There’s a bad taste in my mouth when white restaurant owners co-opt tacos for profits and white foodies venture for the most “authentic” tacos as a badge to show off their own expansive tastes because in both cases they’re taking parts of a culture they enjoy and commodifying it, all while disregarding the parts they don’t care for.
https://www.autostraddle.com/taco-tuesd ... ur-307608/
White people owning restaurants that make tacos is problematic, because for it not to be problematic only people of a certain ethnicity should be able to make and sell tacos.
Do white people eating tacos care for rights of the undocumented worker preparing their next Instagrammable plate?
Well, first of all, almost all of the people preparing food in restaurants in the US are not undocumented workers. Most are lawful residents with the right to work. Undocumented immigrants - aka illegal aliens - are not legally permitted to work in the United States, and to do so they must lie to their employer.
Even so, most white people do "care for rights" of all people, not just lawful residents. However, if they are working in the US without the legal right to do so, then they aren't really having their rights violated. Perhaps if they are not being paid minimum wage or overtime compensation they might be, but most employers abide by the law, and the wage laws in the US allow undocumented immigrants to report their employer's violations and they will be investigated and if found to be true the employer will be forced to pay wages and fines. So, there is a mechanism there.
The writer here seems to think that white people eating tacos don't give a fuck. Just gimme my taco and fuck you! Because, you know, white people don't care. Other colors of people care, but not white people.
Can the Mexican cooks, waitresses, busboys, dishwashers and staff who work at these restaurants afford to eat the food?
Not sure, I guess it depends on if it's a high end or low end restaurants. There are plenty of American steakhouses with average meal costs of $75 to $100 a meal at which poor people can't generally afford to eat. This is not specific to Mexicans. But, generally, Mexican restaurants are not high end establishments and there are foods on the menu that are affordable to most people.
And, it's not just Mexicans who work in these jobs. I am as white as they come, and I and many other white, male, cisgendered, folks have toiled away as busboys. I and others cleaned tables, and washed dishes, and cleaned bathrooms and the like. We generally get through that kind of job in our younger years, not remaining in them for life, but we aren't immigrating to a new country, without legal authorization, without a social security number, and without an education or qualification to do anything else. Today in the US, the busboy would be making about $8.00 an hour, but back in Mexico, the Mexicans would be working in restaurants making about 40 cents (US) an hour. So, when they come to the US illegally, that's one of the reasons why they're doing it. Many of them come to the US to work, and send back half their wages home, which equates to about 8 days of pay for every one day of pay they would make in Mexico. If they come to the US and work their ass off for a few years, they can amass a nest egg that helps their family amount monumentally.
When taquerias owned by Mexicans don’t conform to white people’s tastebuds or standards of appearance, will its food be acclaimed?
Another racist position here - "white people's tastebuds" lol. "white people's standards of appearance?" We have a racially determined taste bud and standard of appearance? LOL.
But, the answer is the food will be "acclaimed" by people who find it appealing. That may differ from person to person and culture to culture. An American chophouse might not go over well in Mexico - not because of "non-white taste buds" (Mexicans are generally white or aboriginal - Mexican doesn't mean "non-white" racially). The restaurant might not go over well because it's not served in what people there have been culturally brought up to enjoy and expect - countries south of the Rio Grande River tend to have thinner cut steaks, usually extensively marinated, and cooked in sauces, so if they saw a giant ribeye steak on a plate, with loaded baked potato, vegetable side and a side salad, they wouldn't generally see that as their preferred meal on a daily basis. Presumably many of them would enjoy experimenting with another kind of food, but as a successful restaurant, it may have some trouble.
The interactions between white people and Mexican food has always been fucked. Before it became popularized in the U.S., Mexican food was thought of too exotic, dangerous and spicy to be eaten. Food historian Jeffrey Pilcher points out these ideas have reinforced racist images of Mexicans. “People use food to think about others, and popular views of the taco as cheap, hot, and potentially dangerous have reinforced racist images of Mexico as a land of tequila, migrants, and tourist’s diarrhea.”
Oh, really? What about the white people in Mexico. Mexicans are not by definition non-white, and the percentage of the population that is of white European descent is estimated as up to 47% of the population.
http://www.conapred.org.mx/documentos_c ... RACIAL.pdf The Mexican National Council to Prevent Discrimination), which seeks to remedy discrimination in Mexico against black Mexicans and Mexicans of indigenous descent, by a culture which apparently favors white Mexicans.
Tacos are cheap food, and in the US they were often served spicy and
My family has experienced the impact of these racist ideas. I wrote in the first Taco Tuesday column about how my mom was embarrassed to eat the tacos my grandmother prepared for her school lunch in front of her classmates. Immigrant food has always been scorned for being the other and for not conforming to American culture.
Kids tease other kids over being different? What a shocker.
My mom made me wear scandinavian sweaters to school, and I got teased too.
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar
