ABSTRACT
This paper is about how a Latina named Bernadette from the small town of Antonito in southern Colorado used food as a voice to speak about gender, class, and ethnic barriers. I tape-recorded food-centered life stories from Bernadette as part of an ongoing ethnographic project I have been conducting since 1996 in Antonito with my husband, anthropologist Jim Taggart (Taggart, this volume; Taylor and Taggart, n.d.). In several informal conversations and tape-recorded interviews, I asked Bernadette questions about her experiences and memories centered around food production, preparation, consumption, and exchange. She spoke about past and present diet, recipes, food preservation, everyday and ritual meals, healing foods, breast-feeding, and food exchanges. These food-centered life stories are like the testimonies, which the Latina Feminist Group (2001, 2) defines as “a crucial means of bearing witness and inscribing into history those lived realities that would otherwise succumb to the alchemy of erasure.” The stories prone to erasure are those of people like Bernadette, a poor, chronically disabled, working-class Latina from an isolated and ignored region. 2 Her food-centered stories about ethnic, class, and gender barriers express counterhegemonic views and broaden the web of social understanding in the United States.
