Food, Masculinity, and Place in the Hispanic Southwest

This paper examines how a Spanish-speaking man from the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado used food to present his masculine moral vision. ¹ José Inez Taylor expressed his moral vision when telling his life story in many hours of interviews between 1998 and 2001. I shall draw on the method of food-centered life history and gender theory to interpret how he constructed his moral vision out of his food experiences. Scholars have used food-centered life histories to understand the subjective experience of being a woman (Counihan 1999). ² The same method can also reveal the subjective experience of being a man. Theories of masculinity focus on a boy’s transition from the world of the mother to that of the father (Chodorow 1978; Gilmore 1990, 2001; R. Stoller 1985; Taggart 1997), and Taylor evoked food memories to describe how he made that transition. He presented his masculinity in a moral vision constructed out of his sense of place, his class consciousness, and cultural notions of manhood he learned from his father and mother in accord with his social location (Zavella 1997).