Introduction

The four papers in this section, Yong Chen’s “Recreating the Chinese-American Home through Cookbook Writing,” Jeffrey M. Pilcher’s “‘Old-Stock’ Tamales and Migrant Tacos,” Fabio Parasecoli’s “Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities,” and Dwaine Plaza’s “Roti and Doubles as Comfort Foods for the Trinidadian Diaspora in Canada, the United States, and Britain” all focus on the inextricable bond between the histories of migration and the histories of food. Whether written from the perspective of historical research or that of ethnography, studies of food and immigration make clear that while the details vary from group to group, from time to time, and place to place, a kind of universal story emerges as we look at the ways in which people who have migrated out of their familiar homes negotiate with the food realities in their new unfamiliar ones.