Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City

By Melissa Fuster

Melissa Fuster thinks expansively about the multiple meanings of comida, food, from something as simple as a meal to something as complex as one's identity. She listens intently to the voices of New York City residents with Cuban, Dominican, or Puerto Rican backgrounds, as well as to those of the nutritionists and health professionals who serve them. She argues with sensitivity that the migrants' health depends not only on food culture but also on important structural factors that underlie their access to food, employment, and high-quality healthcare.

People in Hispanic Caribbean communities in the United States present high rates of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related diseases, conditions painfully highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both eaters and dietitians may blame these diseases on the shedding of traditional diets in favor of highly processed foods. Or, conversely, they may blame these on the traditional diets of fatty meat, starchy root vegetables, and rice. Applying a much needed intersectional approach, Fuster shows that nutritionists and eaters often misrepresent, and even racialize or pathologize, a cuisine's healthfulness or unhealthfulness if they overlook the kinds of economic and racial inequities that exist within the global migration experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469664583

Melissa Fuster

Melissa Fuster is associate professor of public health nutrition at Tulane University.

Book preview

Caribeños at the Table

Caribeños at the Table

How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City

Melissa Fuster

The University of North Carolina Press   CHAPEL HILL

© 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fuster, Melissa, author.

Title: Caribeños at the table : how migration, health, and race intersect in New York City / Melissa Fuster.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020055722 | ISBN 9781469664569 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469664576 (pbk ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469664583 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Caribbean Americans—Health and hygiene—New York (State)—New York. | Caribbean Americans—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions. | Cuban Americans—Food—New York (State)—New York. | Puerto Ricans—Food—New York (State)—New York. | Dominican Americans—Food—New York (State)—New York. | Health and race—Social aspects—New York (State)—New York. | Health—Social aspects—New York (State)—New York. | New York (N.Y.)—Emigration and immigration.

Classification: LCC F128.9.C27 F87 2021 | DDC 305.896/97290747—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055722

Cover illustrations: Banana chips © iStock.com/santhosh_varghese; Manhattan Bridge © iStock.com/Moussa81.

This is dedicated to Eugenia and Omar,

and to my community: aquí y allá

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

When Motion Turns Foods into Comidas

CHAPTER ONE

Setting Hispanic Caribbean Tables in New York City

CHAPTER TWO

Culture as Cause and Solution

CHAPTER THREE

Caribeños Talk about Comidas in Nutri-speak

CHAPTER FOUR

Gathering, Cooking, and Eating Comidas

CONCLUSION

Comidas Back Home and Moving Forward

Hispanic Caribbean Foods: A Glossary

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Figure and Table

FIGURE

1.  Culinary overlaps based on descriptions of comidas: main dishes and snacks  76

TABLE

1.  Three main meals a day: comparisons across Hispanic Caribbean cuisines  79

Acknowledgments

The research contained in this book was supported by the New York University Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, the Professional Staff Congress–City University of New York (PSC-CUNY) Research Award Program, the CUNY Diversity Projects Development Fund, the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program, the Claire and Leonard Tow Faculty Research Travel Fellowship, the CUNY Mellon Faculty Diversity Career Enhancement Initiative, and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at CUNY Hunter College.

My gratitude goes out to mentors, colleagues, and friends who provided advice, encouragement, and feedback in this process, pushing me to dig deeper while making me a better scholar in the process. I am lucky to have been able to workshop these pages with an amazing group of mentors, whose scholarship and ongoing feedback were instrumental to the analysis contained within. In this regard, I want to thank Jorge Duany, Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra, Krishnendu Ray, and Alyshia Gálvez. This book also benefited from a multidisciplinary community of scholars and friends who provided community connections, feedback, or simply much needed fresh eyes for the writing. These individuals include (in first-name alphabetical order) Elisa González, Eris Garriga, Judith Anderson, Kara Schlichting, Lourdes Castro Mortillaro, Margaret Handley, Margrethe Horlyck-Romanovsky, Natasha Wilson, and Sophia Domokos. I must also acknowledge the assistance provided by Brooklyn College students Kevin Guerrero, Elina Banks, Leah Galitzdorfer and Tara Frank, who took the time to assist in this work, including via data collection or other research activities.

