Mexicane Cuisine

Chapter Title: Mexican Cuisine: Food as Culture
Book Title: Latino Metropolis

Book Author(s): Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv768.8
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3
Mexican Cuisine
Food as Culture
The following passage, written by Charles Fletcher Lummis and published

in 1903 in The Landmarks Club Cook Book, captures a revealing moment in
Los Angeles cultural history:
While a few other cities are as "cosmopolitan" as Los Angeles, no
other city in the world is made up of so many intelligent and well-
to-do people so far from their old homes and from homes so wide-
ly scattered. Without going outside their own yard or their own "so-
cial set," [housewives] may exchange recipes for English puddings,
New England pies, French sautes, Italian pastes, Swiss hassenpfef-
fer, Virginia corn pone, Mexican chocolate—in fine, the dishes of
every land, and from typical housekeepers thereof.1
In many ways, Lummis's chapter titled "Spanish-American Cookery"
anticipates the marketing tactics of superstar chefs who today write cook-
books and go on cable TV to promote their restaurants. In both epochs,
culinary texts created by a workforce that specializes in cultural criticism
express ideologies of cultural incorporation that underlie the creation and
perpetuation of urban landscapes and cultural spaces. In early-twentieth-
century Los Angeles, sales of The Landmarks Club Cook Book represented
one of several schemes Lummis devised to finance the preservation of
California's old Spanish missions. But California's most influential booster-
journalist peddled more than recipes. Lummis also used crumbing mis-
sions as tangible symbols to claim Southern California as a homeland for a
displaced and alienated Anglo middle class. As others have argued, Lummis
provided the narratives and symbols with which Mexican Los Angeles could
be revalorized as a fantasy landscape of Spanish romance.2 In contrast to
67

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68 • Mexican Cuisine
the blatantly anti-Mexican discourse of the mid-nineteenth century,

Lummis's more subtle Hispanic fantasy appropriated those Mexican cul-
tural images that could be interpreted as "Spanish" (read white and Euro-
pean) or dependent on Anglo leadership and protection while excluding
others. And he succeeded, with the backing of the city's WASP elite, who
saw in his books, articles, and civic leadership a way to give Los Angeles the
cultural respectability it lacked. The city's infant tourist and restaurant in-
dustry, complemented by the mass merchandising of food products, pro-
duced an especially powerful means of constructing Lummis's new urban
imagery. Like the theatrical re-creations and pageants so favored by Lum-
mis and his contemporaries, the dining experience provided a visceral
means of giving the mission-based Hispanic fantasy the flavor and aroma
of a full-fledged simulacrum.
The Hispanic fantasy discourse continues to play a role in the design,
construction, and marketing of Los Angeles landscapes. At the Border Grill
in Santa Monica, for example, the jagged, angular lines of a metaphorical
border fence suspended from above symbolically divide the restaurant in
half. In a city where tourists and an international business set experience
dining as simulated cultural travel, the Border Grill capitalizes on the most
ubiquitous aspects of the city's Mexican landscape. Like the Taco Bell com-
mercials of the early 1990s, the restaurant commodities lafrontera as thrill-
seeking threshold preceding contact with the exotic Other. The patronizing
multiculturalism implied in the restaurant's interior design and its menu is
overdy expressed by its owners, Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, in
their cookbooks and their first cable television show, Too Hot Tamales. The
show prefaced its neocolonial appropriations of world cuisine by reviving a
gendered variant of the Hispanic fantasy discourse. Since the early years of
Hollywood, the female stereotype of the Latin "hot tamale," or half-breed
harlot, has conveyed the image of a lusty, hot-tempered, sexually promiscu-
ous, racially mixed, and therefore degraded mestiza subject.3
In the end, both Lummis and the "hot tamales" uproot Mexican cui-
sine from its cultural and social contexts, but with different technologies
and aesthetic strategies. The elite chefs of Los Angeles use a postmodern
aesthetic to appropriate and incorporate Mexican recipes and ingredients,
and then disseminate their appropriations nationwide through cable tele-
vision, radio shows, and Web sites, as well as through the cookbooks and
magazine features Lummis would have recognized. In the global city, these
methods of cultural appropriation, image construction, and dissemination
are aided by the transformation of urban cultural industries. In today's Los
Angeles, the circulation of the public, its physical opportunities for social or

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Mexican Cuisine • 69
cultural contact, whether indoors in private malls, theme parks, movie the-
aters, video stores, or restaurants, increasingly revolves around the con-
sumption of cultural products. Hence the importance of what Sharon
Zukin defines as the critical infrastructure, which designs production and
consumption of cultural products. Zukiris concept of critical infrastructure
covers a broad spectrum of knowledge workers, beginning with the "high-
culture artists and performers" typically identified with the cultivation of
urban taste, but also including cultural service workers such as museum
curators, advisers to corporate art collectors, cheese sellers at gourmet food
stores, restaurant waiters, chefs, restaurant owners, and "restaurant critics
whose reviews are eagerly read for vicarious cultural consumption."4 The
critical infrastructure expresses a new global division of labor that requires
the internationalization of investment flows and the power to commodity
local landscapes and traditions. But it also reinforces that division by nor-
malizing the policies of economic and spatial restructuring in global cities
and by producing critiques that cultivate self-aware, status-driven con-
sumption among its urban denizens. To Zukin, restaurant reviewers epito-
mize the critical process that constructs the imagery of the global city:
They visit restaurants, writing up reactions to dishes and compar-

ing them with the composite menu of their collective experience.
By these activities, the critical infrastructure establish and unify a
new perspective for viewing and consuming the value of place—
but by doing so they also establish their market values.5
Zukin's conception of critical infrastructure and her analysis of cultural

production offer an especially powerful means of contextualizing the incor-
poration of Latino workers and the appropriation of Latino menus in the
Los Angeles restaurant industry. Restaurants, particularly such style-setting
restaurants as the Border Grill, embody those spaces where the critical in-
frastructure and immigrant Latino workers produce and market the multi-
cultural cuisine that defines Los Angeles as a global city.
That restaurants help manufacture the edible multicultural texts and
symbols upon which a global city's pluralistic self-image is constructed is
not surprising. The metropolis of the industrial age has long been identified
as the style center that generates cultural models emulated in the suburban
and rural periphery. In the postindustrial global city, that function has in-
tensified as cultural production has become its chief economic activity.
Building upon her earlier studies of gentrification, Zukin advances the con-
cept of the symbolic economy in her latest book to explain this transforma-
tion more thoroughly. She argues that urban elites appropriate the images,

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narratives, and symbols of multiculturalism and then inscribe these into

the built environment, to communicate their tastes, values, and desires to
their cultural peers and to the citizenry at large.6 The exterior form and con-
tents of a new museum are the metaphorical sheets of paper upon which
elites represent their visions of a culturally pluralistic city. It is the critical
infrastructure's job to make sure these texts are read correctly so that inter-
national investment flows without hindrance.
Although urban elites use the critical infrastructure to dominate the
means of symbolic production and distribution, there are several reasons
they do not control it absolutely. To begin with, the huge costs of constructing
their grand narratives depend upon the consent of the culture-consuming,
taxpaying, and voting public. Moreover, their texts are continually contest-
ed, and thus subject to the give-and-take of a cultural dialectic. Zukin thus
coins me term symbolic economy to frame this multisided cultural dialectic.
The creative destruction of landscape formation is more than a material
process; it is the language of power, the means by which elites include and
exclude symbols to construct and communicate the urban images, narra-
tives, and visions they hope to make real. To Zukin, the symbolic economy
speaks especially clearly in restaurants. These quasi-public spaces allow us
to gauge a city's globalizing reach through "the quality of life a city offers" its
corporate executives. "High-class" restaurants, she adds,
suggest an aura of sensual excitement akin to the latest financial

information, publishing coup, or fashion scoop. Indeed, restau-
rants have become the public drawing rooms of the symbolic
economy's business and creative elites. The more corporate ex-
pense accounts are concentrated in a city, the greater the resource
base to support both haute cuisine and nouvelle alternatives.7
Restaurants also function as important gateways and clearinghouses

for global labor recruitment. The size of a city's restaurant workforce, "the
countries of origin of participants, and the volume of monetary transac-
tions that pass through" them, Zukin writes, make "restaurant work an im-
portant transnational activity—and one that is mainly undocumented."8
Zukin's analysis of New York's elite restaurants can be applied to
restaurants in Los Angeles, but in different ways. For reasons of history and
geography, New York's elite restaurants lean more toward classic European
standards. Not surprisingly, as many as twenty-five four- and five-star
restaurants operate in New York, compared to only five in Los Angeles.9 But
the economy of stars does not mean that Los Angeles and Hollywood, the
Vatican of celebrity glamour and popular culture, lack elite restaurants.

