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  • The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City by Robert Lemon
  • Sarah Fouts
The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City. By Robert Lemon. Foreword by Jeffrey M. Pilcher. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. ix + 195 pp. Illustrations, notes, references, index. $24.95 paper.

Robert Lemon’s The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food Is Transforming the American City is a compelling examination of the taco truck’s role in shaping space and place in cities within the United States. Situated in urban studies scholarship with a nod toward food studies literature, Lemon’s work provides a much-needed scholarly overview of the proliferation of food trucks in the 21st century. Through a rich comparative analysis set in the Bay Area, Sacramento, and Columbus, Ohio, Lemon aptly unveils the ways in which taco truck vendors are simultaneously visible and invisible as they forge their own economic and cultural spaces and expose paradoxes within capitalist systems.

In each chapter Lemon’s book rightfully foregrounds the role of gentrification and whiteness in fashioning policies that, he argues, often exclude already marginalized taco truck owners. Lemon underscores the ways in which taco trucks—which he limits to just Mexican-owned vendors—inhabit public and private realms, often defying blueprints and policies crafted by city officials.

Throughout the text, Lemon juxtaposes the rise of boutique food trucks with the taco trucks to illustrate the disparate treatment of these two types of street commerce. The boutique trucks, he explains, are viewed as neat, orderly, and favored by city boosters; meanwhile, the taco trucks are generalized as foreign and associated more with “dirt,” evoking prominent themes of “othering” vis-à-vis sanitation and xenophobia. Here Lemon makes an important distinction in terms of how these entities are depicted and therefore regulated or deregulated.

Yet, by keeping his analysis mostly at a city level, Lemon tiptoes around an important macro-level analysis: the degree to which anti-Latinx racism, immigrant policing, and fear of deportations foster the exclusion of taco trucks. His discussion of immigration regulation is relegated to a six-page section in the book’s final chapter and contains a limited discussion of global systems, like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), that foster migration in the first place. Without this analysis, the reader is left with many unanswered questions. Namely, why are there so many Mexican immigrants in Columbus? Instead of exceptionalizing a place like Columbus, a more holistic examination can better link these case studies, because taco truck expansion (and criminalization) has happened in cities across the Great Plains, Midwest, and US Southeast.

Lemon’s most compelling narrative links Black and Latinx communities in Columbus through the relationship between John, a Black lawyer, and Alejandra, a taco truck owner who John invites to sell food from his East Side business. In this chapter Lemon humanizes the taco truck experience by detailing a seemingly uncomplicated symbiosis, one that builds community, cultural awareness, and even public safety as Alejandra adapts her Mexican foods to her neighbors’ palettes, and customers like Pickle can’t get enough.

The extent of fieldwork, impressive access to key stakeholders, and comparative scope are the monograph’s strengths; the lack of threads to more explicitly connect the three cities (and beyond) are its weakness. Lemon’s text provides an integral contribution to food studies scholarship showing how immigrant foodways and street commerce shape urban landscapes. For readers of Great Plains Research, this book offers a rich scaffolding [End Page 122] to use to explore the growth of food trucks in cities like Tulsa, Kansas City, and Omaha.

Sarah Fouts
Department of American Studies
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
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