Rethinking Chicana/o Literature through Food

Postnational Appetites

Kenneth A. Loparo, M. Abarca, Kenneth A. Loparo, M. Abarca

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137371447
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As Food Studies has grown into a well-established field, literary scholars have not fully addressed the prevalent themes of food, eating, and consumption in Chicana/o literature. Here, contributors propose food consciousness as a paradigm to examine the literary discourses of Chicana/o authors as they shift from the nation to the postnation.

Part I

Translatable Foods

Chapter 1

Diabetes, Culture, and Food: Posthumanist Nutrition in the Gloria Anzaldúa Archive

Suzanne Bost

It might seem odd to talk about eating in the context of posthumanism since our food cultures seem to revolve around sustaining the human (often at the expense of the nonhuman world surrounding us). Posthumanism evokes cyborgs, indeterminacy, and decentered cultures. Food evokes nourishment, home, and cultural tradition, and this seems to be especially the case in Chicano/a representations. In novels like Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1994) and Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), and films like Tortilla Soup (2001) and Like Water for Chocolate (1993), food is a sign of Mexican cultural memory, authenticity, and the passing down of tradition through female labor. But in thinking about Gloria Anzaldúa’s relationship to food after the onset of diabetes, I need a term that conveys boundary-crossings more radical than the cultural and national ones we usually associate with her work. Posthumanism is a term that stretches from post-structuralism through animal studies, ecocriticsm, and feminist science studies, and its definition seems to be continually evolving. When I invoke posthumanism, I also mean to invoke that range of sources as well as the fluidity and uncertainty surrounding the term. Most fundamentally, for understanding the work of Anzaldúa, we need a worldview that is no longer centered around the human or those epistemologies that privilege human reason and human transcendence over the nonhuman world (which includes animals, “nature,” and supposedly inert matter).

Anzaldúa’s early representations seem to use food as an index of cultural identity. Her poem “Nopalitos,” from Borderlands/La Frontera, provides an infrequently discussed example. The speaker—who has been “gone a long time” and whose presence reminds her community that “no one but me had ever left”—struggles with the preparation of nopalitos. She describes the “defanging” of the cactus as a violation (taking a “sharp blade” to the “under curl” as she sheaths the thorns), and she is likewise violated by the culinary process, piercing her thumb, stooped over the bucket. By the end of the poem she has “thorns embedded in my flesh / stings behind my eyes.” Her desire to be a part of the “camaradería” of the women gathered at dusk in their yards to prepare food, to again be “one of them,” seems to wound both the speaker and the cactus in a mutual sacrifice ritual (112–13).

We might think of this mode of representation as food nationalism. In these instances, food acts as an indicator of cultural belonging, a claim to identity; passing on Mexican food traditions resists assimilation into the dominant culture. Yet, as Meredith Abarca asks, “What does it mean to speak of the authenticity of culinary practice when traditions within all cultures are constantly changing?” (Abarca, “Authentic or Not, It’s Original” 2). And, I would add, what does it mean to speak of the authenticity of culinary practice for an author whose theories are built upon borderlands and the cultural collisions of mestizaje? As Anzaldúa writes in Borderlands: “The new mestiza . . . learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else” (79).¹ Identity, here, sounds a bit like digestion, processing everything that comes into its mouth. Food and eating are the result of a number of impure processes: Most food comes from seeds and meats that are hybridized (either through germination/breeding or through the variety of nutrients consumed by plants and animals that become food for others). The foods we associate with Mexico are derived from multiple cultures—indigenous, European, North African—and would not exist if it were not for the transnational routes of European Conquest and empire building. And the routes of transnational empire building among indigenous Americans predate the Conquest by centuries—which is to say that even the “natives” were not pure in their food traditions.

When Anzaldúa was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in the early 1990s, she encountered a different set of conflicts and impurities in her relationship to food. Food was always an important metaphor in her work, but during the years she lived with diabetes (the illness responsible for her death in 2004), food presented a very literal encounter with the functioning of her body and her mortality.² Her health depended upon a balance in blood sugars, and eating the wrong combination of foods led to hypoglycemic episodes: “I get dizzy and mentally foggy when I’m having a hypo. I lose my equilibrium and fall. Gastrointestinal reflex has me throwing up and having diarrhea . . . Things like these change your image of yourself, your identity” (Anzaldúa, Interviews 289–90). I have already written at length (in Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature) about the ways in which illness and pain might have led Anzaldúa to rethink the boundaries around her identity and her relationship to the world around her. In this essay, I’d like to focus on how her changed relationship to food with the onset of diabetes took her ideas about the body and identity beyond even the limits of the human (human body, human nature, and human reason).

Food crosses corporeal borders as well as cultural borders; its permeations are more fundamental than cultural mestizaje. Eating, like other processes Julia Kristeva describes in The Powers of Horror under the category of abjection, crosses our most fundamental boundaries: ingesting something other into our bodies, breaking it down, and absorbing it within our own bloodstreams, expelling it through urine and feces. It is no wonder that there are so many taboos and anxieties about eating. There must be a correlation between this permeation and humans’ ritualization of food. We implant it at the center of our definition of self and culture because it is also potentially a site of pollution, poison, and death. I am pointing to not just the familiar convergence of pleasure and danger but also the susceptibility to corruption and transformation that inheres within the very attributes we elevate as true signs of culture. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her famous work Purity and Danger, argues that bodily boundaries symbolically represent the boundaries around and between cultures, and this is why food purity assumes such import in the maintenance of cultural traditions as part of the “ritual protection” of bodily orifices as well as social entrances and exits (127).³ In this essay, I’m taking this insight beyond an analysis of cultural boundaries to the thresholds of the human. Eating, and, by extension, human health involve a number of processes that cross boundaries between the human body and the nonhuman world, as well as the boundaries between “natural” and “artificial” ingredients: the production of grains and vegetables involves dirt, weather, fertilizers, and machines; the meat products we consume carry with them traces of animal life, slaughter, purification, and packaging; and food shopping, cooking, eating, and digestion involve cultural constructs like economics and manners as well as manufactured chemicals and utensils. When we prepare and eat any food, we directly and indirectly ingest a bit of the nonhuman. Once we have habitualized our eating practices, we rarely think of the nonhuman origins of our food, but a dramatic shift in food regimen—as Anzaldúa experienced with the onset of diabetes—makes these processes visible in a whole new way. From this new perspective, cultural distinctions appear a bit like romantic fantasies designed to preserve human specialness or integrity.

One of my primary documents here is the Gloria E. Anzaldúa papers held at the University of Texas at Austin. This expansive archive includes, along with multiple drafts of Anzaldúa’s numerous published and unpublished writings, a significant quantity of ephemera like flyers, articles clipped from magazines, appointment cards, ticket stubs, and, of course, recipes. File box number five contains a number of recipes, including the cookbook produced for the “Homemakers” of Rio Farms (probably from the 1950s), to which Anzaldúa refers in Borderlands when describing her mother’s pride in having her recipe for chile colorado published in it.⁴ This box also includes Aztec birthday charts for Anzaldúa and her sister Hilda; an analysis of Anzaldúa’s handwriting; a bookmark embroidered with her nickname, “Prieta”; an old metal Hebrew prayer book wrapped in silk; a tarot deck given to her by her close friend Randy Conner; a sign proclaiming “Not one day without love./ Not one day without struggle”; and a “Do Not Disturb” doorknob placard from a hotel in Tijuana with a picture of an almost naked woman on it. One imagines stories of great personal significance attached to each of these items. Their placement in the same file box as the recipes seems to put food at the heart of the author’s sense of self.

File box number four is dedicated to information about diabetes and nutrition, including a different collection of recipes and a collection of menus from restaurants in Santa Cruz, California, where Anzaldúa lived the last decades of her life.⁵ The documents from file box four present jarring contradictions: Anzaldúa’s daily food logs (which seem to offer an intimate glimpse into the daily life and body of the author) are filed with articles from the American Journal of Medicine, advertisements for vitamins (including prices and toll-free phone numbers for ordering), pamphlets on metaphysical healing practices, an article on “Your Health in Cyberspace,” and actual samples of butcher’s broom and bee pollen. This heterogeneity of materials is unlike anything else in the archive, bringing together such a variety of discourses, worldviews, and material substances as to point out how eating, for a diabetic, involves an epistemological clash: a constellation of behaviors, where desire conflicts with the biological functioning of one’s body and one’s own culture conflicts with the cultures of the medical and nutritional professionals. My extensive use of lists in my account of this archive reflects not just my own love of the cacophony I find there but also a desire to try to recreate this epistemological clash for my readers. Lists not only reflect the range of materials in the archive and the range of materials the author consulted; they also reproduce the disorienting experience of sifting through divergent ways of thinking.

