Magical Habits

"Magical Habits draws from Saidiya Hartman's suggestive mode of "ficto-criticism," and proceeds through an assemblage of elements including personal narrative, fictionalized monologues, archival photographs, menu bits, restaurant reviews, and fairy tales among others. Monica Huerta focuses on the irregular cultural history of Mexican restaurants in twentieth-century Chicago (including Salvador's, the chain owned and operated by her parents) and asks what kinds of freedoms there are to taste as we live with and alongside the capacious historicity and potent afterlives of settler-colonial racial capitalism. The autobiomythography explores the relationship between self, history, and story-telling habits as self- and world-making, ultimately proposing that multiple habits of thought, rather than one way of knowing, can guide us in the path toward liberation"--