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Rather, for what they lack in lacquered mahogany, silverware, white table-
cloths, and haute respectability, they more than compensate with copious
servings of glamour, multicultural exoticism, and nouvelle chic.
Like ethnic enclaves repackaged for tourists as nostalgia or exotic
Otherness, restaurants, particularly those that set the standards and images
imitated by other restaurants, represent the global city's quintessential dis-
cursive space. Zukin maintains that style-setting restaurants' pairings of ar-
chitectural and culinary design with cultural tourism and culinary perfor-
mance produce "a city's visual style." At the center of this space stand the
restaurateurs, who "often appear as a cultural synthesis of the artist, the en-
trepreneur, and the social organizer. The restaurant itself is both theater
and performance. It serves and helps create the symbolic economy."10 Like
the city officials and developers who promote cultural development and
the architects who design office towers, the menu-designing chefs function
as public intellectuals. The local critical media, which are particularly de-
pendent upon and identified with their audiences, normalize elite culinary
representations by translating them into popular vernaculars. When echoed
by the local critical media, a city's political, economic, and cultural elites
negotiate a city's "look and feel," designating which cultures "should be
visible" and which should remain invisible.11
In Los Angeles, the multicultural style-setting restaurants straddle a
paradox. Throughout the restaurant industry, but especially in the style-
setting nouvelle restaurants, Latino immigrant workers play the role of un-
skilled physical labor while college- and academy-trained chefs play the
role of culinary artists. In such an intellectual division of labor, a cadre of
mostly non-Latino elite chefs appropriates and reinterprets the Latino in-
gredients and recipes their Latino staffs assemble into nouvelle creations.
That the ubiquitous contradictions of multicultural commodification do not
seem more jarring is due in part to the cultural discourses that obscure diem.
Our goal in this chapter is to deconstruct the symbolic representation
and material production of Mexican cuisine in Los Angeles to reveal its
hidden gastronomic culture wars. For most of the twentieth century, culi-
nary symbolism and metaphor have served as important tools for con-
structing racialized Latino images and, later, for appropriating Mexican
culture, and later still, for constructing the city's image of multicultural plu-
ralism. And now, as Latinos emerge as the Los Angeles area's majority popu-
lation and workforce, particularly in the growing service sector, the dialec-
tic between representation and production of Mexican cuisine offers a
critical means of gauging Latino cultural power, or, more precisely, the rela-
tive lack of such power. Because of the domestic, feminized connotations

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and decentralized production of restaurant work, and because of restau-

rants' classification as secondary production centers dominated by immi-
grant workers, the study of culinary representation and production has not
been a priority of social science research. That oversight should give way
to new realities. The various forms of food service constitute the fourth-
fastest-growing industry in the United States; waiting tables ranks sixth
among the nation's fastest-growing job categories.12 These trends under-
score the need for a serious assessment of restaurant work in general and
of Latino restaurant workers in particular. The U.S. Census Bureau esti-
mates that as many as 209,741 people were employed in Los Angeles
County's eating and drinking places in 1994, compared to more than 173,000
in New York in 1998.13 Latino immigrants, when compared to Anglos, are
also overrepresented in Los Angeles County's food services industry by a
ratio of more than two to one, and make up as much as 70 percent of this
workforce.14
By themselves, however, statistics provide few clues that would ex-
plain the operations of the symbolic economy in the city's restaurant indus-
try. That is why we have examined two discrete types of social texts to help
us in our analysis of culinary representation and production: the more
widely read literature of urban landscape formation and the city's lesser-
known body of culinary literature. With this triad of demographic, land-
scape, and culinary texts, we will attempt to show how the city's elites have
tried to remarket Los Angeles as a "multicultural" metropolis by simultane-
ously incorporating and marginalizing Latino cuisine and low-wage culi-
nary workers.
Changes in the political economy and the technological environment
have increased the importance of cultural production. To be sure, goods
solely defined by their cultural use and meaning have long been crucial
components of industrial production. Beginning in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, a series of technological and marketing innovations created a mass-
media revolution that permanently altered production of cultural goods
and services. Equally important, a mass-culture revolution occurred in the
largest cities. Today, a comparable revolution in cultural production is
under way in the new global cities. New digital technologies now encourage
die proliferation of industries based solely upon the commodification of cul-
tural artifacts, information, and spaces. In addition to the city's old content-
based industries, such as the print and broadcast media, film and sound-
recording media transformed by the digital revolution, and the new
cultural industries that operate in cyberspace, we add those industries that
commodify cultural landscapes, goods, services, and images, such as movie

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studio theme parks, restaurants, hotels, guided movie star tours, and cloth-
ing and food manufacturing. Recent data show that lost aerospace jobs, ca-
sualties of the Cold War's end, have been replaced and superseded in
Southern California by new jobs in the cultural sector. Between 1990 and
1997, the number of people employed in the core businesses of motion pic-
tures and television jumped from 143,000 to 262,000, or 83 percent. Ser-
vicing this growing industry in turn generated another 50,000 culture-
based jobs, from music recording to on-location gourmet catering.15 Such
displacements signal structural changes in the economies of global cities.
As manufacturing reorganizes in the suburbs and cities suffer recur-
ring financial crises, culture emerges as the principal "business of cities."
That transformation, which Zukin sees in the "growth of cultural consump-
tion (of art, food, fashion, music, tourism) and their industries," fuels "the
city's symbolic economy, its visible ability to produce both symbols and
space."16 Since Southern California's emergence from its recent economic
downturn, the investment of huge sums of public and private capital in the
arts and entertainment infrastructure of Los Angeles continues to sustain
and expand the region's elite cultural institutions, including its restaurants.
Despite their seeming pluralism and populist disdain for class snobbery,
the style-setting multicultural restaurants of Los Angeles are its most repre-
sentative elite institutions. Like the city's other spaces of cultural produc-
tion, these restaurants have benefited from massive cultural infrastructure
investments. Capital tunneled into museums, such as the new Getty Center
on the Westside, the conversion of Hollywood studios into amusement
parks, and the planned construction of computer-age DreamWorks studios
in the Ballona Wetiands will require a complement of elite culinary spaces.
Once inside the restaurant, the tourist and overseas businessman ex-
perience a safe and highly aestheticized encounter with the multicultural
city before heading off to an evening at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a
private screening on the Universal Studios lot, or an afternoon at the Mu-
seum of Contemporary Art. In other cases, dinner at Patina Restaurant is
the evening's theatrical event. The multicultural style-setting restaurant
thus functions as an entertainment niche in its own right or as a prelude to
another cultural experience. Either way, investments in culinary entertain-
ment remain intimately linked to local and global economies of scale. Not
only do the critical infrastructure's journalists, public relations operatives,
and marketers create and perpetuate places of "multicultural delectation,"
tens of thousands of immigrant workers ensure that these places operate
profitably and smoothly. But as economic life in the global city gravitates

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toward cultural production and communication systems converge and

their technologies blur, new spaces for cultural contestation appear.
Los Angeles, a veritable tangle of culture industries, exemplifies the
global city as arbiter of cultural meaning and investment, but also as a post-
colonial territory subject to the reinterpretation by its Latino majority.17
The nearness of its postcolonial past thus presents certain risks to elite ef-
forts to incorporate, reconfigure, and commodify the city's multicultural
landscapes. Its culture industries must create narratives and images that
render harmless whatever oppositional tendencies its inhabitants preserve
in their memories. The elites know they cannot fully control and exploit the
landscapes of the present without also patrolling the landscapes of the
past. In a city such as Los Angeles, that postcolonial moment occurred only
yesterday, when Charles Fletcher Lummis set about inventing a cosmopoli-
tan identity for Los Angeles in the course of a very long walk.
While walking west from Ohio in 1884 and writing about his journey
in installments for the Los Angeles Daily Times (as the paper was then
called), Lummis delivered his first account of Mexicans and their food at
Cucharas Creek in southern Colorado. After portraying the plaza's "greasers"
as "snide-looking, twice as dark" as Indians, and ineffably lazy, he took his
first shot at Mexican cooking. "Not even a coyote will touch a dead Greaser,
the flesh is so seasoned with the red pepper they ram into their food in howl-
ing profusion."18 Lummis's characterization reiterated a well-established
anti-Mexican discourse. Throughout the Southwest, publishers of dime
novels, travelogues, and newspapers used culinary analogy to illustrate
Mexican savagery and depravity to mark a community as racial Others. The
newspaper story reproduced here, which was published in the 1899 edition
of the Los Angeles Record, illustrates the pattern. Efforts to hunt down the
seller of the tamale in question proved fruitless. But a lack of evidence did
not hinder the Record's reporter from leveling accusations: "Bad meat is
often used in the manufacture of tamales, the offensive taste being dis-
guised by the fiery condiments which are used." The next paragraph, writ-
ten with a man's lustful eye, establishes the other side of this good-versus-
rotten narrative: "Miss Hufford is a most pronounced blonde. She has
beautiful flaxen hair, a pearly complexion and large expressive blue eyes.
She is about 21 years of age." The reporter's effort to convict a cuisine by
means of racist analogy is transparent: a flaxen-haired beauty, the image of
Anglo racial purity, succumbs to a putrid tamale made with spices and
chiles to disguise the flavor of rotten meat. The reporter did not need to re-
mind his readers that tamales were made by Mexicans, a word already
cloaked in negative connotations. Words such as "bad meat" and "rotten"

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Los Angeles Record story from 1899 illustrating the pattern of the use
of culinary analogy to indicate Mexican depravity.

