E. MELANIE DuPUIS is a professor and chair of environmental studies and science at Pace University, New York, and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author or editor of numerous books including, Dangerous Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice.  

DON MITCHELL is a professor of cultural geography at Uppsala University in Sweden, and is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University in New York. He is the author or editor of numerous books including, of They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape and the Struggle of Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California.

 

Praise for Food Across Borders

"A 'Taco Truck on Every Corner'? Well organized and well written, Food Across Borders takes a broad inter-ethnic, transnational, and transhemispheric approach to its subject. The book is a welcome reminder and fresh interpretation of the central role that food plays in American politics and society at every level from production to consumption."
— José M. Alamillo

"This important volume reminds us that eating necessarily involves the movement of foodstuffs, meanings, and bodies across borders, both intimate and geopolitical, and that 'building a wall' is no solution."
— Julie Guthman

"Essays on such topics as negotiating nostalgia in family-owned and small-scale Mexican restaurants in the United States."
— Chronicle

A Conversation with Food Across Borders editors Matt Garcia, E. Melanie DuPuis, and Don Mitchell
— Meant to be Eaten