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.

How the visual culture of food, cookery, and consumption played a central role in the making of postrevolutionary Mexico.

Postrevolutionary Mexico City was a site of anxious nation-building, as rampant modernization converged and clashed with the nation’s growing nostalgia for its pre-Columbian heritage. During this volatile period, food became a meaningful symbol for a Mexican citizenry seeking new modes of national participation.

Culinary Palettes explores how the artistic invocation of food cultures became an arena in which to negotiate the political entanglements of postrevolutionary Mexico. Lesley Wolff casts a nuanced eye on the work of visual artists such as Tina Modotti, Carlos González, and Rufino Tamayo, who nurtured the symbolic and performative power of iconic foods such as pulque, mole poblano, and watermelon. Through analysis of a wide array of visual evidence, including paintings, architecture, vintage postcards, menus, and cookbooks, Culinary Palettes demonstrates how these artists positioned their work within a broad visual landscape that relied upon the power of Mexican foodways in the urban and national imagination. In the studios of modernists, Wolff argues, artistic production, foodways, and Indigeneity proved to be mutually constitutive—and at times weaponized—agents in articulating competing claims to a new nationhood.