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reminded readers what they already knew—that Mexicans were dirty and
deceitful.
By the time Lummis, a native of Lynn, Massachusetts, got to New
Mexico, however, his opinion of "greasers" had undergone a transforma-
tion. In his 1892 travelogue Tramp across the Continent, Lummis excused
himself for his "silly" Anglo-Saxon prejudices before painting Mexicans as a
"quaint, kindly people, ignorant of books, but better taught than our own
average in all the social virtues."19 It was while writing this book and serving
as Times city editor that Lummis built his home just north of Los Angeles,
on the banks of the usually dry creek bed called Arroyo Seco, where he de-
veloped a fondness for Mexican cooking. In the home he dubbed El Alisal
(the place of the Sycamores) he held court, entertaining artists and intellec-
tuals with dinner parties that featured Mexican cooking and pontificating
on the southwestern Hispanic legacy.20
From his fortresslike home, Lummis wrote articles, books, and edited
magazines such as Out West (Land of Sunshine) that wrapped sun worship,
health fadism, and nostalgia for bygone Spanish days in a single package.
His patronizing view of Mexicans was entirely consistent with his Brahmin
upbringing. He intended his publications for people like himself, the mid-
dle and upper classes he adeptly beckoned to the city. In Los Angeles, he
founded the Landmarks Club, a group that worked to preserve the missions
from further decay and established the Southwest Museum to house the re-
gion's Native American artifacts and Californio history.21 But the character
of Lummis's work would be dictated by the cultural and economic alliances
he would make in Los Angeles.
Like other eastern intellectuals of his generation, he'd become disillu-
sioned with the ideals of American democracy; the capitalist robber barons
didn't need reform-minded do-gooders and middle-class self-improvers to
run the Republican Party. Feeling left out, as well as disgusted by the greed
of monopoly capitalism exposed by the muckrakers, he and other disen-
chanted intellectuals known as mugwumps searched for a new homeland.
They found it in California and the greater Southwest, a landscape that
Lummis imagined as "enchanting" rather than simply savage.22
Refashioning the past to their personal advantage, they now saw
themselves husbanding a fallen Hispanic civilization. Lummis, for his part,
assumed the pose of a Spanish grandee, going so far as to call himself Don
Carlos, a conceit, writes historian James W. Byrkit, that evokes the imagery
of the southern Lost Cause: "Indians toil happily in the fields for Padre
Agustin or Don Jose, rather than blacks for OF Massa; caballero is just an-
other name for cavalier; sprawling ranches . . . replace the colonnaded

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mansions." Both mythologies, Byrkit adds, glorify the "loftier aspects of

Western civilization: traditions, leisure, refined literary tastes, sartorial for-
mality, and well-bred social graces, including courtliness."23
And what better symbol of loftiness than California's abandoned mis-
sions, given that crumbling adobe could evoke a time when gentle padres
presided over vast pastoral domains in idyllic splendor. Lummis under-
stood the myth's bankability, writing at one point, "The Missions are, next
to our climate and its consequences, the best capital Southern California
has."24 Lummis's strategy for selling California impressed his boss at the
Times. Colonel Harrison Gray Otis needed more than sunshine to compen-
sate for the natural harbor and water that Los Angeles did not have. Behind
the booster grandiosity lurked insecurity over Soutiiern California's image
as a cultural wasteland good only for convalescing tuberculars. That is why
Otis stressed the patrician side of the Lummis myth but suppressed the
facts that the Franciscans had flogged runaway Indian laborers and that
Yankee freebooters had lynched and swindled the Mexicans less than a
century before. Lummis wanted to reassure the affluent Babbittry of the
Middle West, so sought after by Otis as real estate investors, that Los
Angeles offered Spanish-flavored European refinement.25 And anything, in-
cluding Lummis's cookbook, could be transformed into a symbol of bour-
geois gentility.26
However, in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles, very few Mexican home-
makers dreamed of sharing recipes with the "social set" to which the book
appealed. A deep social chasm separated their worlds. But for a handful of
wealthy ranchero families trotted out at fiesta time, most Mexicans were
miserably poor and socially invisible.27 The profoundly unequal relation-
ship between communities not only precluded the housewifely recipe ex-
changes Lummis imagined in his cookbook, but maintained the social dis-
tance that protected him from comparing his fantasies to the Mexican
community's social isolation. His selective inclusions and exclusions freed
him to incorporate mestizo Mexican culture into his romanticized concep-
tion of Spanish culture and so create a sophisticated origin myth for the pa-
trician class of Los Angeles.28
Lummis, however, cannot take all the credit for reinventing Cali-
fornia. In 1884, Helen Hunt Jackson published Ramona, a novel she wrote
to denounce Native American exploitation; Ramona became, in the hands
of D. W. Griffith, the perfect libretto for selling his vision of Spanish Cali-
fornia. Griffith's 1910 film version of the novel deployed the Hispanic fanta-
sy discourse to elevate Ramona to the level of respectable art for middle-
class audiences. Jackson had originally made her protagonist, whom she

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identified as Mexican, the offspring of a Scottish father and an Indian

mother, which Europeanized the character for readers who perceived mes-
tizos as degraded "half-breeds." Griffith transformed the novel's half-white
"Mexican" protagonist into the "daughter of the noble Spanish house of
Moreno." And with Mary Pickford cast as Ramona, Griffith encouraged the
male members of the audience to fantasize about a "Spanish" beauty and
yet still portrayed Mexicans and Native Americans as innately inferior be-
ings too powerless to impede progress, represented as white conquest and
capitalist expansion.29 By 1916, the novel had generated as much as $50
million in publishing, stage, and screen revenues (a sum equivalent to the
amount generated by a Spielberg blockbuster today) as well as provided the
mythic rationale for landscape transformations already in progress. "In
Southern California a town (home of the Ramona Pioneer Historical Soci-
ety), streets, businesses ('Ramona's Chile Rellenos'), and real estate devel-
opments have been named after Ramona."30
Los Angeles area restaurateurs and cookbook writers swept up in
Lummis's mission revival movement thus made their enchiladas and
tamales more palatable for non-Mexican diners by affixing a "Spanish"
label. The Spanish Kitchen, run by Ismael Ramirez and located at 127 North
Broadway, in the heart of downtown, advertised to English-language read-
ers its "Beef & Chicken Tamales" in the March 16, 1912, edition of the Los
Angeles Record. The ad promised, "The only place in the city where you can
get a genuine Spanish Dinner," followed by a rather un-Spanish-sounding
list of dishes: "Special Chicken Tamales / Spanish Tamales / Enchiladas /
Spanish Beans / Tortillas."
Published in 1914, Bertha Haffner-Ginger's California Mexican-
Spanish Cook Book appears to rationalize the misrepresentation of Mexi-
can cuisine by asserting that the "majority of Spanish people in California
are as devoted to peppery dishes as the Mexicans themselves, and as the
Mexicans speak Spanish, the foods are commonly called Spanish dishes."31
It would have been more honest for Haffner-Ginger to write that the term
Spanish food was simply wrong, and left it at that. But she could not deny
the midwestern housewives who bought her book and attended her in-
person culinary presentations a taste of the romantically imagined land-
scapes that had lured them to California. So she went along with Lummis
and friends. Aside from her cookbook's "Regular Spanish Dinner" menus of
enchiladas and "carne con chili" lifted from local restaurants and photos of
genteel "Spanish" senoritas, Haffner-Ginger invoked mission revival mythol-
ogy by including a photo of the dome-shaped oven next to which Ramona,
the tragic Indian protagonist of Jackson's novel, was allegedly married.

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"Regular Spanish Dinner" menu reproduced from Bertha Haffner-Ginger's
California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book, 1914.