One source in this folder, Juicing for Life (by Cherie Calbom and Maureen Keane), is particularly illuminating in its rhetoric. It presents diabetes as a “chronic disorder” based on “insufficient production” of insulin, the “number-three killer in the United States,” requiring “dietary modifications,” and most of these modifications are framed in the negative, like “avoid fruit juices” and “eliminate all sugars” (151, 153–54). This account is true enough, but couldn’t it also be true to present the diabetic body as one that produces different levels of insulin and has different dietary needs? Articles like this one assume a single standard for human health; according to this standard, the organizing principles of diabetes are disorder, deficiency, and the threat of mortality (qualities that all people face, regardless of diabetes status). Framed in this way, there is nothing to desire in a diabetes diet; it consists entirely of making up for lacks and fighting off death. Anzaldúa’s notes on these documents seem to explore eating as negation. On one yellow sheet from a legal pad with the heading “Diet,” she lists foods by categories, and over half are prohibited: “no carbohydrates,” “no sugar,” “no fat,” “no mayonnaise,” “no honey,” no nuts,” “no beef,” “no cheese,” “no snacks,” et cetera. Items listed in the affirmative include relatively unappealing foods like “wheat germ, 2 Tbl . . . spread on potato,” “bran pita bread,” and raw fruits and vegetables. Reading the old family recipes for chile colorado and buñuelos alongside bland recipes with no sugar and low fat (not to mention the food pyramids, food exchange lists, and pamphlets like “New Perspectives in Nutrition Management of Diabetes Mellitus”) reflects a shift from food pride to food tedium, or at least a shift from food as pleasure to food as mandatory labor. As Anzaldúa wrote about her experience with food as a diabetic in an unpublished essay, “Plan the meals, shop for food, always reading the labels for sugar and fat grams, cook the food. Eating certain foods in measured spoonfuls at regular intervals 365 days a year . . . Always got to stay within the ‘balancing act,’ the holy triangle of diet, exercise, and insulin” (Anzaldúa, “Spiritual Identity Crisis” n.p.). The sentence structure here reflects the repetitive and regimented quality of these acts, represented as fragments, modified only by “always,” “measured,” and “regular.” Eating here is decidedly artificial.

In most of the documents about diabetes management, the diabetic is presented as a generic victim with no cultural particularity, no sexuality, no faith, and no authority to be making decisions about her own body. Another article in this file, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Chemicals In Your Food,” presents eating as an unwanted invasion by an Other. But just as the movie by that name could be viewed as an invitation to accept the Other as an equal in the intimate ritual of dinner, overcoming prejudices in the process, couldn’t one embrace diabetes as a cultural difference or simply a different way of eating? Clearly, Anzaldúa herself was ultimately put off by the threatening rhetoric of most of the nutritional guides, and she turned to a wide variety of alternative sources and alternative cultures for healing: the archive contains articles or brochures about herbs, gemstones, dreams, energy healing, astrology, Chakras, the Tattvas, music, charm pillows, candles and their color symbolism, something called “Self-Realization Fellowship,” and “Rainbow Medicine” (herbal remedies from native women in the Ozark Mountains). Mixed in with the diabetes guides that present an evacuation of culture, personality, and even human vitality, these documents present a literal rainbow of cultures. It is significant that, rather than turning only to Chicana/o or Mexican culture, Anzaldúa turned everywhere at once, jamming diabetes with a cultural cacophony that it could never drown out. There is also a shift here from passive acceptance of normative medical judgments to active exploration of multiple ways of healing and multiple ways of being.

One document in this file box, “A Taste of the Garden,” from the Sha’Arei Orah Jewish Community, advocates recovering the sense of taste that was “blemished” in the story of the Fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden. This document suggests that, in the celebration of Shabbos, using every fiber and organ of one’s being to share the ritual meal, one can restore this broad sense of taste. The number of food-related materials Anzaldúa gathered and saved seems to respond to this call. Her daily food logs reflect deliberate effort to create appealing food based on her dietary restrictions/requirements and feature adapted “Mexican” foods like burritos with whole w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Translatable Foods
• Part II   The Taste of Authenticity
• Part III   The Voice of Hunger
• Part IV   Machos or Cooks
• Notes on Contributors
• Index