Identities in Transition

The Enkidu Summer Conference 2007

June 1 - 5, 2007

Mexico City

in:

“Made by real Mexicans”: (re)visiting Mexicaness in Canada

Federico Barahona

Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing 

University of British Columbia

Canada

“Made by real Mexicans” says the sign on the window front. Located in trendy Vancouver, Canada’s third largest city, the small restaurant invites customers to experience authentic Mexican food made by real Mexicans. Like other Mexican restaurants in Vancouver, “Hola Churro!” promises passers-by that the items on its menu — as well as the ambience, its colourful decorations and lively music — are “typically” and “truthfully” Mexican. How is this Mexicaness constructed nearly four thousand kilometres north of Mexico City in what is now Canada’s Western shore? What stories and representations of Mexicans and Mexico (and even Latin America) are embedded in these culinary texts, images, and spaces? How are these “identities in transitions” problematic? We propose to explore the constructions of “Mexicaness” by (re)visiting a dozen popular Mexican restaurants in Vancouver’s affluent Kitsilano, Point Grey, and Downtown neighbourhoods. While a few of these businesses are actually owned and operated by people who were born or lived in Mexico, many of these establishments have non-Mexican owners, and are staffed by Spanish-speaking managers, cooks, and servers who come from various countries in South and Central America. Interestingly, however, all of these businesses present similar textual and visual narratives of what is “Mexican.” We argue that they offer a picturesque, exotic, and homogeneous view of Mexico and its diverse populations. Through critical discourse analysis, we explore the restaurants’ store fronts, their interior decorations and menus to examine constructions of Mexicaness, and Latin-Americaness. Following feminist, anti-racist and post-colonial theories on processes of racialization and othering, we analyze what metaphors, tropes, imageries, and stories are at play in these food businesses. We explore how these narratives (re)produce a homogeneous idea of “Latin America” for the appetite of (white) Canadian consumers navigating through increasingly popular ethnic dining spaces. Our preliminary findings suggest that images of sombreros, donkeys, beaches, and cacti are often the dominant decorating elements on the walls of Vancouver’s Mexican restaurants. Menus usually offer “tortilla chips and salsa,” or “nachos” as appetizers. Hamburgers feature “guacamole.” Posters show a Mexico without Mexicans – Coronas, white sand, a blue sea. Far from being empty of meaning, we argue that these discursive and visual narratives do construct Mexico as a simple place, “underdeveloped,” and “a-historical.” Here, urban imageries of a complex Latin American metropolis such as Mexico City do not exist. In this context, Vancouver’s Mexican restaurants seem to inhabit what U.S. scholar Anne McClintock calls an “anachronistic space.” In other words, these imageries construct Mexicans as living in the “past” — a past that is less “civilized,” “developed” and “modern” than (white) Canada. What is also interesting about these restaurants is the fact that many of them are not owned or even operated by Mexicans — one could argue most offer Mexican food, not people, after all — but by Spanish-speaking peoples who have settled in Vancouver. In this sense, our preliminary findings suggest that this imagined Mexico becomes the dominant commodified symbol and imagery of what it means to be Latin, brown, or Hispanic in Canada. These discourses suggest that to satisfy the appetite and fantasies of white Canadian consumers for "Latin" foods and products, it might be more lucrative to label and market one’s restaurant as authentically Mexican, rather than authentically Columbian, Salvadorian, Chilean, or Peruvian.

About Federico Barahona

Federico Barahona is a Mexican who’s not Mexican. He is a writer and editor living in Vancouver, BC. He was born in Santiago, Chile, grew up in Mexico City, and moved to Canada in his teens. He is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate in the Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He edits artsBeat, the Faculty of Arts news and research quarterly. His writing has appeared in a wide variety of Canadian literary magazines and newspapers, including Event, Descant, Geist, The Toronto Star, and The London Free Press. He holds a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of British Columbia. He is writing a novel.