Chicana/o Food Imaginaries in New Mexico

This essay develops the concept of Chicana/o food imaginaries to illuminate how food practices, both material and representational, shaped political vision, collective memory, and everyday life in the Chicano movement. Focusing on two New Mexico-based political publications, El Grito del Norte (1968-1973) and 450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures (1974-1976), I analyze how foodways-defined here as the cultivation, preparation, sharing, and symbolism of food-appear in visual and textual traces to assert cultural continuity, critique colonial and capitalist systems, and imagine alternatives rooted in land and community. Attending to both visual iconography and first-person narratives, I argue that food in these archives functions as a decolonial mode of world-making and a form of querencia: an embodied sense of place and belonging forged through struggle. Drawing from food studies scholarship on embodiment and everyday practices, the essay contributes to an emergent field of Chicana/o food studies and expands how we understand political print culture in the US Southwest. The essay links daily food practices with broader systems of dispossession and resistance, offering a regionally grounded, interdisciplinary approach to Chicano movement history

Colonialism · Embodied cognition · Ethnography · Everyday life · Field (mathematics) · Food studies · Politics · Scholarship · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Latin American and Latino Studies · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy