ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the growth of the available kinds of food in migrant neighbourhoods in Chicago. It focuses on the process of culinary regionalization that characterizes the Mexican food sold in restaurants, stalls and local festivities, which mainly consist of specialties from the Mexican regions of Guerrero and Michoacan. The chapter addresses the construction of the notion of eating and feeling ‘at home’ in the public space. Migrant housing areas have gradually dissociated themselves from the places where food outlets and restaurants are located due to gentrification in Pilsen and La Villita. A brief consideration of Mexican migration in the Chicago metropolitan area, the third largest metropolitan area in the United States, is necessary. The exponential growth of Chicago’s Mexican immigrant population since the second half of the 1990s has been particularly noticeable in the public spaces of the host neighbourhoods. An area of interest is the taqueria El Taconazo, whose patrons live in nearby residential areas.
