Eating Puerto Rico is an illuminating historical exploration of the local, regional, and global dynamics shaping the material conditions and practices as well as the affective and symbolic needs that have led Puerto Rican people to associate specific foods with the nation. In this book, Cruz Miguel Ortíz Cuadra grounds culinary culture in the logistics of conquest and colonization; migration; gender, class, and racialized struggles; climate and soil fertility; technological advances in cultivation, preservation, and transport; and the ebbs and flows of market exchanges and financial investments. He brings together all these elements while highlighting the historical agency of people, who create, adapt, and innovate as individuals and communities negotiate survival and weather transformations that they can rarely control.
After extensive scholarly research, the author has identified a few general types of foods that are familiar to several generations of Puerto Ricans and that in many inspire a sense of...
