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  • Kitchenspace: Women, Fiestas, and Everyday Life in Central Mexico
  • Patricia L. Price
Kitchenspace: Women, Fiestas, and Everyday Life in Central Mexico. Maria Elisa Christie. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. xxiv and 308 pp., maps, diagrs., photos, notes, glossary, bibliography, and index. $50.00 hardcover (ISBN 978-0-292-71794-7).

Those looking for a high-octane critical theoretical exploration of gender and social change will not find it in Maria Elisa Christie's Kitchenspace. Nor will they find a rigorous analysis of comparative food traditions. And as far as I am concerned, that is all well and fine, for Christie has instead written a book that is as lovingly detailed as the food preparation traditions she describes. In keeping with the best of traditional cultural geography, Christie's close description of food preparation practices in three central Mexican places is steeped in intimate familiarity with the rhythms of life. The writing is so evocative that the reader can almost smell the wood smoke, taste the toasted corn that forms the basis of most regional dishes, and feel the electric excitement of a Mexican fiesta. Yet Christie is far from unaware that what she describes in fact distills some of the most glaringly dramatic transitions in modern Mexico: diets that are shifting from traditional local agriculture to genetically-modified processed foods imported from the US; circular rhythms celebrated in small places on a daily, weekly, and annual basis giving way to long-distance migration to the US, as well as weekend tourism from nearby Mexico City, both of which break traditional place-based ties and require new ones to be established; and from clearly-circumscribed gender roles that map neatly onto defined spaces, toward gender role uncertainty, expansion, and inversion that people find bewildering and liberating in turn. The author does not dwell disproportionately upon these larger shifts, preferring instead to craft a balance between readability and incisiveness that makes this book a real treat.

The book's empirical substance is derived from ethnographic fieldwork consisting of interviews and participant observation conducted over a year in three central Mexican sites: Ocotepec and Tetecala (both in the state of Morelos), and Xochimilco (located in the Federal District). The author interviewed women in each [End Page 232] place, worked with them as well as their family members and neighbors to prepare food, and attended the festivals where the food was served. All three places are semi-urban, with Ocotepec and Xochimilco in particular feeling the encroaching effects of the nearby cities of Cuernavaca and Mexico City, respectively. All three have deep roots in pre Hispanic indigenous cultures that shape their resident's diets, agricultural practices, belief systems, and the spatial delineation of traditional barrios (neighborhoods) that define social interaction here to this day. Yet Christie has a keen eye for the differences among her research sites, and does a fine job of conveying what they mean for her work.

The book's key term is kitchenspace. At its most literal, kitchenspace refers to the physical site in the home where food preparation occurs, and is itself divided between the walled-in room (cocina) which is part of the interior domestic architecture and where most daily cooking occurs, and the house-garden lot located outside and containing the cocina de humo (smoke kitchen) where large-scale food preparation for fiestas and other celebrations takes place. Kitchenspace also operates in a more-porous way, constituting "a site of adaptation and innovation where gendered subjects work within the parameters of cultural boundaries to accommodate changes in the natural and social landscapes" (p. 232). Finally, the symbolic associations with kitchenspace are woven throughout the text. The physical space of kitchenspace, and the items it contains, are womblike. The food prepared within sets in motion maternal, communal, and collaborative energies. Yet kitchenspace is often experienced as oppressive for the women who labor within, while the food preparation process itself is vulnerable to focusing negative energies such as anger or jealousy, and food prepared under less-than-ideal emotional conditions is viewed as capable of hexing those who consume it.

Kitchenspace contributes to several intersecting literatures. Most closely, it makes valuable contributions to work by feminist...

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