ABSTRACT
What does change taste like? What are its smells, its sounds? This chapter engages with sensory experience to consider questions of taste and memory in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. Guadalajara is Mexico’s second-largest city. It receives migrants from other parts of the state and country and is also home to many international businesses. Urban expansion shifts populations and modifies relationships between people and places. It also impacts local foodscapes: aromas, tastes, and textures disappear, and new culinary offerings and flavours arrive. Through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2019, I explore the ways in which some tapatíos, as residents of Guadalajara are called, use food and eating to mark these changes. I argue that convivencia – understood as the interplay between self and others that arises when people share spaces – contributes to the development of a common palate and provides tapatíos a means to both note and manage change.
