I encourage my readers to check out Lauren Marie Fleming’s wonderful Substack | Unscripted. I did not receive permission from Lauren prior to posting this message. I do not speak for Lauren and everything I have said below is solely my opinion and perspective.
Dear Reader,
My friend and colleague Lauren Marie Fleming recently penned a moving piece about what it is like to be a white person, with a heart wide open, growing up in the midst of Chicano culture. I have a similar experience. Spicy foods and Latin flair feel like home to me, but I’m totally white.
I was born in the LA area, and moved to Central California as a fifth grader. Whenever I travel out of state, it is the cilantro, lime, and chilies I miss. If I am long enough in a place that does not cook with chilies or tomatillos I think I may go mad.
Thus, Lauren’s piece about Latin culture growing up in a border town resonated with me. It’s the culture Lauren was raised in, but it is not hers. She would not be who she is without it, but in so much as it describes her identity it describes what she lacks.
Is what we lack all that white Californians can say about their upbringing? I doubt it. For example, Eve Babitz hated visiting Paris, in part, because the food sucked. For Eve, Los Angeles’ tamales, hot sauce, and burritos sated her culinary desires in a way that even the most storied Parisian cuisine could not. She even seemed to have resented Paris for making her father search for tamales hidden in the back of some dingy market, just so Eve could have a taste of home in a foreign land.
According to Eve, a taste of home in Paris was Chicano food. According to Cheech, the word “Chicano” is a pejorative aimed at Latinos living in the United States, meaning “little Mexican.” The “big” Mexicans, the ones who live in Mexico, apparently, created this and other sleights for Chicanos like Pocho or being a Coconut (“Coca”) — brown on the outside, and white on the inside.
Eve spoke back at these pejoratives as they were being developed in the 1960s, in part, by explaining how the Pachucos’ style of dancing, the salsa choke, gave her life. She described the spirit of Los Angeles by appreciating and participating in cultural advancements brought by others, especially the Chicano community. She swore by all she felt was holy, which wasn’t much, that Janis Joplin would not have overdosed had she known where to buy taquitos on Olvera Street in DTLA.
According to Eve, Chicano cuisine was better than drugs. In terms of glamour and food, she said that only Rome could compare with her iconic Hollywood, California home. One of the central points Eve made after traveling in Europe was that, in her estimation, not all white heritages are equal in pleasure and beauty. In fact, most of them did not even compare with the vibrant tapestry of cultures in California that featured Chicano taste and style as, perhaps, its oldest foundation.1
Subjective as opinions of taste and fashion are, opinions of taste and fashion drive markets, communities, and life itself. Holding subjective opinions about food, clothing, and culture is not appropriation. But it can be dangerous to speak one’s mind, depending on the context.
Imagine if Julia Child overheard Eve complaining about French cuisine, especially after having access to the finest fare France had to offer. It was entirely possible that Julia Child may have run into Eve Babitz at some point or another, though Eve would have been significantly younger. They may have disliked each other if they had met, but it would be ridiculous to expect every Californian to agree on matters of taste, especially across such a gap in ages.
Whether or not French food is spectacular, Julia and Eve generally agreed about Chicano culture. According to Julia, the best taco place was La Super-Rica in Santa Barbara, which I can attest was a scrumptious mainstay for us Westmont College students living in nearby Montecito. Eve may not have agreed, exactly, about what restaurant made the best Chicano foods, but Julia and Eve both represented California taste on the world’s stage.
For these tastemakers to remark on Chicano contributions as a representation of California is not appropriation. In fact, if Julia or Eve ignored the advancements in cuisine and fashion led by Latin cooks and designers, they would have covered up the reality with a fraud. They would have rightly been criticized, as Taylor Swift was, when she made a music video for her song Wildest Dreams that featured beautiful African landscapes and no African people.
When it comes to Californian tastemakers like Julia, Eve, Lauren, or potentially myself, our opinion about Mexican food and Chicano culture is an important part of our identity. We like it! Home to us may mean something that is transient and impermanent. As Eve tells, visitors with tips and tricks for making a delicious meal sit at the foundations of Los Angeles itself — a city that was imagined into being on Olvera Street, in the very same place Eve’s favorite taquitos were, apparently, dreamed into reality.
Of course, this is only one, particularly adventurous, view about identity. Eve’s celebration of impermanence in Los Angeles was unpopular even in her day. But for those of us who grew up with earthquake drills and brushfires, Eve’s way of finding home amid the general alarm is commonplace and even nostalgic.
For some, the risk of community with people who disagree or see things differently is worth the rewards. Transcendent pleasure awaits those willing to risk interactions with others. Those who never try are potentially tragic as they may never know what I am talking about.
To each their own.
Yours Cordially,
Joshua J. Schroeder
I recognize the very complex relationship between Mexico and Native American Tribes and Nations, and refer my readers to Octavio Paz’s Nobel Prize winning work on the Mexican identity entitled The Labyrinth of Solitude, which masterfully reviewed the extraordinarily nuanced issue of Native cultures in Spanish Mexico.