During the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle, a Latino supporter of then-candidate Donald Trump issued a warning on national television—which quickly went viral—that if Latino culture went unchecked and became too “dominant” in the country, Americans would have to confront “a taco truck on every corner.” The numerous tongue-in-cheek social media posts begging for this to become a culinary reality made clear that Latin American cuisine has fully permeated and transformed U.S. culture. Paradoxically, however, Latino/x food workers of all kinds—from farmworkers to restaurant workers to street vendors—continue to experience intense discrimination, criminalization, invisibility, and exploitation throughout the country. This treatment is only compounded by many of these workers’ vulnerabilities as racial minorities, immigrants (oftentimes undocumented), and “back of the house” workers or laborers in the informal economy. Americans have come to appreciate and demand Latino/x food and foodways, but have a much more fraught relationship with Latino/x people’s visible presence in the country and their labor in various foodscapes.
My new book project, tentatively titled Starved for Respect (to be published in University of North Carolina Press’s Latinx Histories Series), traces the history of Latino/x workers (citizen and immigrant) in the U.S. Northeast’s food industry, their treatment within that industry, and their sociocultural impact upon the region through systems of food. Though various communities of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Dominican, and Central American descent have lived in the Northeast for decades or even centuries, the U.S. Northeast has been severely understudied in Latino/x history. While working in the food industry is certainly not the only way in which this population has transformed the Northeast, I believe it is a particularly illuminating vantage point. Using this analytical window, my book presents the tandem stories of how the U.S. gained an appetite for Latin American food and Latin American food labor over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book will provide a useable history of how the nation came to see and desire Latin American food over time, but un-see and marginalize people of Latin American descent in spheres of food labor such as fields, farms, restaurants, street vending, processing factories, and warehouses. I’m captivated by the resulting moves these workers have made, historically and currently, to make themselves seen, heard, and treated with more fairness and respect.