Eating Puerto Rico - (Latin America in Translation/En Traducción/Em Tradução) by Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra (Paperback)

About the Book

Eating Puerto Rico: A History of Food, Culture, and Identity

Book Synopsis

Available for the first time in English, Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra's magisterial history of the foods and eating habits of Puerto Rico unfolds into an examination of Puerto Rican society from the Spanish conquest to the present. Each chapter is centered on an iconic Puerto Rican foodstuff, from rice and cornmeal to beans, roots, herbs, fish, and meat. Ortíz shows how their production and consumption connects with race, ethnicity, gender, social class, and cultural appropriation in Puerto Rico.
Using a multidisciplinary approach and a sweeping array of sources, Ortíz asks whether Puerto Ricans really still are what they ate. Whether judging by a host of social and economic factors -- or by the foods once eaten that have now disappeared -- Ortíz concludes that the nature of daily life in Puerto Rico has experienced a sea change.

Review Quotes

"A feast for the mind . . . highly readable and frequently entertaining."--Journal of Latin American Geography

"A great resource for scholars focusing on food in the Caribbean."--Food, Culture, and Society

"Charming and learned . . . [but] also bittersweet. . . . One ends up wondering whether, finally, the question has to be: 'Who really determines what choices are available?'"--Sidney W. Mintz, Gastronomica

"Ortíz employs an impressive range of sources and has creatively put together a multidisciplinary methodological apparatus to meet the challenge of historicizing symbolic practices such as taste, food preferences, and national belonging. . . . An innovative introduction to the histories of colonialism, struggle, and cultural hybridization that is useful in the classroom and beyond."--Hispanic American Historical Review

"Ortíz is a man dedicated to understanding and exploring the precise spot where food and history intersect en la isla del encanto." --NBC Latino

"Ortíz succeeds in demythologizing the basic staples of Puerto Rican cuisine by explaining how rice, bananas, cornmeal, codfish, beef, and pork arrived on the island and how they became as popular as they did, [and] also skillfully deconstructs the category of 'Puerto Rican' into multiple populations defined by gender, rural vs. urban, literacy and education levels, laboring class, immigrant or island-born, government vs. private sector, and colonizer or colonized, among others." --American Historical Review

"Ortíz's primary research is as impressive as his mastery of relevant secondary literature, and he provides a model for how best to exploit the archives to construct his food history."--Reviews in American History

"The book is an important contribution to the social and cultural history of the Caribbean and may also be fruitful as a primary source for studies of colonialism, Third World poverty, and underdevelopment." -- The Historian

"Well translated. . . . Recommended. All levels/libraries."--CHOICE

About the Author

Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra is senior lecturer in the department of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico, Humacao, and author of Puerto Rico en la olla, among other books. Russ Davidson is curator emeritus of Latin American and Iberian collections and professor emeritus of librarianship at the University of New Mexico.