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Culinary reinvention paralleled the ongoing landscape transforma-

tions. In 1896, the Landmarks Club prevailed upon the Los Angeles city at-
torney to render an opinion against the use of the city's historic plaza as a
marketplace, despite the plaza's long tradition of food sales and the com-
mon Mexican practice of using plazas for trading purposes.32 But Lummis
decided what was best for the people who used the plaza. His Landmarks
Club argued in an unsigned Los Angeles Daily Times article that the produce
and food vendors who sold their goods to Mexican shoppers each week
represented a "perversion and practical obliteration of the most important
landmark in the city."33 The intervention of Lummis, a Landmarks Club
founder and a former Times editor, and Otis, Times publisher and a club di-
rector, makes this a classic example of news management. The Times por-
trayed Lummis as saving the plaza from the people who had built and
maintained it for more than a century. Like his fiestas, Lummis's incursion
into the plaza more than boosted the city's tourist industry. His "civic" in-
terventions later helped city elites to exclude and silence groups such as the
Wobblies and syndico-anarchist Magonistas, who used the plaza to agitate
and organize.34
Despite the tremendous power of city elites to reconfigure land-
scapes, members of the Mexican community found ways to defend their
own cultural spaces. After 1900, the yearly arrival of hundreds and then, in
the 1920s, tens of thousands of Mexicans instigated a nostalgia for home
cooking. New restaurants opened, menus became more elaborate, and
restaurant owners tried to cash in on the immigrants' nationalist sympa-
thies by running ads during Mexican national and religious holidays
promising "authentic" Mexican fare. In 1921, two days before the sixteenth
of September, the holiday celebrating Mexico's independence from Spain,
the Gran Restaurant Mexico offered "one of those Xochimilco meals that
shall remind of better days back home." The menu listed "real mole
poblano," enchiladas with cream, fried chicken, breaded pigs' feet, cham-
purrado con piloncillo (a hot drink made with chocolate, milk, and raw
sugar), tostadas topped with meat and vegetables, queso fundido (chiles
melted into Mexican cheese), chile verde stew, and huevos rancheros. It is
hard to gauge the authenticity of the cooking from these Spanish-language
newspaper ads, but they clearly catered to a working-class immigrant clien-
tele. Many of these eateries qualify as "third" places, or establishments that
blur the boundaries between private and public space, serving as living
rooms for the homesick, archives of culinary memory, and cozy places for
politicos, artists, and journalists to arrange their affairs.35
Despite low-paid work and the loneliness of exile, Mexicans now at

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least had enough spare time and spare change to enjoy something akin to
their own Harlem Renaissance.36 This rebirth reflected the immigrant's cul-
tural transformation. Paradoxically, these strangers from different corners
of Mexico now hungered for their roots, but also for a sense of community.
Their search led them into the streets, the squares, the shops, and the the-
aters, where they shared experiences of a popular culture that chronicled
their struggles and adjustments to their new home. In downtown bakeries,
tortillerias, pool halls, dance halls, music halls, music stores, restaurants,
bars, theaters, and even art galleries, the exiled immigrants found places
where they could be Mexican in public. The theaters, the most well attend-
ed of these venues, were probably more popular than the churches. In 1927,
for example, about a half dozen downtown Los Angeles theaters regularly
featured Spanish-language plays, musical revues, and silent movies, in-
cluding Spanish-language films produced in Mexico.37 Newspapers such as
La Opinion provided information that helped the members of the Mexican
community adapt to their new home while maintaining a link with their
homeland, and a handful of music stores recorded local Mexican artists,
many of whom sang corridas, or story songs about the revolution they had
fled and the new country they had found. Pedro J. Gonzalez, formerly
Pancho Villa's telegraph operator, persuaded a local radio station to give
him his own early-morning show. His program, the nation's first Spanish-
language radio broadcast, quickly attracted advertisers who recognized the
Mexican community's growing purchasing power. Gonzalez's singing group,
Los Madrugadores, or the Early Risers, performed his popular tune "El
Corrido del Lava-platos," or "The Dishwasher's Ballad," a humorous ac-
count of Pedro's first work experiences after he crossed the border.38
Restaurants such as La Mision Cafe, which capitalized on mission re-
vival imagery and advertised "Exquisite Mexican Dishes," were thus more
than mere purveyors of food and drink. Consuelo Bonzo, who founded La
Mision in 1924, not only hired musicians and dancers to entertain her cus-
tomers, she also invited the city's political leaders to hear the concerns of
the Mexican business community and hosted special celebrations for visit-
ing artists.39 A May 13, 1927, story in La Opinion announced that Virginia
Fabregas, touted on playbills as "the pride of our race," would dine with
the members of her company at La Mision Cafe on the last night Divorcie-
monos (Let's divorce), the play in which she was appearing, ran at the
Capitol Theatre on Spring Street. The article noted: "Mrs. Bonzo, propri-
etress of the well-known 'La Mision' Cafe, has been entrusted with prepar-
ing an exquisite dinner with which to honor the aforementioned persons.
An orchestra shall enliven the genial gathering."40 Bonzo also joined die

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Woman grinding flour for tortillas, circa 1920s or 1930s. Photograph from Secu-
rity Pacific Collection, Los Angeles Public Library; reprinted with permission.
mutualistas, or mutual aid groups, that fed and clothed the indigent among
her countrymen and later paid their train fares back to Mexico during the
repatriation hysteria of the 1930s.41
Consuelo Bonzo's contacts with the Los Angeles political and cultural
elite paid off. In 1924, Times editor in chief Harry Chandler, the most influ-
ential member of the city's ruling elite, built upon Lummis's mythologizing.
Chandler, at the insistence of Christine Sterling, persuaded the City Council
to convert the plaza and an adjoining alley into a historic monument cele-
brating the city's Californio founders. Sterling envisioned the alley running
between buildings previously owned by Italian and Chinese shopkeepers as
a Mexican shopping bazaar with restaurants that would cater to the tourists
who visited the Lummis-restored mission across the street.42 She therefore
interceded on Bonzo's behalf after learning of Chandler's plans to demolish
the businesses along Spring Street, where La Mision Cafe was located.43
While other Mexican-owned businesses were pushed south of the Los
Angeles River by a Chandler rebuilding campaign designed to raise down-
town property values, Sterling invited Bonzo to open a restaurant in the for-
mer alley, now transformed into a mythical street that had never really ex-
isted, so that she might serve a style of cooking the city's Mexican founders

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La Mision Cafe on North Spring Street, Los Angeles, circa 1920s. Photograph
courtesy of William Estrada, curator, history division, El Pueblo de Los Angeles
Historical Monument.
had never tasted.44 The city offered Consuelo Bonzo and her Italian hus-
band, Alfredo Antonio, the old Pelanconi House, built around 1855, which
was situated next to the old plaza in the middle of the new tourist destina-
tion.45 The restaurant, which opened in a building formerly owned by
Italians and served a style of Mexican food designed to please Anglo
tourists, was renamed La Golondrina, after Mexico's sentimental farewell
song. Like other Mexican restaurants of that time, the restaurant's name
made connections with sentimental romance and immigrant yearning.
The deportation and repatriation of as many as a million Mexicans,
which began in 1931 with a raid in La Placita, just yards from La Golon-
drina, initiated a frontal assault upon the Mexican presence in Los Angeles.46

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The city would have to wait until the 1980s before it would witness a revival
of the Mexican community that would exceed the levels of cultural influ-
ence attained in 1930. But even at its height in the late 1920s, and for
decades afterward, the Mexican community in Los Angeles lacked the
power or focus to prevent the WASP elite from dominating the city's sym-
bolic economy. Aside from a handful of Spanish-language newspapers,
radio stations, recording studios, and assorted politically committed
media, the Mexican community relied upon popular cultural forms to con-
struct a sense of group identity and maintain control over neighborhood
cultural spaces.
That picture would change after the 1940s, when Mexican American
activists would begin to win important social victories in the local labor
movement and a few local elections during the 1950s. After the 1960s, these
modest gains would be bolstered by the emergence of Chicano political ac-
tivism, a burst of mainstream and grassroots book and magazine publish-
ing by and about Chicanes, the rapid expansion of Spanish-language tele-
vision, and the grudging admittance of a handful of Mexican journalists
into the mainstream English-language media.47 In East L.A., a resurgence of
Mexican cultural pride hastened the disappearance of "Spanish" restau-
rants. The numerous puestos (food stalls) of the First Street Mercado, the in-
troduction of pescaderias or seafood restaurants serving steaming bowls of
siete mares, Mexico City-styled taquerfas serving tacos al pastor, and birri-
erias serving slow-roasted kid would offer new spaces for the social con-
struction and expression of Chicano and Mexican identity. Neighborhood
eateries such as Manuel's Tepeyac in East L.A., La Golondrina in Olvera
Street, Lucy's El Adobe across the street from Paramount Studios, and
Barragan's and La Villa Taxco on Sunset Boulevard continued to serve as
third places for political discussion and deal making between an emerging
Mexican American middle-class political leadership and the Democratic
machine. Meanwhile, the spread of Mexican restaurants followed the
movement of Mexican Americans into the suburbs. Central and South
American restaurants would continue a slow but steady acquisition of cul-
tural space in the Pico-Union/Westlake area, Hollywood, and Echo Park.
Incremental increases in Latino political, economic, and media empower-
ment accompanied these conquests. But after the 1970s, the government
and media diluted them by reviving the term Hispanic and other aspects of
the "fantasy legacy."
The quality and quantity of the culinary publishing record, and the
subordinate role to which it assigned Mexican cuisine, illustrate the persis-

