A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture) [Hardcover]

Carole M. Counihan (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0292719817 | ISBN-13: 978-0292719811 | Publication Date: November 15, 2009 | Edition: First Edition

Located in the southern San Luis Valley of Colorado, the remote and relatively unknown town of Antonito is home to an overwhelmingly Hispanic population struggling not only to exist in an economically depressed and politically marginalized area, but also to preserve their culture and their lifeways. Between 1996 and 2006, anthropologist Carole Counihan collected food-centered life histories from nineteen Mexicanas--Hispanic American women--who had long-standing roots in the Upper Rio Grande region. The interviews in this groundbreaking study focused on southern Colorado Hispanic foodways--beliefs and behaviors surrounding food production, distribution, preparation, and consumption. In this book, Counihan features extensive excerpts from these interviews to give voice to the women of Antonito and highlight their perspectives. Three lines of inquiry are framed: feminist ethnography, Latino cultural citizenship, and Chicano environmentalism. Counihan documents how Antonito's Mexicanas establish a sense of place and belonging through their knowledge of land and water and use this knowledge to sustain their families and communities. Women play an important role by gardening, canning, and drying vegetables; earning money to buy food; cooking; and feeding family, friends, and neighbors on ordinary and festive occasions. They use food to solder or break relationships and to express contrasting feelings of harmony and generosity, or enmity and envy. The interviews in this book reveal that these Mexicanas are resourceful providers whose food work contributes to cultural survival.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

CAROLE M. COUNIHAN is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence and the co-editor of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: University of Texas Press; First Edition edition (November 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0292719817
• ISBN-13: 978-0292719811
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,270,367 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Carole M. Counihan is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she earned a BA in history cum laude from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. Counihan's research centers on food, culture, gender, and identity in the United States and Italy. She conducted fieldwork in Bosa (Sardinia) and Florence (Tuscany), Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, and published "Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence" in 2004. Long fascinated with women's complex relationship with food and body, she explored gender, food, body, reproduction, and culture in her book "The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power" (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of "Food in the USA: A Reader" (Routledge 2002) and, with Penny Van Esterik, of "Food and Culture: A Reader" (Routledge 2008). She conducted fieldwork from 1996-2006 in a Hispanic community in Colorado, collecting food-centered life histories from nineteen women. Based on this research and supported by a 2005-2006 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she authored "A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado" (University of Texas Press, 2009). She is editor of the scholarly journal "Food and Foodways." Counihan was a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences Masters Program in Colorno (Parma), Italy, during Spring 2009 where she began a new ethnographic research project on food activism in local chapters of the Slow Food movement.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Food, Folkways, Families, December 21, 2009

By 

Story Circle Book Reviews - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture) (Hardcover)

"My great-aunts used to say that a tortilla is like life. Nothing is ever going to be exactly the way you want it to be. However life is, that is how your tortilla comes out. So however you rolled out your tortilla, maybe it wasn't quite round, but you ate it because you made it." --Monica Taylor on learning to cook from the Latina women in her family

A Tortilla is Like Life is a valuable, imminently readable book that deserves a place beside such currently popular food-centered books as Michael Pollan's The Ominvore's Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Rather than narrowly focusing on one individual's or one family's food practices and how these relate to overall American food habits, however, author Carole M. Counihan takes a broad look at the foodways of an entire Hispanic community, seen through the revealing lens of women's stories, both contemporary and traditional. A Tortilla is Like Life not only affords us an in-depth understanding of the ways northern Hispanic families have traditionally related to food over the past century, but illustrates the many indispensable roles Mexicanas have played in producing, preserving, and preparing meals and, in a larger sense, the integral relationships of women to food, family, and community.

From 1996 to 2006, Counihan, a professor of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, conducted research in the small southern Colorado town of Antonito, collecting food-focussed life stories from nineteen Mexicanas and learning firsthand the foodways, past and present, of this traditional community. Antonito is located in the San Luis Valley, on the northern frontier of what was once New Spain's colonial empire, and is part of what is called the siete condados del norte: the seven predominately Hispanic counties of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Once a thriving, self-sustaining center of local commerce, its population has dropped (at the time of this study) to 872. Residents now shop at a locally-owned supermarket and eat at three restaurants.

Counihan has designed A Tortilla to serve several important purposes. She aims to document the evolution of food traditions in a community ("a repository of Hispanic culture") that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was almost entirely self-sustaining. Area residents grew their own vegetables and fruits, grains, and meats, and supplemented their ample diets with wild-gathered foods and game and seasonal purchases from vendors who brought chiles and fruits from New Mexico. Several fascinating chapters are devoted to women's descriptions of these traditional food practices and the changes in food production and preparation that came about as women moved out of the full-time homemaking and into the workplace. The book not only describes past practices, then, but contemporary practices, as well as the compromises that women have made as their roles in family foodwork have evolved.

Another of Counihan's aims in A Tortilla is the creation of "a polyphonic testimonio." Testimonio is a term for a first-person narrative told by someone who has participated in an event, and has been redefined by Latina feminists to refer to the important responsibility of bearing witness to events and lives that might otherwise be forgotten. In Counihan's construction, A Tortilla is a multi-voiced testimonio composed by women engaging in a communal dialogue about women's relationships to food, place, and people. The result is a rich feast of experience, a wide-ranging chorus of narratives derived from 80 hours of tape-recorded interviews with nineteen women aged thirty-two to ninety-four who bear witness to their own lives and the lives of women they have known. Through Counihan's careful orchestration, the women's stories reveal the many ways they have defined themselves; their feelings about their changing relationships to land and water; their roles in helping to produce, preserve, and prepare food; their participation in family meals, community food sharing, and funeral rituals; and the changes that have come to the community since independent, at-home food production has been replaced by dependence on industrial agriculture and the commercial distribution of canned and frozen foods. Counihan sensitively selects and frames these testimonios with brief, informative introductions and weaves them together to create a multilayered narrative demonstrating the remarkable diversity of the life experiences of these Latinas. Some of the women were community-bound from birth to old age, while others went "out" to obtain their educations or engage in work and then returned to reclaim their place in community. All placed family and community at the center of their lives and saw food as one primary expression of their commitment to both.

One of the things I admire most about this book is the consistent level of detail and specificity, both in the women's narratives and in Counihan's thoughtful commentary. An example, recalled by one of the older women:

Another thing that I remember for Lent, Mother used to cook peas, like split peas, but it was the whole pea, and then make chile caribe [coarse ground red chile] and sopaipillas [fried bread]. That was for Lent when we didn't eat meat. There were split peas, the verdolagas, the spinach, and the sopaipillas, the sopa, the panocha, all that for Lent.

The Spanish terms used by the women to describe food and food processing are defined in an appendix. Another appendix provides a list of healing herbs that were locally grown or gathered. The book's sources are fully documented and there is a complete bibliography.

A Tortilla is Like Life is highly recommended for food history collections, women's studies, Southwest studies, and Latina/Mexicana/Hispanic collections. It is also accessible, entertaining, and instructive for general readers interested in food, foodways, and food history.

by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women