UCLA

This dissertation is concerned with understanding how foodways—the production, consumption, and distribution of foods and food goods over time—have shaped Latinx placemaking and survival in the San Gabriel Valley (SGV) of Southern California. This dissertation exists at the intersection of Chicana/o Studies, History, Racial Geographies, and Food Studies. Where this project is historically focused, it uses a mixed-methods approach (archival research, GIS mapping, content analysis, and oral history) to create two interventions: 1. It grounds public history—building knowledges with marginalized communities—in piecing together Latinx social histories and 2. It advances the framework of “critical Latinx foodways,” a methodological process of recovery through a foodways lens that expands beyond this region. Scholarship in Chicana/o Studies has often discussed agricultural labor, but has not always centralized a broader foodways lens in these investigations. And, while a growing scholarship on food workers and street vendors (Graaff & Ha 2015; Rosales 2020) has shaped contemporary understandings of race, power, and food, less work is dedicated to understanding the connections between the contemporary regulation of food workers and the historic regulation of food workers in the first half of the 20th century. To answer the research questions, “How do foodways shape racial formation and the creation of uneven power relations? How might attention to foodways address Latinx historical absences in places like the San Gabriel Valley?” Critical Latinx Foodways: Racial Formation, Regional Identity, and Placemaking in the San Gabriel Valley, 1900-1968 weaves together a cultural history of Mexican food workers, vendors, and entrepreneurs to challenge Anglo-dominant narratives of the region. Histories of food workers challenging regional boundaries through vending, taste, and forging place are vital to our understanding of placemaking and survival of Latinx populations in urban outskirts.