My motivation to write this book was born out of interactions in interdisciplinary spaces, particularly, the Association for the Study of Food and Society, but also due to the encouragement received from Arlene Dávila and Marion Nestle, who pushed me to disseminate my research beyond the scientific journals more commonly used in my home discipline of nutrition and public health. I am also deeply thankful to the University of North Carolina Press, the anonymous reviewers, and, specifically, Elaine Maisner for her enthusiasm and time, helping me to find and strengthen my voice in these pages.

Most importantly, this book would not have been possible without the caribeños who gifted their time and shared their life and food experiences with me, over many meals in the city. Their voices are at the center of this work, and I will be forever thankful for their openness and interest in this project. Nor would I have been able to undertake this long journey without the support of my family, in many ways inspiring the work presented in this book. I want to thank my mother, Eugenia Victoria Rivera, who has been an important part of the somewhat personal story intermingled throughout the book and responsible for the person I am today. I am thankful for my family, including my sister, Jessica; my aunts, Elby and Evelyn; my uncle and godfather, Euldaldo; my stepfather, Angel, and my mother-in-law, Norma, for their encouragement and their indulging me in ongoing discussions about food and this project throughout the years. Finally, these pages would not have come into existence without the love, care, and intellectual contributions of my better half, Omar A. Dauhajre, whose knowledge about our community’s history and culture has been essential in inspiring and moving this work forward.

Gracias.

Caribeños at the Table

INTRODUCTION

When Motion Turns Foods into Comidas

My favorite food as a child was macaroni and cheese—the one that comes packaged in a blue box with bright orange powdered cheese. The dish first came onto the market in 1937, during the Great Depression, as an economical alternative for families in the United States, eventually evolving into a childhood favorite for many generations to follow. While such a memory may convey an image of a childhood spent in the United States, my love for this highly processed dish was not developed at a post-Depression U.S. kitchen table. I enjoyed the dish as a child in Puerto Rico, preferring it over many traditional meals.

I was a picky eater, raised in San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico. My pickiness was especially challenging when visiting family, where Sunday lunches might have included foods like morcilla (blood sausage), mondongo (tripe soup), gandinga (pork liver, kidney, and heart stew), guineitos en escabeche (marinated bananas), or cabro (goat), among many other Puerto Rican traditional favorites—all of which I vehemently refused to eat. My mother struggled, gradually finding the solution in the boxed (and easily transportable) macaroni and cheese. The macaroni and cheese was easy to carry and super easy to make, she recalled, and since it had milk and cheese, I thought it was also nutritious. The most important thing is that you liked it, and I felt relaxed because you had eaten. My mother was not alone in this perspective. Food marketing efforts sold this quick meal as both nutritious and convenient—a dream for working mothers like mine.

Growing up in Puerto Rico, I was also exposed to food marketing. Food advertisements were conveniently intertwined with cartoons on weekend mornings, with U.S. brands, like Kraft, making their way to our kitchen and my plate. Aside from macaroni and cheese, I recall eating brightly colored cereal in the mornings and drinking juices made from powdered mixes, accustoming my palate to these artificial, ultra-sweet flavors. My eating habits and preference for these ultra-processed foods were the result of the urban food environment I grew up in. We had a Pueblo supermarket within walking distance of our home.¹ A quick drive would take us to the nearest fast-food chains, grouped in fast-food plazas with shared parking and individual drive-throughs. I ate a mix of simple home-cooked dishes and Americanized foods. My mother enjoyed cooking, providing us with home-cooked meals such as steak with mashed potatoes, pork chops with rice and beans, and arroz con pollo (rice with chicken). While I don’t recall having too many snacks and sweets in the home, as a working parent, she complemented her cooking with occasional canned meals, frozen dinners, and the rare (and exciting) appearances of Chinese American takeout or fast-food dinners.