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Restaurant on Fourth near Evergreen, circa 1930s. At that time, the term
Spanish was used instead of Mexican to describe the food. Photograph from
Shades of L.A., Los Angeles Public Library; reprinted by permission.
tence of this discourse. A 1994 national search of library databases found

more than nineteen hundred citations of books on California cookery. Of
these, only forty-four, or about 2 percent, are dedicated in part or in full
to Mexican or Spanish cuisine, and only eight are written by authors with
identifiable Spanish surnames.48 Most of the forty-four so-called Mexican
cookbooks were compiled by Anglo women's church or other social groups,
with sections dedicated to "Spanish" recipes, or else published in trade
books, such as California's Mission Recipes, that stress the romantic "Old
Spanish" days. Mark Preston's California Mission Cookery, published in
1994 and based upon Haffner-Ginger's book mentioned earlier, represents
one of the latest versions of the fantasy legacy:
And as I read her [Haffner-Ginger's] recipes, I was transported back
to the "Land of Sunshine," a golden state of fiestas and rodeos last-
ing for many days. It was a time when there was clean air, clear
water, orange groves, and cattle grazing on a thousand hills. It
was a time of charros, Mexican gentiemen farmers in the mold
of Thomas Jefferson and flashing dark-eyed senoritas with roses
held between their teeth as they danced the jota.49

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In using the phrase "Land of Sunshine" Preston acknowledges Lummis's

magazine, which was created to extol Southern California's weather, mis-
sions, and Spanish romance.
Although the Los Angeles critical media could not match Preston's
Hispanicizing nostalgia, food writers and restaurant reviewers, particularly
those at the Los Angeles Times, left much of the city's Hispanic fantasy lega-
cy intact while constructing the city's image as the nation's capital of Third
World cuisine. For example, Ruth Reichl, the foremost chronicler of nou-
velle cuisine in Los Angeles during the 1980s and early 1990s, wrote a Los
Angeles Times feature tracing the origins of California cuisine to such newly
discovered texts as Encarnacion Pinedo's El Cocinero Espanol (The Spanish
cook), published in 1898 in San Francisco. Reichl correctly notes that many
of the stylistic qualities identified with California cuisine—a love of fresh
fruits, vegetables, edible flowers, and herbs, and aggressive spicing and
grilling over native wood fires—were elements of Mexican cuisine docu-
mented by Pinedo's recipes nearly a century ago. But Reichl overlooks the
colonized subject behind the text. More than a fine cook, Pinedo was a di-
rect descendant of the Berreyesa family, one of Alta California's wealthiest
and most tragic of the elite ranchero families. From 1846 to 1856, Yankee
miners, soldiers, and vigilantes lynched or shot a total of eight Berreyesa
men. The family was also beset by crooked land lawyers and squatters
who reduced one of me most land-rich Californio families—an estimated
160,000 acres of Santa Clara Valley ranch land—to humiliating landless-
ness. To the other disillusioned Californios, the Berreyesa tragedy symbol-
ized the measure of their defeat. But Reichl mentions nothing of these in-
convenient postcolonial memories.50 Intended or not, her omissions leave
much of the Hispanic fantasy legacy intact, which is not surprising, given
the critical media's reasons for rediscovering California's culinary history.
Beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s, and then later
in Los Angeles, the West Coast staged a culinary revolution called California
cuisine. The new label acknowledged recipes and ingredients from Euro-
pean and Pacific Rim culinary sources. Soon afterward, Los Angeles began
to emphasize its Mexican and Native American influences. But despite its
international scope, a single culinary aesthetic, nouvelle cuisine, dominat-
ed this explosion in culinary innovation. The new cuisine perfectly suited
such emergent global cities as Los Angeles in their transition to economies
of cultural production.
Like the European modernists of previous decades, the elite French
chefs who initiated the nouvelle revolution in the early 1970s utilized the
images, flavors, and associations of the exotic Other to critique a preceding

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generation of French haute chefs. There were differences, however. The

nouvelle came after modernism had reached its cultural zenith; it also
lacked modernism's aggressive assaults on middle-class sensibilities. The
new style instead reflected a gentrifying sensibility produced by changing
social conditions at home and abroad. Increased nutritional awareness, the
availability of more leisure time, and faster transportation combined to de-
construct the haute menus of the Ile-de-France. Whereas the haute tradi-
tion had constructed its social exclusivity by faithfully reproducing a hide-
bound culinary canon, the nouvelle chefs made the haute aesthetic the
object of consumption. Whereas the old haute recipes evoked pomp and
prestige with such aristocratic titles as dues de Bourgogne and noisette
d'agneau Edouard VII, the new chefs emphasized ingredients and cooking
procedures with titles such as ravioles de truffes a la creme de mousserons.51
The revolution in transportation expanded French vacation and dining
habits. For example, new wine regions were added to the tried-and-true
destinations in Cote d'Or. The nouvelle chefs of Paris followed their patrons
on holiday, and thus rediscovered regional cuisines while inaugurating flve-
and four-star restaurants in new locations. Meanwhile, the increased avail-
ability and speed of refrigerated rail and air transportation meant that chefs
could demand the best in seasonal produce from the provinces, and from
the world. The nouvelle style also emphasized the chef's personal artistry
over the old school's selfless obedience to tradition.52 The new chefs thus
challenged discerning patrons to read the old haute values in the edible text
of the nouvelle recipes. The nouvelle method's symbolic hierarchies decon-
structed and reassembled haute and regional French cuisine in a way that
prepackaged that cuisine for international export. The French superstars of
nouvelle cuisine thus took their show on the road, performing their style
with new ingredients in major cities around the world. They established
their own restaurants and academies at home and abroad, training thou-
sands of non-French chefs to speak the nouvelle culinary language. But
whereas classical haute cuisine had established its hegemonic dominance
over regional cuisines by military and political means during the formation
of the modern French state, nouvelle cuisine relied upon the market and
cultural forces to establish its hegemony over global cuisine, particularly in
the United States.53
Like the nouvelle chefs, who had rediscovered and reinvented France's
regional cuisine, the American nouvelle disciples applied dieir techniques
and aesthetic to local ingredients and recipes, a gentrifying impulse that ex-
plains an initial interest in regional culinary history. The practitioners and
promoters of California cuisine, nouvelle cuisine mexique, and Cal-Mex,

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Southwest, and Tex-Mex cuisines, as well as other variants of the new

American cuisine, mined the past to feed a commodifying aesthetic. But
few of these chefs felt compelled to engage in a comparable critical dia-
logue with Mexican and other so-called Third World cuisines. The appropri-
ation and rejection of local ingredients and recipes gathered from around
the world represented, at a symbolic level, the rhetorical assertions and
counterassertions of an argument occurring within a culinary tradition.
The haute and nouvelle partisans did not seriously attempt to engage the
practitioners and advocates of non-European, nonnouvelle culinary dis-
courses in their dialogue.
The same went for Los Angeles, which emerged as a hotbed of nou-
velle experimentation in the 1980s. With rare exceptions, the city's nouvelle
disciples were not interested in incorporating Mexican cuisine as a fully re-
alized cultural or aesthetic subject. Instead, the poststructuralism of the
nouvelle style appeared to vanquish historical memory and freed chefs to
fill their tamales with smoked salmon or caviar without having to worry too
much about the cultural ramifications of how they had appropriated
recipes or combined ingredients. The nouvelle chefs also discovered that
they could make Mexican cuisine more palatable to their upscale clientele
if they called it southwestern, a term that simultaneously evoked New Age
appropriations of Native American mysticism and the Hispanic fantasy
legacy and de-emphasized overtly Mexican influences.
John Rivera Sedlar, founder of the trend-setting Los Angeles restau-
rants St. Estephe's, Bikini, and, recendy, Albiquiu, expressed this neocolonial
attitude in his book Modern Southwest Cuisine, a gastronomic tour de force
fraught with discursive contradictions. Rivera Sedlar, among the first
Latinos to join the ranks of the French-trained style-setting elite, neverthe-
less expresses the ambiguities that come with being the lone pioneer in a
new professional culture. On the one hand, his cooking shows a real knowl-
edge and appreciation of New Mexico's regional cuisine. On the other, his
writing reiterates European culinary hegemony by characterizing his native
New Mexico cooking as "earthy," a "common people's cuisine" that offered
"a limited palette," while portraying French cuisine as a refined, aristocrat-
ic, and modernizing influence.54 Rivera Sedlar appears to have succumbed
to the Hispanic fantasy that imprisoned preceding generations of New
Mexican cookbook writers in a tangle of conflicting discourses. In the
1930s, cookbook writers like Fabiola Cabeza de Baca and Cleofas Jaramillo
attempted to protect their local culture from appropriation by Anglo artists
while asserting fictional Spanish, more European, ancestries so as to pass

