The Immigrant-Food Nexus Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America

"This book investigates the intersection of food and immigration in North America through a novel construct: the immigrant-food nexus. To do this, the book's chapters delve into three overarching areas in which immigration and food intersect from the national level down to the daily lived experience of immigrants: Boundaries: Individuals, Communities, and Nations, Labor: Fields and Bodies, and Identity Narratives and Identity Politics. In taking a critical approach towards questions of food, agricultural and immigration policy, the volume's contributors ask: How can the immigrant-food nexus be understood in our current political climate of rising nationalism, and how does an analysis that transcends traditional "micro" or "macro" scales from the nation to the community to the body provide a new way to think about these issues? The contributors synthesize this analysis of "macro" topics within immigration and food with a "micro" analysis of immigrant foodways. Foodways are manifestations and symbols of cultural histories and proclivities. As individuals participate in culturally defined ways of eating, they perform their own identities and memberships in particular groups. How important are foodways as performances, on immigrant lived and daily practices? The concepts defined as "macro" have real, embodied consequences. The concepts defined as "micro" have large-scale, important meanings. The contributors recognize this: their work bridges the scales of the nation, community, and individual bodies to "render visible the political tensions about race, agriculture, immigration, and the future of the nation that simmer in everyday life" (Neubert, Chapter 2). Through critical, multidimensional research, critical food and immigration scholars today find themselves at a generative place to bring fact-based, humanized, and multi-scalar narratives of the immigrant-food nexus to light. The uniqueness of this book lies in the concept of the immigrant-food nexus as a lens for exploring immigration and food in North America. This fulfills a special need: to complicate the binary of macro level policy, and micro level lived experience, showing the intersections between these scales"--