Remembering the food I saw and enjoyed growing up in Puerto Rico, I realize that the repertoire was limited, especially when it came to vegetables. The typical salad in Puerto Rico is mostly iceberg lettuce, a few pieces of pale tomatoes, and the occasional avocado, a delicious addition I came to appreciate as an adult. The main vegetables eaten are the viandas, a group of starchy tubers and vegetables including plantains, green bananas, yucca, and taro root. Peppers are also common but mostly in very small quantities as part of the cooking base (the sofrito) or in sauces (salsas criollas). Calabaza (winter squash) is a mere condiment to beans and, less frequently, is turned into fried snacks or desserts, such as barriguitas de vieja, squash fritters with a hint of vanilla and a funny name (literally translated as the diminutive of old woman bellies). It wasn’t until I left the island that my palate began to expand as I discovered new ingredients and reencountered old ones.

I left Puerto Rico for Miami when I was twenty, moving not out of economic necessity or due to political unrest on the island but out of curiosity, using a university transfer to finish my undergraduate studies as the ticket out. Miami did not feel alien; the climate was still hot and varied little throughout the year. My diet was similar to that of any other student living away from home—grabbing bites at odd hours, combining fast food with quick meals at home. I relied on Cuban restaurants as a facsimile for Puerto Rican food. I ate black beans and learned to call them frijoles, not habichuelas. I learned that orange juice was not jugo de china but jugo de naranja.² When I ordered coffee, I asked for a cortadito, not a pocillo. The differences between Cuban and Puerto Rican food went beyond names—the flavors were different, too. I craved the unique sofrito flavor in red beans and arroz con pollo. I missed my mother’s empanadas de bistec (breaded, fried steak) and her pastelón de amarillo, which she prepared as a baked dish of fried ripe plantains layered with ground beef and green beans, topped with cheese.

Distance provided a new view of my island and, with it, a new perspective on my comida. This word, comida—important in the pages of this book—is one of those Spanish terms with a multitude of meanings, for which a comparable English word is difficult to find. It can simply translate to food, but it is more than that. A comida is a meal, as opposed to a snack, and it can also be used to name the main meal of the day. As an eater on the move,³ I learned to distinguish the comidas of others—including the distinct Cuban flavors and culinary terminology I encountered in Miami—from what I experienced back in Puerto Rico. I also started to experience the process of becoming the other in a new land, even in a Latin American city, as in the case of Miami, Florida.

My time in Florida was meant to be temporary. Yet instead of returning to the Caribbean, I went further north—to Boston, Massachusetts, as a graduate student at Tufts University. Unlike Miami, my move to the Northeast was not a subtle adaptation. I arrived in the fall and soon after saw my first snowflakes, which gradually turned into full-blown blizzards. For the first time, I experienced the seasons I used to see in movies. Moreover, I saw seasonality reflected in the farmers’ markets around the city—another new experience for me. While nowadays farmers’ markets are slowly spreading in Puerto Rico, such was not the case during my time living on the island.⁴ Boston’s farmers’ markets were not only new but also intimidating. I realized I had never really seen garlic, onions, and other foods in their natural form—that is, with dirt, roots, and leaves still attached. I discovered a rich and colorful variety of leafy greens, with tastes that far surpassed the watery, tasteless crunch of the iceberg lettuce to which I was accustomed. Gradually, my diet became more varied. I learned to love vegetables I had previously disliked through tasting them in their fresh form—much better than the canned versions I saw and sometimes ate on the island. I also encountered, for the first time, a strong Puerto Rican community away from the island. Boston’s sizable Puerto Rican diaspora provided access to traditional ingredients and dishes in markets and restaurants. At the same time, I also witnessed the reality of poverty and isolation many compatriots faced in these communities too far up north, away from home.

