View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository READING FOOD: GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES IN LATINA LITERATURE Karen Cruz Stapleton A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: María DeGuzmán Linda Wagner Martin Jennifer Ho James Coleman Laurence Avery ABSTRACT KAREN CRUZ STAPLETON: “Reading Food: Gender, Ethnicity, and Transnational Identities in Latina Literature” (Under the direction of María DeGuzmán) This study analyzes intersections of gender, ethnicity, and transnational identities in the literature of Latina/o writers Ernesto Quiñonez, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Loida Maritza Pérez. Although the project includes an analysis of Quiñonez’s novel to demonstrate the novel’s discursive approach to identity, this study focuses on the texts of Latina writers. I explore how their works explore the highly contested grounds of “Americanness” and the ways in which these writings use representations of food as a means to establish, and sometimes resist, various gendered and ethnic identities. My critical lens combines Latina/o Studies and feminist theory as I interrogate the breadth of their transnational textual negotiations. This strategy lends itself to various forms of social critique and investigations of cross-cultural representations particularly since they occur in diasporic contexts as two of these authors, Ortiz Cofer and Pérez, hail from the Spanish Caribbean, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, respectively. Quiñonez is from New York City and has both Caribbean and Latin American roots. Their fiction maps experiences of migration to the Northeastern United States. The final chapter is an autoethnography, an analysis of a Puerto Rican food event, a holiday celebration that features a very important ethnic food, a Puerto Rican dish called pasteles. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank the members of my committee for their continuous support of this study—to James Coleman and Laurence Avery for sticking with me throughout this project, and to Jennifer Ho for her expert advice on the study of food culture. I offer special thanks to Linda Wagner Martin who is an inspiration to me and to so many scholars. To my director María DeGuzmán, muchisimas gracias, for her keen insights, her patience, and her unwavering encouragement. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. INTRODUCTION: ON GENDER AND ETHNICITY...........................................1 II. FEMINISM, IDENTITY POLITICS AND FOOD...................................................7 Food and Identity......................................................................................................9 Women, Philosophy, and Food...............................................................................11 Identity Politics.......................................................................................................18 Gender and Food.....................................................................................................29 Food and Latina/os..................................................................................................31 Food in Latina/o Literature.....................................................................................35 III. LANGUAGE OR FOOD? LANGUAGE AND FOOD..........................................41 A Critical Reading of Bodega Dreams: “Who We Are is What We Speak”...............................................................................................................48 A Focus on Food: “We Are What We Eat”.............................................................63 IV. READING FOOD IN THE LATIN DELI: THE GENDERED SELF AND LATINA/O COMMUNITY....................................................................................70 Representation and Latina/o Identities....................................................................77 Food and Gender in Representations......................................................................83 Food and Ethnic Community..................................................................................97 iv Food and Female Puerto Rican Community.........................................................103 V. FOOD, POWER, AND VIOLENCE IN GEOGRAPHIES OF HOME................117 Sugar and Patriarchy.............................................................................................124 The Starvation of Children....................................................................................137 The Chicken Scene................................................................................................141 VI. READING A PUERTO RICAN FOOD EVENT.................................................153 On Puerto Rican History.......................................................................................163 Identity and Reading Food as Text........................................................................166 Tracing the Origins of Ingredients........................................................................172 Making Pasteles....................................................................................................185 Pasteles in North Carolina....................................................................................200 AFTERWORD.......................................................................................................................203 WORKS CITED....................................................................................................................206 v CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: ON GENDER AND ETHICITY Before I delve into the literary texts I have chosen to analyze, I would like to offer two personal recollections. The first highlights the importance of foodways in identity issues, the latter gender and ethnicity in those same issues. My first memory focuses on the ways food worked in a positive experience of my identity as Puerto Rican. Throughout my entire childhood, every Saturday afternoon my family would head from the Bronx to my abuela’s home in Yonkers, NY where we would visit for hours and eat the most delicious Puerto Rican meals.1 The appetizing aromas of my grandmother’s pernile, empanadas or arroz con pollo circulated and so too did some Spanish.2 I would catch fragments and expressions here and there, but we children—my siblings, cousins and I—were never spoken to in Spanish. Thus, it was through my abuela’s food that I experienced the only ethnic culture I had ever known. The family bonding and the delicious food comprise some of my very fondest memories as I primarily understood my ethnicity through the foodways my abuela shared with us each weekend as she recreated a little bit of Puerto Rico in that Yonkers apartment. As an adult, I have actively sought to 1 Yonkers is a city just north of and contiguous to the western section of the Bronx along the Hudson River. Though lesser well-known, like the Bronx, Yonkers, NY also has large Latina/o and African-American populations. 2 Pernile is a heavily-marinated roast pork butt or shoulder. Empanadas, a fairly labor- intensive dish when made from scratch, are patties stuffed with meats or cheese. Arroz con pollo, chicken with rice, may be familiar to most readers. learn my family’s foodways, as well as some Spanish, in an ongoing process of acculturation to my Puerto Rican heritage. The second recollection is not pleasant. When I was in seventh grade and attending St. John’s Catholic Middle School in the Bronx, a group of approximately ten students was selected to bypass eighth grade and advance directly to high school, to “skip” as we called it. I was one of those lucky students. Later that afternoon as school let out, a group of kids stood around on the sidewalk kicking around this news. Another seventh grader, Jimmy Byrne, approached me. “So you’re one of the kids that’s gonna skip?” he inquired with a rather menacing look on his face. I was very shy in those days and I quietly confirmed this. “Well, I should be the one skipping, not you! You’re just a girl and you’re a spic,” he spewed. I could feel the heat rise to my cheeks and my eyes begin to sting and fill with tears. “At least I’m not ugly like you!” I struck back in true seventh-grade fashion as I cried my way home down Kingsbridge Avenue. When I told my Irish-American mother what had happened, her “sage” advice, in a genuine effort to console me, was “Don’t tell anyone you’re Puerto Rican. Tell them you’re Spanish.” This episode has stayed with me, etched indelibly in my memory. It was a painful moment in some ways; Jimmy Byrne marked my difference in a public way. Two of the facets of my identity-my gender and my Puerto Rican heritage-two aspects of my being that I hadn’t considered very much at the ripe old age of twelve, became for me potential sources of shame. I did not recognize prior to that scathing critique that I was supposedly somehow deficient on two counts. It appears that gender and ethnicity issues can confront a person when she is neither aware of, nor expecting, them. 2 My mother’s third generation, very “Americanized” family was thoroughly assimilated and seemingly devoid of culture. In fact, no recognizable traces of Irish heritage informed their language or their foodways.3 They became transparently “American.” With no foreign accent, nondescript fair