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Introduction: Troubling America(s) InJune2009theculinarymagazine Gourmet ranafeatureentitled“Fiesta Forever.” Shot in real time with real people—“no casting, no script, no backup food”—the spread photographed Cuban-born cook and restauranteur Maricel Presilla’s annual barbecue in Palisades Interstate Park, in Alpine, New Jersey. The event, which also promotes Presilla’s two restaurants , is a giant affair where “as many as sixty people show up to cook, dance, and devour dozens of dishes,” and honors Presilla, whose “all-out Latin gathering of family and friends of all ages is the ultimate outdoor party, a perfect example of why we are all in love with grilling.” The editors believe that this is a rare opportunity to shoot “a grand version of el barbecue.”1 The twenty-four-page spread, offering vivid photographs and recipes with relatively little text, is presented to readers as a chance to “spend a day in [Presilla’s] world, with her food.” Readers are gently urged, “You’re invited, too.”2 The message of the feature is clear: the magazine’s readers can experience Latin America vicariously by gazing at photographs, studying recipes, and reproducing them in their own homes. Presilla, in her own words, extends the invitation: “I want to take everyone on a winding journey through Mexico, through Central and South America, to show them the artisanal cooking there, the cooking ordinary people do.” The feature writers note that Presilla “effortlessly pulls guests into her own orbit, which, on this day, closely resembles a Mexican market.”3 Of course, this orbit unfolds right in the United States. Although readers are encouraged to feel that they are on a traveling vacation in Latin 2 / introduction America, voyeuristically able to experience a foreign culture and its delicious cuisine with their Gourmet passport in hand, the event takes place within the national and political borders of the United States. This U.S. state park in New Jersey is transformed, for the duration of the fiesta, into Mexico. Two months after the issue ran, the magazine printed a perhaps predictable angry reader’s response to the “Fiesta Forever” feature. This reader, a self-described longtime regular subscriber, explains why she will be “tossing out” the June issue: “Let’s see . . . what will I serve my guests from this issue? How about slab bacon adobo made with four pounds of bacon? I’ll serve it with refried black beans made with ten Mexican avocado leaves. I can hardly wait for the July issue. What will your staff dream up for a Fourth of July barbecue—maybe there will be some great Mongolian or Ethiopian recipes your readers can use as they plan celebrations for Independence Day. This is the United States of America, not Latin America.”4 Other than the glaring xenophobia of this response, what is startling is the way that Latin America functions as a scapegoat for U.S. anxiety about its cultural and national identification. In other words, for this reader a porous border between the United States and Latin America opens the floodgates to other foreign influences. Such Latin Americanization of the United States represents the nation’s potential cultural dissolution: the sarcastic reference to Mongolian and Ethiopian influences signals the way in which the presence of Latin America in the United States spurs fears of other foreign invasions and potentially threatens the very roots of the nation’s foundation. We may begin by celebrating Latinos in the United States, cautions the reader, but before we know it we will be marking the United States’ most patriotic national holiday with radically foreign presences. The reader recognizes that the magazine is not simply traveling southward , but that the expectation to reproduce such recipes in one’s own home in the United States also signals the geographical border’s movement northward. In such a way, Latin American cuisine enters, albeit by invitation, the domestic spaces of the United States, and threatens the dominant culture’s definition of the nation. By ingesting “foreign” food, the collective, cultural body of the nation could become unrecognizably othered. Significantly, the letter also shows the United States’ ambiguous and troubling relationship with Latin America. The reader, after all, takes pains to separate the United States from Latin America (“This is the United States of America, not Latin America”). In this context it would be hard to imagine a similar need to differentiate the United States from, say, Ethiopia or Mongolia; even though the reader has already cast them [3.133.121.160] Project...

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