Caribeños At The Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City [REVIEW]
The study of migrant cuisines in New York City and the broader United States has tended to privilege culture as a grounding force through which ethnic communities engage in food practices. Furthermore, the centrality of culture has been named as the culprit of health outcomes among the Latino population, a population that has been categorized as homogenous without considering migratory experiences nor racial, class, and gender backgrounds. This notion, argues Melissa Fuster in her book Caribeños At The Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City (2021), fails to notice that immigrants negotiate and make decisions that “are the result of much more than cultural values attached to certain comidas. They are the result of the historical, structural, and personal journeys of eaters in motion” (128). This book proposes to rethink migrant cuisines of caribeños—that is, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans—by considering structural factors such as the diverse migratory experiences, along with racialized, gendered, and classed notions. In doing so, it raises two questions: how do caribeños in New York City relate to food? And how do they elaborate new notions of their cuisines that are mediated through notions of healthy eating, often racialized, gendered, and classed?
Caribeños At The Table expands the field of food studies by bringing forward an interdisciplinary approach that combines public health, food policy, anthropology, and sociology focused on the understudied communities of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans in NYC. Building on her previous work, Fuster continues to expand the conversation about Caribbean foodways and does so from a position of nurture and care by providing introspective accounts of her own relation to her comidas as a way to begin conversations about food and its meanings in these communities. Fuster draws on a variety of research methods: field interviews, participant observation, and archival research. Caribeños At The Table integrates a transnational framework that “acknowledges and incorporates existing cross-border networks where migrants, non-migrants, and former migrants are joined through interpersonal ties, forming social capital across the migrant space” (18), which allows Fuster to engage with a broader scholarship on cuisine, migration, and health.
Fuster proposes to look at caribeños’ relations to food through the term comida which works as an analytical concept throughout her study. For Fuster, comida is more than its English counterpart food; “comida is a meal, as opposed to a snack, and it can also be used to name the main meal of the day”. In chapter 3, “Caribeños Talk About Comidas in Nutri-Speak,” Fuster explores the description and understandings caribeños make of their comidas and shows that these are “influenced by internalized notions of traditional diets being unhealthy, showcased by their use of nutrient-dense language (“nutri-speak”)” (22). This influence is in constant tension with understandings of what makes traditional comida something flavorful and it aids to demonstrate the constant negotiations caribeños make in choosing to “maintain and also change eating behaviors” (99), which dialogues with recent scholarship on food studies in the Caribbean as Hannah Garth’s Food in Cuba (2020) and her development of the concept of adequacy.
Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cuban communities are in constant movement in significant part due to their past and present colonial and imperial relations with the United States. Through migratory movements, notions of comidas change in relation to othering processes, memory, and experiences of racialization and class. Indeed, movement, mobility, and transit are key to Fuster because it allows her to expand on migration and food access scholarship. In chapter 1, “Setting Hispanic Caribbean Tables in New York City,” Fuster “outlines the distinct trajectories of Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans between the Caribbean and New York City” (26) and looks at “how migrants face new social, economic, and political conditions that have led to unequal racialization processes in New York City” (47). The gesture of setting a table in the title speaks to the creation of food histories, of caribeños’ own food stories as it is also the case of Nuyorican literature and salsa. These food stories also have a political capacity as Fuster shows with the community breakfast program for children organized by the Young Lords, following the lead of the Black Panthers. Caribeños At The Table also shows us that what makes it possible for caribeños to set their tables are the cultural practices of gathering, cooking, and eating, which Fuster develops in chapter 4. These three practices point toward a discussion of food access that is a priority to have in current times as caribeño communities are being displaced through processes of gentrification in NYC and as the COVID-19 pandemic exposes the racial, class, and gender realities that have led to “communities of color [bearing] higher rates of infection and death, linked with living conditions, residential segregation, lack of access to health care and healthy foods, and employment in “essential industries”, often synonymous with low-pay, high-risk jobs” (127).
Overall, Caribeños At The Table proves to be an engaging project by bringing forward the complex relations to food Hispanic Caribbean communities in NYC have and makes two significant contributions. First, it pushes against the focus on culture to approach migrants eating behaviors, a frequent lens used in the field of public health, and by the same token, it challenges the homogeneity of encompassing all Latinos into one category that doesn't consider diversity of race, class, and migratory experiences. Second, it aids in understanding not only caribeños’ relation to their culinary traditions both in the city and in their islands of origin, but also in grasping at how caribeños in the city relate to each other's cuisines and cultures. For instance, an important point is made about anti-blackness when comparing how both Cubans and Puerto Rican view plantains as an unsophisticated, heavy food that Dominicans consume in bigger quantities, and when contrasting how Cubans are barely familiar with Puerto Rican and Dominican dishes compared to their counterparts because they embrace traditional descriptors of their community as lighter, wealthier, and different (88-90). While the book contributes to expanding the conversation about migration, public health, and food justice through the consideration of structural problems such as globalization and migration fluxes, processes of racialization and issues of class and gender, it fails to engage with current food studies scholarship focused on blackness which carries out a parallel conversation on this topic. Nonetheless, Fuster demonstrates the necessity of studying caribeño communities beyond NYC and engaging in migratory trajectories of caribeños like in the cases of New Jersey and Florida. Caribeños At The Table is a necessary book in Latinx Studies and Caribbean Cultural Studies courses that wish to address the Hispanic Caribbean communities in NYC.
Caribeños At The Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City
By Melissa Fuster
196pgs. The University of North Carolina Press. $24.95
Mónica B. Ocasio Vega is a doctoral student in Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at the University of Texas in Austin. She studies the relationship between food, reading, and writing in Caribbean cookbooks, food blogs, cooking shows, and literature.