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as second-class whites. But before we judge tiiese writers too harshly,

Genaro Padilla warns us that
our antepasados were not fools. They had moments of clarity... in

which they knew they were lying to themselves, and they certainly
knew they were engaged in a battle in [which] lies were crucial to
survival. In intercultural discourse between a dominant and sub-
ject group, survival is predicated upon strategically voicing one's
presence. Often, simply being able to open one's mouth signals a
moment of affirmation.55
In the 1980s, the chefs who invented southwestern cuisine echoed

the neocolonial narratives of the 1930s, but with different objectives. By
striking poses as heroic westerners, these chefs ennobled an earthy cookery
and, in the process, invented themselves as culinary artists, a creative sta-
tus that inscribed a new division of intellectual labor in the city's style-
setting restaurants. Today, their neocolonial stance has been institution-
alized in culinary academies nationwide, including at the Los Angeles
Culinary Institute in Encino. Although the institute's Web site suggests a
global reach, its European-trained staff and course curriculum focus upon
the haute and nouvelle style. The institute's handful of courses in Hispanic
cuisine are also less than they appear to be—the emphasis is Iberian, not
Latin American.56
The food writers who fussed about "exotic" new ingredients and the
ingenious ways nouvelle chefs painted on plates legitimated the chef's cul-
tural appropriations. Few of the critical infrastructure's members noted the
imperial way a new generation of European-trained chefs had detached
Mexican and so-called Third World cuisines from their social and cultural
histories. More important, the one-way conversation of a postmodern
French aesthetic imposing itself upon New World foods and ingredients
was held up as a sophisticated urban metaphor of "salad bowl" multicultur-
alism. David Rieff, the New York writer and son of Susan Sontag, takes the
culinary metaphor quite literally when he writes:
Indeed, it was on the... far more basic level of what people ate that
this multiculturalization of the Southland had progressed the far-
thest. Ethnic restaurants and fast-food restaurants, only recently...
confined to particular neighborhoods or immigrant-owned mini-
mals, seemed to be sprouting up everywhere— A generation of
Anglo kids whose parents had been raised on steak and baked
potatoes could comfortably tell the difference at a glance between

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Thai and Cantonese food. A previously exotic prospect like, say, a

Szechuan dinner now seemed almost tame, a Mexican burrito as
American as a hamburger. In other words, their bellies were grow-
ing up multicultural.57
The local and regional media also romanticize the nation's growing
appetite for Mexican food as a premonition of multicultural communion.
Latino cultural critic Richard Rodriguez echoes both the imperial pose of
the nouvelle chefs (he describes Mexican cuisine as "peasant" cooking) and
the romance of multicultural culinary communion:
In California, where our borders are not holding, there is an even

more interesting development, mixed-race cuisine. Down the
block is a restaurant that features Chinese-Italian. A skinhead I
know hates Mexicans—but loves tacos. While blue-rinsed grannies
and inept politicians are marching under the SOS (Save Our State)
banner, demanding firmer borders, Americans are switching from
ketchup to salsa.58
Several trends contributed to L.A.'s decade of culinary fame. One

began in the 1970s with the dramatic increase in dining out, reinforced by
the gentrifying return of Reagan-era yuppies, who practiced multicultural
dining in formerly abandoned urban enclaves. Southern California's ex-
ploding culture industries, typified by the proliferation of Disneyland-like
theme parks, also rediscovered and repackaged the city's ethnic enclaves,
including their restaurants, as multicultural tourist destinations. The ar-
rival of billions in Asian investment dollars and increased Asian immigra-
tion led to the expansion of Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles, as well
as to the creation of a Chinese metropolis in the San Gabriel Valley city of
Monterey Park and a Vietnamese suburb in Orange County. These, among
other demographic changes, produced dramatic transformations of
Southern California's cultural landscape, which included the proliferation
and improvement of Asian and Latino restaurants.59
After several frustrating decades of trying to reinvent the city as a
metropolis of high Euro-American culture, Los Angeles's elites went with
the demographic flow. Beginning in the 1980s, elites, led by the downtown
"blue bloods," latched onto the city's ethnic mosaic to sell Los Angeles to
the national media as a "world-class" multicultural city. In the 1960s, the
downtown elite used the construction of a new music center to spearhead
the redevelopment of Bunker Hill, a twelve-square-mile core of dilapi-
dated hotels, homes, and apartments, for larger real estate development
schemes.60 The late Dorothy "Buffy" Chandler, wife of Times publisher

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Harry Chandler, had, by dint of political shrewdness, overcome the rivalry

between the downtown elite, which had dominated downtown since the
late nineteenth century, and the Westside's Jewish movie moguls and sav-
ings and loan bankers; she persuaded botii sides to compete to raise the
money to build the Los Angeles Music Center.61 But renewed leadership
competition between the city's Westside and downtown elites delayed the
removal of Bunker Hill's working-class and minority residents from land
targeted for redevelopment. Later, even after the downtown elites had
everything in their favor—a compliant county government and a $50 mil-
lion donation from Lillian Disney—their poor planning and arrogant mis-
management of the Disney Hall project would also delay their reinvention
of downtown.62 By the early 1980s, with land clearing completed and the
pro-development agenda reconsolidated under Mayor Bradley's adminis-
tration, the downtown elites would resume unfinished projects by sinking
unprecedented sums into high culture.63 This time around, however, the
cultural rationale for enhancing downtown property values, and attracting
new buyers and tenants to the high-rises constructed with huge sums of
public financing, underwent a modification.
In addition to showcasing generic high culture at the Music Center
and other newly constructed museums, the downtown elites would mar-
ket L.A. as the capital of the Pacific Rim.64 The city's hosting of the 1984
Olympic Games, preceded and followed by two Los Angeles Arts Festivals,
which included artists from the Pacific Rim, and redevelopment projects
rationalized as cultural improvement, drew upon multicultural motifs to
engender wider public support. Toward this end, Davis writes, the down-
town elites recruited an army of "mercenary" intellectuals and artists to
construct the image of a global city worthy of international investment.
These elites
patronize the art market, endow the museums, subsidize the re-
gional institutes and planning schools, award the architectural
competitions, dominate the arts and urban design task forces, and
influence the flow of public arts monies. They have become so in-
tegrally involved in the organization of high culture, not because of
old-fashioned philanthropy, but because "culture" has become an
important component of the land development process.65
The city's style-setting restaurants, and the food writers who reviewed
them, played a prominent role in the "revalorization" of L.A. culture. The
critical infrastructure fostered the convergence of Hollywood-style glam-
our with poststructuralist "multicultural delectation." Prominent architects

