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This dissertation is concerned with understanding how foodways—the production, consumption, and distribution of foods and food goods over time—have shaped Latinx placemaking and survival in the San Gabriel Valley (SGV) of Southern California. This dissertation exists at the intersection of Chicana/o Studies, History, Racial Geographies, and Food Studies. Where this project is historically focused, it uses a mixed-methods approach (archival research, GIS mapping, content analysis, and oral history) to create two interventions: 1. It grounds public history—building knowledges with marginalized communities—in piecing together Latinx social histories and 2. It advances the framework of “critical Latinx foodways,” a methodological process of recovery through a foodways lens that expands beyond this region. Scholarship in Chicana/o Studies has often discussed agricultural labor, but has not always centralized a broader foodways lens in these investigations. And, while a growing scholarship on food workers and street vendors (Graaff & Ha 2015; Rosales 2020) has shaped contemporary understandings of race, power, and food, less work is dedicated to understanding the connections between the contemporary regulation of food workers and the historic regulation of food workers in the first half of the 20th century. To answer the research questions, “How do foodways shape racial formation and the creation of uneven power relations? How might attention to foodways address Latinx historical absences in places like the San Gabriel Valley?” Critical Latinx Foodways: Racial Formation, Regional Identity, and Placemaking in the San Gabriel Valley, 1900-1968 weaves together a cultural history of Mexican food workers, vendors, and entrepreneurs to challenge Anglo-dominant narratives of the region. Histories of food workers challenging regional boundaries through vending, taste, and forging place are vital to our understanding of placemaking and survival of Latinx populations in urban outskirts.

Die öffentliche Versorgung der Bevölkerung durch Großküchen gewann im Verlauf des Ersten Weltkrieges an Bedeutung und blieb während der Nachkriegsjahre eine notwendige Maßnahme zur Linderung der Not in den Großstädten. Die vorliegende Dissertation untersucht anhand der Metropolen Wien und Berlin, ob die kriegsbedingte Massenverpflegung eine nachhaltige Veränderung der Ernährungsgewohnheiten in der Bevölkerung herbeiführte. Auf diese Frage liefern die beiden Hauptstädte auf dem ersten Blick unterschiedliche Antworten. Während für die Wiener Kriegsküchen sowohl wachsende Besucherzahlen als auch der Fortbestand der Küchen über den Krieg hinaus festzustellen sind, wurden die Berliner Großküchen von der Bevölkerung zunehmend abgelehnt und als „Notbehelf der Kriegszeit“ zurückgewiesen. Die Studie sucht nach den Ursachen für diese unterschiedliche Entwicklung und geht davon aus, dass hierbei nicht nur die sehr viel stärker vorherrschende Not in Wien, sondern auch mehrere sich gegenseitig überlagernde organisatorisch-administrative, soziokulturelle und (sozial-)politische Faktoren eine Rolle spielten. Im Mittelpunkt der Vergleichsanalyse stehen die kommunalen Kriegsverwaltungen als Organisatoren der städtischen Küchensysteme und die mehrheitlich aus Arbeiterschaft und Mittelstand bestehende Stadtbevölkerung als Empfänger der Verpflegungsangebote. Einen weiteren Analyseschwerpunkt bilden die im starken Maße von der Sozialdemokratie beherrschten sozialpolitischen Entwicklungen ab November 1918. An die öffentliche Verpflegung seit dem späten 19. Jahrhundert anknüpfend nimmt die Studie die Entwicklung der Massenverpflegungsaktivitäten beider Metropolen im Verlauf des Krieges in den Blick und kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass sich das Wiener Kriegsküchenwesen im Gegensatz zur Berliner Volksspeisungsorganisation durch ein hohes Maß an kommunaler Eigenständigkeit, Entschlossenheit, Anpassungsfähigkeit und Kontinuität auszeichnete – allesamt Faktoren, die eine höhere Inanspruchnahme der Küchen begünstigten. Die vergleichsweise „effiziente“ Entwicklung der Wiener Massenversorgung wirkte sich nachhaltig auf das Verpflegungswesen der Nachkriegszeit aus. Die Sozialdemokraten, die in beiden Städten die politische Verantwortung übernahmen, betrachteten die öffentliche Massenverpflegung im Sinne des Social Engineering als ein zweckdienliches Instrument, mit dem die sozialdemokratische Rationalisierungspolitik unterstützt werden konnte. Dementsprechend betrieben die Verantwortlichen in Wien und Berlin einen großen Aufwand, um der kommunalen Massenverpflegung eine Zukunftsperspektive zu geben. Doch nur in Wien gelang es den Sozialdemokraten, die Stadtküchen zu erhalten und in ein modernes Verpflegungsunternehmen zu verwandeln. Die Studie ermittelt eine Reihe von Faktoren, die diese Entwicklung begünstigten und zeigt hierbei auf, dass die Wiener Entwicklung mit Blick auf die „moderne“ Berliner Speisehauskultur der Vorkriegszeit dennoch keine Innovation war. Schließlich kommt die Studie zu dem Ergebnis, der Erste Weltkrieg auf dem Gebiet der kollektiven Außerhausverpflegung keinen grundlegenden Wandel der Ernährungsgewohnheiten bewirkte. Angesichts der kommunalen Reformbestreben der 1920er Jahre trug er dennoch dazu bei, dass die Kollektivverpflegung einen festen Platz in der kommunalen Daseinsvorsorge einnahm., To properly care for the population, public kitchens gained in importance during the First World War. They continued to be a necessary measure to alleviate the hardship in the major cities during the post-war years. Based on the metropolises of Vienna and Berlin, this dissertation examines whether the wartime public kitchens led to a lasting change in the eating habits among the population. At first glance, the two capitals provide different answers to this question. While in Vienna, the war kitchens increased in demand and continued to exist after the war, Berlin’s population on the other hand increasingly refused to make use of the public meal halls and rejected them as a “stopgap solution”. This study looks for reasons for this different development and assumes that not only the much more prevalent hardship in Vienna, but also several overlapping organizational-administrative, socio-cultural and (socio-)political factors played a role. The comparative analysis focuses on the municipal wartime administrations as the organizers of the municipal kitchen systems as well as the urban population, consisting mainly of the working- and middle-classes, as recipients of the offered meals. Another focus of the analysis is on the sociopolitical developments from November 1918 onward, which were strongly dominated by social democracy. Building on public feeding since the late 19th century, the study looks at the development of public kitchen activities in both metropolises during the course of war and concludes, that in contrast to the organization of the Volksspeisung in Berlin, the war kitchen organization in Vienna was characterized by a high degree of communal autonomy, determination, adaptability, and continuity – all of them factors that favored a higher utilization of the kitchens. The comparatively “efficient” development of public feeding in Vienna had a lasting effect on the municipal catering in the postwar period. The Social Democrats, who took on political responsibility in both cities regarded public feeding, in terms of social engineering, as a useful instrument with which social democratic rationalization policies could be supported. Accordingly, those responsible in Vienna and Berlin made a great effort to give public feeding a viable future. Nevertheless, only in Vienna did the Social Democrats managed to preserve the municipal kitchens and transform them into a modern kitchen company. The study identifies several factors that favored this development, while pointing out that the development in Vienna was not an innovation compared to the "modern" food culture of pre-war Berlin. Finally, the study concludes, public feeding in the First World War did not bring about a fundamental change in eating habits. Considering the municipal reform efforts of the 1920s, the war nonetheless contributed to the establishment of community catering as a permanent feature of municipal public services.

The preparation and consumption of food is not merely a physical act, but a deeply social one, conveying cultural meaning that functions to tie us to our identity and profoundly influence our memory. Drawing upon interviews done with members of Windsor’s Yugoslav diaspora community, this research seeks to explore the ways in which this group has negotiated its collective memory within the host society through the use of food. I identify four central aspects of food’s relation to collective memory within the diaspora. First, the use of food as a means of connection to the homeland, and therefore, to collective memory. Second, the use of traditional foods as a means of gaining acceptance and visibility through the exploitation of collective memory. Next, the alteration of traditional foods as a means of gaining acceptance and (in)visibility through a form of selective forgetting. Finally, the rejection of Yugoslav culture as a means of assimilating and thus of forgetting. Taken in combination, these various approaches provide a multifaceted, comprehensive account of how food acts in relation to memory and forgetting. The emerging field of food history, with its unique ability to grant insights into cultural memories of both the private and public sphere, opens the door to a fuller, richer understanding of the dynamics of migrant life.

Food and drink are fundamental to life, and apart from costume, they are among the most noticeable markers of cultural otherness within intercultural encounters.1 There is a current global interest in foods that are artisanal, local, traditional, seasonal and sustainable, and that tell a cultural story, as witnessed by the popularity of the Nordic Food Movement, or the 2021 Netflix series High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America.2 In 2019, the Royal Irish Academy published A History of Ireland in 100 Words, which had a special chapter on ‘Food and Feasting’ highlighting the importance of bread, milk, apples, and honey as iconic Irish foods, and including drinking horns, forks, cauldrons, and the champion’s portion ‘curadhmhír’ as other important cultural elements within Ireland’s history.3 Food history has been gaining momentum globally for over half a century. In an Irish context, it has been sixty years since A.T. Lucas’s seminal paper ‘Irish food before the potato’ was published in this very journal.4 Other individual researchers on Irish food history, traditions and customs included Kevin Danaher, Fergus Kelly, Louis Cullen, Bríd Mahon, and more recently Finbar McCormick, Katherine Simms and Patricia Lysaght.