Food Stories from the Borderlands, and Why They Matter

Meredith Abarca, Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor in English University of Texas at El Paso

Co-sponsored by Food and Wine Studies, the Center of Media, Communication and Global Change, and the Department of Comparative Literature, English and Global Writing

Stories about food are central to the human experience. For the last three decades, Professor Abarca has worked at gathering, preserving and sharing people's stories about their culinary practices through which they express an "intimate" kind of history that speaks to their cultural, familial and personal identity. The presentation begins with her latest form of gathering, preserving, and sharing food stories as lead producer of El Paso, Texas episode of the documentary Abuelita's Kitchen: Stories from the Borderlands. This four-episode documentary is set at various US-Mexico borderland regions featuring three grandmothers who share their views of the border, their experience as grandmothers, and a number of family recipes through which they communicate familial, cultural, and historical values to their grandchildren. After the screening of El Paso's 30-minute episode, Professor Abarca will address the development of El Paso Food Voices open-source digital archive and its connection to the documentary and to previous food story gathering, preserving, and sharing.

Professor Abarca's path to becoming a professor of Food Studies and Literature stems from a life-long passion for food and for people's stories, especially when these are about food. She defines herself as a child of the kitchen. She grew up in restaurants, for a while thought of becoming a professional chef, and then one day found herself getting a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and writing about food's transformative power. She has written about this power in Voices in the Kitchen (2006); Rethinking Chicana/o Literature Through Food (2013), Latin@s' Presence in the Food Industry (2016), and in numerous articles. She has always approached food studies by interconnecting the humanities and social sciences; in the process, she has developed methodological, conceptual and pedagogical tools to help us listen, feel, and analyze people's food voice and their foodscapes. For over twenty-five years, she has been engaged in gathering, preserving, sharing, and analyzing the complex social, cultural, natural spaces everyday folks navigate and communicate through their food practices. Her work moves from the ground-up, from the story to theory. Her drive: to ensure that scholarship becomes a platform to listen, see, and learn from those outside the academy of higher education and to transform our theories through their stories. This drive has added digital humanities and public facing scholarship as the core of her latest projects El Paso Food Voices, a digital open source archive, as well as El Paso Food Voices podcast series.

If you have any questions about the event please contact Professor Christy Shields at cshieldsaup.edu