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designed culinary theaters where Reagan-era yuppies and nouveaux riches

could flaunt their success. Meanwhile, style-setting chefs—the preeminent
urban intellectuals of the global city—were constructing dishes from exotic
ingredients that mimicked architectural postmodern design. The chefs at
Patina, Citrus, and Chinois constructed crispy, edible cookie triangles
standing upright upon sumptuous chocolate mousse rectangles all criss-
crossed with Miro-like raspberry squiggles and powdered sugar to produce
the visual delights of jewelry. Restaurateurs, chefs, architects, and interior
designers marshaled music, lighting, celebrities, attractive waiters and
waitresses, as well as taste and aroma to simulate and normalize the experi-
ence of consuming the multicultural Other. These new culinary spaces, in
other words, symbolically fetishized a kind of cultural cannibalism. The
style-setting restaurant's mode of cultural production ran on more than
symbolic appropriation, however. Its commodification of multicultural
cuisine reinforced and relied upon a division of labor that trapped Latino
immigrant workers in the role of brute physical laborers.
In Los Angeles and New York, the nouvelle restaurants exploited a
two-tiered employment structure that consumed vast quantities of immi-
grant Latino workers as well as unemployed or underemployed artists and
actors. In the 1990s, a sobering recession prompted the elite chefs of Los
Angeles to reevaluate and modify their recipes, but not the division of labor
that had transformed the style-setting restaurant into a transnational insti-
tution. Today, as we near the end of a so-called economic recovery, immi-
grant workers in the style-setting multicultural restaurants labor behind
kitchen doors in unglamorous steam and heat while underemployed artists
perform in public view, seating patrons, explaining menus, and presenting
food. Emphasizing the performative quality of their labor, these waiters
and waitresses, Zukin writes, resemble "Disney World performers." They
"project an air of knowing or personable authority . . . and speak proper
English to middle-class customers without being either servile or surly."66
Immigrants, by contrast, have their reasons for seeking out the indus-
try's low-paying, often dead-end jobs. Lack of English-language skills and
U.S. educational credentials, willingness to work unusual and long hours at
subminimum wages, "and the restaurant industry's traditional barriers to
unionization, make this a pliable" labor force preferred by employers.67 In
her ethnographic survey of New York restaurants, Zukin also found that
those immigrant workers allowed direct contact with the public were more
European in appearance and had mastered English and urbane middle-
class manners. By contrast, Mexicans dominated "the lowest-skill kitchen

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positions," a fact she attributes to the rural origins of immigrant workers

who have not yet acquired "urban job skills."68
Available data suggest that the division of labor Zukin observed in
New York may be more accentuated in Los Angeles. In 1990, 108,921 per-
sons in the L.A. area were employed in creative occupations (actors, direc-
tors, dancers, musicians, and so on), compared to 114,231 in New York.
However, such creative occupations are growing at a faster rate in Los Ange-
les than in New York; much of this growth is generated by L.A.'s television
and film industry.69 Los Angeles is also home to far larger Latino and Asian
communities than are found in New York, and an economy mat historically
has depended upon undocumented Latino labor.
Unfortunately, gaps in restaurant workforce data make it difficult for
us to elaborate upon these numbers.70 Still, available workforce data and
anecdotal evidence allow us to make preliminary generalizations about the
Los Angeles area's restaurant industry. For example, data on occupational
concentration in Southern California show that in 1990 Latinos were more
than twice as likely as Anglos to be employed in food service jobs, a broad
category that covers the full spectrum of restaurant service and food prepa-
ration.71 This pattern holds for mat portion of the Latino workforce classi-
fied as cooks. Compared to Anglos, Salvadorans are 3.1 times as likely to be
employed as cooks; Guatemalans are 3 times as likely and Mexicans are
3.3 times as likely as Anglos to be working as cooks.72 Data provided by
Local 10 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International
Union confirms the pattern. In 1996, Mexican American and other Latino
employees constituted 58 percent of the New Otani Hotel's 388-member
service workforce, a proportion consistent with the slightly more than 50
percent of Latinos employed in Los Angeles County's more than 1.14 mil-
lion service sector jobs.73 Moreover, in 1990, 72 percent of Mexican immi-
grant men in Los Angeles were concentrated in a handful of occupational
niches, which included restaurant work.74 In 1990,75 percent of these work-
ers had not graduated from high school. Moreover, they averaged annual
salaries of $18,000, compared to $30,500 earned by native-born Mexican
Americans.75 Anecdotal evidence appears to confirm the job bifurcation
implied by the statistical data.
During a guest cooking engagement at a Southern California restau-
rant, Rick Bayless, award-winning owner and executive chef of Chicago's
Frontera Grill, was "flabbergasted" to see an entirely Latino prep crew re-
placed by white line cooks when the restaurant opened its display kitchen
in the evening. "I had someone tell me that you could not get a line position

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if you were Hispanic," Bayless later told a writer.76 Another restaurant and
travel writer who has years of experience writing about Southern Cali-
fornia's restaurants recounted the case of a light-skinned Argentinian who
started working in the kitchen of a Los Angeles-area gay restaurant:
After about four days of working there, the owners told him, "You
are too good looking to work in the back." They turned him into
a waiter, then he went off to Citrus [the epitome of a Los Angeles
style-setting restaruant], where he's making hundreds of dollars.
It's indicative of what happens in all restaurants. He had a good
capacity to learn English. He was surrounded by busboys from
Mexico. The others were not learning English, while he was
aggressively learning English.77
Although Bayless and celebrity nouvelle chefs such as Wolfgang Puck
have trained and promoted Latinos to more creative and visible positions,
several structural factors explain why style-setting restaurants prefer to em-
ploy Latino immigrants in unskilled and less visible positions. First, the
celebrity chef and assisting sous and line chefs represent the biggest part of
the style-setting restaurant's kitchen labor costs. Industry insiders note that
restaurant owners do not spend money to increase the education or train-
ing of immigrant Latino workers, aside from the on-the-job training these
workers receive. And the language barrier between the skilled, generally
non-Latino chefs and the unskilled Latino dishwashers and busboys rein-
forces the social distance that separates these groups. Executive chefs tend
to handpick the other skilled staff from among their social peers, which in-
cludes colleagues with whom they have worked or trained at other elite or
style-setting restaurants.
A recent trend has further heightened the social bifurcation of skilled
and unskilled restaurant workers. Traditionally, most skilled restaurant em-
ployees received their training and experience on the job. Today, however,
the preferred pathway to becoming a style-setting chef begins with a uni-
versity degree, followed by vocational training in one of many European-
styled culinary academies and an apprenticeship in a style-setting kitchen.78
By contrast, few Latinos receive elite professional training, although they
represent the majority of Southern California's restaurant workforce. La-
tinos made up 10.4 percent of 556 students enrolled in the chef's program
at San Francisco's prestigious California Culinary Academy in 1996, com-
pared to 65.3 percent for white students and 13.3 percent for Asians.79 Even
this low percentage of Latinos receiving elite culinary educations repre-
sents a significant advance. More than a decade ago, the number of Latinos

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enrolled in elite culinary academies would have been almost undetectable.

Still, the majority of immigrant Latino workers enter the restaurant indus-
try by the back door, through referrals or recommendations from other
Latino immigrant workers. These immigrant workers, moreover, get their
on-the-job training at middle to low-end full-service and fast-food restau-
rants—a career path that does not prepare workers for the style-setting
restaurant. The high restaurant failure rate and the undocumented status
of many of these immigrant workers also increase their vulnerability. When
seen from the immigrant worker's perspective, the obstacles to advance-
ment are indeed discouraging.
"It is very hard for [immigrant Latinos) to conceive of learning En-
glish, finishing high school, and then going to college" in order to become a
chef, one industry insider observed. "It's hard enough for them to stay em-
ployed." The restaurant's intellectual division of labor ghettoizes unskilled
Latino workers, many of whom remain in the same positions for ten to
twenty years.80 That many of these midrange and fast-food restaurants
serve Mexican food and are Mexican or Latino owned does not significantly
alter the social relations of production.
The success stories of Latino chefs who have opened well-reviewed
restaurants also confirm the pattern. Jose Rodriguez, chef and owner of La
Serenata de Garibaldi in Boyle Heights, and Felipe Cabrera, .owner and chef
of El Emperador Maya in south San Gabriel—both of whom received early
training in French and North Italian restaurants—say they would have ap-
preciated the opportunity to receive formal training, especially in Mexican
cuisine. Rodriguez has also noted that it strikes him as ironic that the
largest population of Mexicans outside of Mexico City does not have its
own institute of Mexican gastronomy.81
The low levels of Latino academic achievement and professional
training represent other factors suppressing Latino representational power
in the symbolic economy of Los Angeles. Too few Latinos are academically
positioned to receive professional training at elite culinary schools and in-
stitutes, and too many are overrepresented in the vocational schools that
lead to careers in midrange and low-priced fast-food outlets. One recent
study found that only 4 percent of California's Latino high school graduates
are fully eligible for admission to the University of California. In fact, Latino
enrollment in the UC system declined from 2,991 in 1989 to 2,218 in 1992,
although the state's Latino student population continued to expand steadi-
ly. Only 6.2 percent of students of Mexican origin, and only 10 percent of
Latinos, complete four or more years of college, compared to 22.3 percent of
non-Latinos.82 By contrast, 58.2 percent of the students who graduated in

