The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City'

H-LatAm Willcutt on Lemon and Pilcher, 'The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City'

Discussion published by Casey Lurtz on Thursday, September 3, 2020 Ed. note - reposted from H-Environment Review published on Wednesday, September 2, 2020 Author: Robert Lemon, Jeffrey M. Pilcher Reviewer: Dani M. Willcutt

Willcutt on Lemon and Pilcher, 'The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City'

Robert Lemon, Jeffrey M. Pilcher. The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City. University of Illinois Press, 2019. xiii + 204 pages + 16 pages of plates. $99.00

(cloth), ISBN 978-0-252-04245-4; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-08423-2.

Reviewed by Dani M. Willcutt (Michigan State University)Published on H-Environment (September, 2020) Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55045

The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food is Transforming the American City (2019) by Robert Lemon is sure to become a formative text in the expanding body of work on the relationship between culinary entrepreneurship and local city ordinances. The Taco Truck is Lemon’s second major project highlighting and revealing a culinary institution that, upon first inspection, appears to be a humble and even forgettable piece of urban landscapes. However, the food truck’s meteoric rise to urban normalcy drives this text by complicating the meanings of public spaces. Lemon’s 2014 documentary, Transfusión, exposed the community and ensuing networks of people who share a common connection to a taco truck in Columbus, Ohio. Lemon carries many of his film’s themes into his text, although the geographical scope of the text is much wider.The Taco Truck focuses specifically on three United States locations: California’s Bay Area; San Francisco, California; and Columbus, Ohio.

“A missing link in cultural-landscape studies is the analysis of social practices as spatial patterns,” writes Lemon. “My aim in this text is to bring about a new way of seeing landscape: through the lens of spatial practices” (pp. 14). Lemon’s examples center the taco truck as an agent of cultural change as well as cultural hybridization. Examining food is a way to reveal inadequacies between the ways that people use space and the ways that city planners think that people should use a space. Focusing on the taco truck, Lemon reveals the social, cultural, and economic exchange networks that arise from and surround the humble taco truck. Lemon shows how taco truck proprietors use mobility to their advantage as they navigate the geographic as well as political landscape of cities. This is done in order to avoid ICE as well as local regulations, but also to bring delicious, affordable, and

Citation: Casey Lurtz. Willcutt on Lemon and Pilcher, 'The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City'. H-LatAm. 09-03-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/23910/discussions/6396189/willcutt-lemon-and-pilcher-taco-truck-how-mexican-street-food Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-LatAm transportable food to hungry laborers.

Lemon’s sources are one of the strongest parts of this text. The interviews he collected are a rich source of data and suggest that Lemon spent considerable time building relationships with the interviewees. His intimate knowledge of taco trucks and experience working with local government make The Taco Truck a rich text. Lemon’s multipronged story present the taco truck as a site of cultural evolution and hybridization.

The first two chapters take place in California’s Bay Area. Lemon introduces Oakland, a city with a history of activism where Latino entrepreneurs have been forced to participate in the informal economy in response to the constant policing they experience over their own right to work and accrue capital. Not far away, however, is San Francisco, where taco trucks are rarely seen amongst the mass of boutique food trucks. Chapter 2, “Formalizing San Francisco’s Informal Street Food Vendors,” highlights the central conflict between the immigrant culinary entrepreneur and modern “foodie” culture that is forever in search of “authentic” food. San Francisco has a large middle- to upper-middle-class population with an expendable income who subscribes to the foodie ideal. Even immigrant entrepreneurs who are selling their products through informal networks will, as Lemon explains, be forced to cater to the bourgeois palate.

In chapter 3, “Making Sacramento into an Edible City,” Lemon reveals the role of food trucks in branding the capital city as a Farm-to-Fork city. City planners used Sacramento’s culinary roots and terroir to create an attractive sense of place. Taco trucks paved the way for the food truck revolution across the United States and Sacramento was no exception. Yet inconsistencies between the treatment of taco trucks and boutique food trucks suggest that the former had no place in the branding vision of city planners. Chapter 4, “Landscape, Labor, and the Lonchera,” complete Lemon’s argument that Sacramento has systematically obscured taco trucks from the city center as part of a campaign toward attracting middle- to upper-middle-class, mostly Anglo, professionals. For the taco truck owner, their authentic product is an extension of their culture. The “foodie” is driven by the bourgeois need to accrue social and cultural capital by consuming what they see as authentic ethnic cuisine. Boutique food trucks, as Lemon refers to them, have turned the working-class food truck into a bourgeois, Anglicized phenomenon. Instead of serving the Mexican laborers, as taco trucks have done in the United States, boutique food vending trucks promote gentrification and lead to more expensive licensing fees.

Lemon’s final three chapters are set in Columbus, Ohio, where the author worked as a community planner in 2004. Chapter 5, “Community Conflict and Cuisine in Columbus,” begins in the city’s westside, which underwent considerable demographic changes between 2001 and 2005, when the Mexican population expanded sixfold. Lemon examines the meaning of place and space as it relates to social and cultural practices. Taco trucks were unwelcome at first, especially by the city’s low- income white citizens, but eventually became a part of the community’s identity. Although taco trucks were integral in shifting notions of taco trucks in the minds of Columbus’s citizens, they were largely forgotten about by urban boosters and city planners. Chapter 6, “Cooking Up Multiculturalism,” explores the city’s intentions to brand itself as multicultural and food truck-friendly, but ultimately demonstrates how the city’s treatment of taco trucks is completely off-brand with this imagined identity. Perhaps most ironically, the spaces designed specifically for food trucks do not feature taco trucks or any other “multicultural” cuisine.

Lemon’s final chapter, “Food, Fear, and Dreams,” ends in Columbus’s eastside, which is a historically African American neighborhood. Focusing on taco truck owner Alejandra’s story, Lemon enlightens us as to the ability of food to bring people together and to create new culture. Taco trucks prevail because they are serving the purpose of feeding hungry, diverse communities a filling and inexpensive meal. Using food as a field of inquiry is still a relatively new concept in academia, but scholars like Lemon remind us that foodways are an integral part of society where cultural, political, economic, and social relationships converge.

An initial critique of this book was that Lemon might actually undermine the potential of food trucks to help entrepreneurs hedge the expensive start-up costs associated with opening a food business. Lemon seemed to be ignoring the power of food trucks to lead culinary innovation. Food truck business models are significantly lower in risk than opening a brick-and-mortar restaurant. In an industry with profit margins as slim as 10 percent, opening a food truck is a great starting point. For some immigrant business owners, this could be a positive aspect of operating a food truck. Unfortunately, others are unable to bear the burden of city-mandated licensing and registration fees, putting them at a disadvantage the competition.

In a wonderful moment of forethought, Lemon began working on this project before taco trucks became a commonplace on American television and in bustling city centers. Lemon’s work does a phenomenal job of revealing issues of gentrification as they relate to taco truck owners.The Taco Truck is a useful text for any scholar who is interested in Mexican or US foodways, immigration law, sociology, city planning, entrepreneurship, geography, and more.

Citation: Dani M. Willcutt. Review of Lemon, Robert; Pilcher, Jeffrey M.,The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. September, 2020. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55045

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.