Food Across Borders

The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes “American” in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from “the line in the sand” that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between “our” food and “their” food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between “us” and “them.”

The stories told in Food Across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University..

MATT GARCIA is a professor of history and transborder studies at Arizona State University in Tempe. He is the author of From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement.

E. MELANIE DuPUIS is a professor and chair of environmental studies and science at Pace University, New York, and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author or editor of numerous books including, Dangerous Digestion: The Politics of American Dietary Advice.

DON MITCHELL is a professor of cultural geography at Uppsala University in Sweden, and is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University in New York. He is the author or editor of numerous books including, of They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape and the Struggle of Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California.