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1995 from Los Angeles Community College with vocational degrees in food
service management were identified as Latino; 36 percent of food service
management graduates were white, and 7.6 percent were listed as Asian.83
Advanced training in restaurant management, which offers another route
to the style-setting restaurant, again shows low Latino participation. Mexi-
can Americans graduating in 1996 from California State Polytechnic Univer-
sity, Pomona, with MBAs in hotel and restaurant management constituted
8.5 percent of the class, whereas whites made up 33 percent of the class.
Chinese students accounted for 20 percent of these graduates, and only 1.9
percent of the MBA recipients were listed as black.84
Granted, the bifurcation that typifies the style-setting restaurant is
more the exception than the rule in mid- to low-priced restaurant chains.
These mostly corporate-run restaurants offer slightly better pay, more op-
portunities for advancement, and greater economic stability and are more
egalitarian than the style-setting restaurants. And as second-generation
Latinos continue securing low- to mid-management positions and Latino
union representation increases, Latinos stand to increase their social influ-
ence within this sector. But the lack of occupational mobility for immi-
grant Latinos continues to limit their representational opportunities in
style-setting restaurants and the critical infrastructure. Although they make
up more than 22 percent of the nation's populace, Latinos represent only
2.6 percent of the nation's newspaper editorial staffs, 3.2 percent of radio
news staffs, and 6 percent of television news teams. In Los Angeles in 1990,
Latinos constituted 40 percent of the population but only 6.46 percent of
the Los Angeles Times news staff.85
Their near exclusion from the critical infrastructure and their struc-
tural subordination in the workplace articulate Latino restaurant workers'
functional relationship to the symbolic economy. The social relations of
restaurant production and the representation of Mexican cuisine mutually
constitute Latino immigrants as a subordinated workforce while normaliz-
ing the commercial and aesthetic appropriation of Mexican culture. Struc-
tural factors such as inadequate educational preparation discourage these
workers from effectively contesting the representation of their labor and
their cuisine inside the restaurant, while racialized media representations
of Mexican culture devalue immigrant restaurant workers in society at
large. This structural-cultural symbiosis explains why the Latino flavor of
Los Angeles—a city with a Mexican population second only to Mexico City,
with more than thirty thousand restaurants where Latino cooks prepare
myriad cuisines, and with a Latino workforce large enough to shut down
the city's restaurants if it stayed home—remains marginalized in the city's
culture wars.86

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Some scholars see a growing Latino middle class as the solution to

Latinos' cultural silence in the city they will soon dominate numerically.
They expect upward social mobility, which they confuse with the ability to
earn middle incomes, to resolve the paradox. Either Latino assimilation will
reinforce the current hegemonic order or majority political and consumer
buying power will allow Latinos to construct a mainstream version of
Latino culture. We believe this optimism is misplaced.
The Latino community has yet to create a cultural class that is suffi-
ciently independent and self-informed to represent itself publicly, let alone
challenge the present hegemonic order. A visit to Rodriguez's La Serenata il-
lustrates our point. Most of Rodriguez's customers are white professionals
who visit the restaurant as if taking a minitour to the Eastside's borderlands.
In fact, Rodriguez complains that he has had only modest success in at-
tracting the kind of middle-class Latinos who can afford the restaurant's
prices.87 Josephine Ramirez, a Getty Research Institute project associate who
studies community-based cultural projects and knowledge systems, believes
she knows why. Experience has shown her that the city's growing Latino
middle class equates high culture with European fine art and cuisine far
more than with Mexican culture or cuisine. Nor do those in this stratum of
Latino Los Angeles yet see themselves as constituting a cultural class, or as
art patrons; instead, they defer to the city's elites for received notions of
high culture—which, Ramirez notes, should not be surprising. Given their
recent immigration, their strong ties to working-class culture, their weak
ties to Mexico's elite cultural classes, their relatively low levels of formal
schooling in Latin America, and the assimilationist assaults of U.S. public
education, Latinos' silence in high-culture discourse is understandable.
Consequently, the Latino middle class and immigrant nouveaux riches
have just begun to consider the possibility of organizing a Latino cultural
class, of becoming a class for themselves.88 Meanwhile, the anti-Latino im-
migrant, anti-bilingual, and anti-affirmative action backlash of the 1990s
has hardened an educational status quo that has rarely served Latinos well,
and that still retards the development of Latino cultural classes.
If Latino majority numbers are to lead to the formation of a cultural
class, the core of that class will emerge from the community of working-
class immigrants and the popular culture they create and consume. We
offer a few reasons. First, Spanish remains the language of the service sec-
tor. Behind restaurant kitchen doors, immigrant workers relying upon well-
established social networks that maintain their access to restaurant jobs
ensure the dominance of Spanish in the workplace. Second, the purchasing
power of a growing immigrant population has expanded Spanish-language
media and provided the Latino community the resources to satisfy its

45.63.6.177 on Sun, 16 Aug 2020 21:06:15 UTC
cultural appetites. An expanding economy of nostalgia supplies these im-

migrants with the raw ingredients they need to maintain and elaborate
upon a vibrant culinary culture within the home and in the neighborhood.
The memory-driven side of the market is sustained by the region's indige-
nous Latino cultures, new immigrant arrivals, and the second- or third-
generation retro-Latinos trying to recover what they have forgotten.89 When
Latino immigrant children are factored in, it is easy to see how the cultural
side of this demographic equation drives the Latinization of consumer ap-
petites and the growth of Spanish-language media and popular culture.
The vitality of Latino popular culture, with all its contradictions, rep-
resents an important strategic resource. As recent organizing efforts in the
service and craft-based industries have shown, culture-based networking
can be used to break immigrant workers out of their social isolation and
build class awareness. As we will show in chapter 4, the use of guerrilla
theater, performance art techniques, and photographic testimonials as or-
ganizing tools in service unions have already proved successful enough to
try in the city's kitchens. By consciously adding cultural benefits to their or-
ganizing agendas, union organizers may someday find themselves bargain-
ing for higher wages, medical benefits, and discursive power for immigrant
workers. Developing unions as cultural institutions would begin to invest
the immigrant majority of restaurant workers with the intellectual authori-
ty to represent their own cuisines. Although such a future may seem far off,
a variant of this model already exists. In France, the best chefs come from
the working class and acquire mastery through on-the-job apprenticeship.
Such a system cannot work here as long as the service sector divides work-
ers into first- and second-class wage earners. But the unions could pursue
their own institution-building strategy to make service sector work more
economically and culturally rewarding.
The unions, while increasing their Latino and Asian memberships,
could assume more of the responsibility for cultural training and draw upon
the expertise of neighborhood arts organizations. At the same time, these
Latino-led unions could mobilize voters to both strengthen and reorient
their local educational institutions. The schools would have the task of
building a worker-oriented culture class that, on the one hand, challenges
and opens the local critical infrastructure and, on the other, democratizes
the restaurant's social organization and allocation of representational
power. As we will show in the chapters that follow, the first steps toward
these objectives have already been taken. Organizations such as La Her-
mandad Mexicana National have taken a half step in this direction. In re-
cent years, this immigrants' rights organization has obtained federal adult

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education funds to prepare several hundred thousand Latino immigrants

for citizenship while maintaining discursive control of the pedagogical
process. The organization's success has produced a vicious backlash from
the Right, which, at this writing, has threatened La Hermandad's access to
continued funding. La Hermandad's vulnerability underscores the need for
Latino self-determination over local public educational institutions domi-
nated by Latino students.

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Chapter Title: Mexican Cuisine: Food as Culture

Book Title: Latino Metropolis

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv768.8

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The following passage, written by Charles Fletcher Lummis and published

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the blatantly anti-Mexican discourse of the mid-nineteenth century,

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They visit restaurants, writing up reactions to dishes and compar-

Zukin's conception of critical infrastructure and her analysis of cultural

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narratives, and symbols of multiculturalism and then inscribe these into

suggest an aura of sensual excitement akin to the latest financial

Restaurants also function as important gateways and clearinghouses

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and decentralized production of restaurant work, and because of restau-

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toward cultural production and communication systems converge and

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mansions." Both mythologies, Byrkit adds, glorify the "loftier aspects of

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identified as Mexican, the offspring of a Scottish father and an Indian

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Culinary reinvention paralleled the ongoing landscape transforma-

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tence of this discourse. A 1994 national search of library databases found

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In using the phrase "Land of Sunshine" Preston acknowledges Lummis's

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generation of French haute chefs. There were differences, however. The

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Southwest, and Tex-Mex cuisines, as well as other variants of the new

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as second-class whites. But before we judge tiiese writers too harshly,

our antepasados were not fools. They had moments of clarity... in

In the 1980s, the chefs who invented southwestern cuisine echoed

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Thai and Cantonese food. A previously exotic prospect like, say, a

In California, where our borders are not holding, there is an even

Several trends contributed to L.A.'s decade of culinary fame. One

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Harry Chandler, had, by dint of political shrewdness, overcome the rivalry

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designed culinary theaters where Reagan-era yuppies and nouveaux riches

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positions," a fact she attributes to the rural origins of immigrant workers

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enrolled in elite culinary academies would have been almost undetectable.

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