It has been almost twenty years since I left Puerto Rico. I tried to return, but life kept taking me on a different path, the latest being New York City, where I wrote these pages, serving as the setting for this book. My experiences in the United States have expanded my palate and allowed me to appreciate foods I had rejected in Puerto Rico. I now enjoy morcilla (blood sausage) during Christmas celebrations and meats such as chivo (goat) and conejo (rabbit). My taste for processed and fast foods has also diminished. I confess I still have a box of macaroni and cheese in my kitchen, but I have since learned to cook the dish from scratch, along with a world of cuisines, thanks to the many global interactions I have enjoyed in the States.

The development of my palate has been parallel to my evolution as a food and nutrition scholar. The movement from my island to different cities in the Northeast has followed a professional trajectory, from a biology major to a food and nutrition policy scholar. In this journey, I have kept my work and research close to home, focusing on Latin American communities in the United States as well as the Latin American region. This has included community-based research to understand eating behaviors and evaluation studies to examine the outcomes from nutrition interventions. This book is the result of these experiences, merging my personal and professional journeys to make a needed contribution to food, nutrition, and public health scholarship addressing Latin American communities in the United States.

Latin American communities in the United States are afflicted by diet-related health conditions, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, at a higher prevalence than are non-Hispanic whites (Ogden et al. 2017; Fei et al. 2017; H. M. González et al. 2016; NHLBI 2013). Working for more than a decade in public health and nutrition, I see that the conventional wisdom in the field tends to focus on cultural factors to explain these health inequities. While culture is an important aspect guiding health-related behaviors, this emphasis misses the structural factors that are also at play. I use the term structural factors to refer to the fabric that encompasses and shapes our actions and the outcomes of such actions. Structural factors—namely race, gender, and social class—ultimately sculpt quality of life through facilitating or hindering access to care, food, and overall living conditions (Frohlich, Corin, and Potvin 2001; G. H. Williams 2003). My purpose in this book is to bring structure into view to show its intersectionality with culture, being potentially more important than culture as an influence on health behaviors and overall well-being.

Formally explained, I use my multidisciplinary perspective to study the complexities involved in how we understand the connection between migration and food behaviors. I describe my perspective as multidisciplinary, as it results from my combining of different disciplines in my academic upbringing. This upbringing began in the natural sciences, with studies in biology, and later moved to the social sciences (anthropology and sociology). I then combined these in my interdisciplinary degree in food policy and applied nutrition, which provided training in economics as well as the design and evaluation of food interventions and policies. These multidisciplinary excursions have resulted in an approach that seeks to embrace the inherent complexities underlying eating in the context of migration. The combination of perspectives has led me to understand immigrant and ethnic communities within an inequitable, interconnected, and global migration experience. In this work, I seek to demonstrate that the same global forces that create migration flows are creating distinct conditions and othering processes that result in different health outcomes in new homes.⁵ As such, addressing food practices in immigrant and ethnic communities needs to consider more than just culture and what traditional practices ought to be.

The perspective brought up in this book is important. Most of the food, migration, and health research tends to focus on the individual and examines migration as a relatively simple unidirectional, linear process. That is, the prevalent view is that newcomers arrive in the United States with ties to traditional diets and food practices, but as time passes, their food and health behaviors gradually become more Americanized. This is understood as having an increased consumption of unhealthy processed and fast foods at the expense of traditional foods, which are seen as healthy. My personal experience as a caribeña in motion shows that the story is much more complicated and nonlinear. People and their foods flow in multiple directions, with their movements and the resulting changes being constantly shaped by local and global policies that color the experiences and health outcomes of migrants around the world.

