Cultures of the City: Mediating Identities in Urban Latin/o America

Feasting on Latina/o Labor in Multicultural Los Angeles

75 It is by eating the Other . . . that one asserts power and privilege. —bell hooks, Black Looks T he symbolic production and consumption of the Other1 —of minority and historically disenfranchised cultures—is perhaps most rampantly, yet inconspicuously, perpetuated in Los Angeles by style-setting nouvelle restaurants that cater to elite surveyors of multicultural cuisine. Such restaurants embody those spaces where the critical infrastructure2 and largely immigrant Latino service workforce converge in a stark pairing to market and produce the multicultural cuisine that unassumingly defines Los Angeles as a global city. That nouvelle restaurants help manufacture the edible multicultural symbols upon which a global city’s pluralistic self-image is constructed is not surprising. The metropolis of the industrial age has long been identified as the style center that generates cultural models emulated in the suburban and rural periphery. In the postindustrial global city of today, moreover , that function has intensified as cultural production has become a chief economic activity. The formation of the ubiquitous field of cultural studies and the study of what Pierre Bourdieu once called “cultural capital” (243) indicates the emerging implications, scholarly and otherwise, of this postindustrial phenomenon . Studies abound in cultural scholarship that assess (to name only a few subjects) cultural iconography, culture industries, popular culture, and the commodification of culture. Yet, as Mike Davis claims in Magical Urbanism, a certain invisibility of Latinas/os persists in high-end urban studies charged feastingonlatina/olaborinMulticulturallosangeles rudolfo d. torres and Juan r. buriel T young and holmes text-5.indd 75 11/1/10 10:08 AM 76 — Rodolfo d. toRRes and Juan R. buRiel with examining such cultural phenomena from the vantage of the world economy ’s impact on the metropolis. Davis contends that “for more than a decade urban theory has been intensely focused on trying to understand how the new world economy is reshaping the metropolis. . . . Yet most of the literature on ‘globalization’ has paradoxically ignored its most spectacular U.S. expression” (Davis 2000, 9). The present chapter purposes not only to bring visibility upon Latinas/os within urban studies, but also to speculate on the implications of having the labor of a largely immigrant Latina/o workforce support nouvelle multicultural restaurants in a postindustrial, and equally postcolonial, urban landscape like Los Angeles. For in Los Angeles the marketing and availability of multicultural cuisine has, to be sure, also become symptomatic of a certain postcolonial desire of the elite to possess the Other by symbolic measures in lieu of territorial and geopolitical expansion. Building upon her earlier studies of gentrification, Sharon Zukin advances the concept of the “symbolic economy” in The Culture of Cities to more thoroughly explain this postindustrial and postcolonial transformation of the metropolis . She argues that urban elites appropriate the images, narratives, and symbols of multiculturalism and then inscribe these into the built environment to communicate their tastes, values, and desires to their cultural peers and to the citizenry at large. These signs of multiculturalism, which circulate in its symbolic economy, are meant to uphold the misguided assumption that one can have unmediated access to the world of the cultural Other. That is, these signs are intended to establish the illusion of cultural transparency. Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture characterizes such instances of transparency as taking place when “the semantic seems to prevail over the syntactic, the signified over the signifier” (109). This prevalence can come about since texts do not merely reflect reality; rather, and perhaps more significantly, texts create reality. A text, says Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious, “articulates its own situation and textualizes it, thereby encouraging and perpetuating the illusion that the situation itself did not exist before it, that there is nothing but a text, that there never was any extra- or con-textual reality before the text itself generated it in the form of a mirage” (1981, 82). Therefore, as should be clear, the texts woven by the symbolic economy of multiculturalism in effect perpetuate the illusion that certain timely signs (though, to the conscious minds of surveyors of multicultural cuisine , they appear as anything but signs) paradoxically provide for unmediated passage into the world of the cultural Other. And in the context of multicultural nouvelle restaurants, the texts of cuisine, with all their ethnic flare and flavor, unproblematically signal access to this different world. young and holmes text-5.indd 76 11/1/10 10:08 AM feasting on...