My story, and those of others in this book, serves as a starting point to question linear, individual-focused, and romanticized understandings of dietary changes in the context of migration. In this analysis, I demonstrate that shifts in food practices occur not only as a result of migration but also before and outside migration, as foodscapes around the world are being Americanized through the movement of transnational food and beverage corporations. I also show that while traditional diets are assumed to be important for immigrant communities, such longing for traditional foods is not universal. The attachment immigrants feel toward their traditional patterns is influenced by the linkages sustained with their home country. These linkages are influenced by both global and local structural factors: the experiences in the new home and those from the home left behind. Hence, with this work I aim to change ongoing scholarly conversations on the immigrant food experience and health outcomes in the United States, which tend to overemphasize the importance of culture when addressing immigrant communities. This overemphasis on culture diminishes the role of the structural factors (class, race, gender) that intersect to shape the experiences of these communities, overstates the uniqueness of specific cultural groups, and risks blaming culture for the health inequities observed in these communities.

The Hispanic Caribbean Context: Identity, Food, and Motion

This book uses Hispanic Caribbean communities in New York City as the object of study. I follow common convention when defining the Hispanic Caribbean as the Spanish-speaking areas in the Caribbean Sea, essentially referring to the insular trio composed of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. In this approach, I exclude Haiti. I recognize that the country shares an island with the Dominican Republic and that its history has been influential in shaping the region’s history. However, Haiti and the Haitian American experience is quite distinct from that of Hispanic Caribbean communities, adding complexity around language and different colonial and migratory histories, which was deemed beyond the scope of this study. I also chose to use the term Hispanic as opposed to Latin or Latino (or the newer, emerging terms Latin@, Latinx, or Latine). These terms are a shortened version of Latin American (or latinoamericano, in Spanish), denoting the shared geography and thus encompassing areas that do not share the Spanish heritage, as the case of Brazil and Haiti. Moreover, I use the term Hispanic as opposed to Spanish speaking or Hispanophone given that these contexts are joined by more than language. These localities share the legacy of Spanish colonialism, which results in shared cultural traits, including religious traditions (Catholicism), the distinct history of slavery, and the decimation of native populations. However, throughout the book, I prefer to use the terms caribeño and caribeña to refer to individuals with ancestry from this region—or those self-identified as Cuban, Dominican, or Puerto Rican—to reflect the shared language, heritage, and geographic ancestry.

We can talk about Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic as distinct, geographically demarcated nations (or territory, as is the case of Puerto Rico). Yet this view misses the regional identity inherent to the Hispanic Caribbean experience. Puerto Rican vocalist Pedro Ortíz Dávila (affectionally known as Davilita) evokes the unique and amalgamating rhythms and flavors that unify these three nations in the song Son tres, las islas hermanas. The title is a play on words, with the word son both acting as a verb (meaning are) and referencing the musical style of the song, the son cubano, which is mixed with Puerto Rican plena. With this distinctive and mixed rhythm, Davilita sings about the common sweet flavors of these islands—rum, honey, and sugarcane—christening these three islands as sisters (hermanas) while noting the shared roots and cultural traits between them (Flores 2008).

The caribeño identity and corresponding cuisines have movement at their core, resulting from the transit of peoples within the region and across continents. Such movement calls for a view of these hermanas beyond geographically established borders and the use of the nation-state of origin as the unit of analysis. Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico are joined by a common insular geography; a tropical climate; and a legacy of Spanish colonialism, sugar plantations, and African slavery. They also share geographical proximity with the United States, facilitating historical movements between the region and the power up north, which have had important consequences on the islands’ and the diasporas’ cultural expressions, as in the case of Davilita’s song, written in New York. These factors separate their experience from those of their Latin American continental counterparts and lead to the creation of what food historian Ortíz Cuadra (2013) calls the paladar memoria (palate’s memories), or the intimate bond with food and diet molded by material circumstances, a mother’s cooking, the frequent repeating of various dishes and meals, and the ‘principles of taste’ (Ortíz Cuadra 2013, 2).

The paladar memoria caribeño is born from movement. Native ingredients were cooked in a large Caribbean pot alongside foods and spices brought across continents at different points in time, starting when the Old World met the New World at the end of the fifteenth century. The Arawak Taino natives lived in farming and hunting societies,