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For many St. Louisans, this year’s James Beard Foundation Awards disappointed because beloved local chef Gerard Craft lost the Best Chef Award for the Midwest to Tory Miller from L’Etoile, in Madison, WI. For celebrity chef-author Anthony Bourdain, disappointment hardly describes his reaction. It wasn’t the final awards Bourdain took umbrage with, but the nominees themselves, and the fact that time and again, the JBF has failed to acknowledge a group of people many believe to be the industry’s backbone: Hispanics.
Given Bourdain’s provocative nature, this may seem like another opportunity for him to garner attention. It turns out, however, that he’s been vocal about the issue for over a decade, and the conversation appears to be gaining traction. A survey of recent scholarship suggests that others agree with Bourdain, criticizing the fact that although a large number of Mexican immigrants—whom many call “the invisible minority”—work in the industry, they continue to go unrecognized for their contributions and accomplishments.
Twelve years ago, in A Cook’s Tour, Bourdain (at right) identified Mexico as the country “where cooks come from.” Not France or Italy, but Mexico. He explains: “If you’re looking for a line cook who’s professional in his work habits, responsible with your food, dependable, a guy with a sense of humor, reasonably good character, and a repertoire of French and Italian standards, and who can drill out 250 meals without going mental or cutting corners too egregiously, chances are you’ll go to Carlos, your grill man” and ask him for a recommendation. And Carlos will have a cousin or a brother for you.
In 2007, Bourdain told the Houston Press’ Robb Walsh, “The bald fact is that the entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board.” While many might believe that little has changed for the better in the 5 years since the Houston Press article was published, the Obama administration’s recent announcement that the children of illegal immigrants will be safe from deportation and able to secure work permits has been praised by Latinos, in particular, as progress. Further, an article published on Tuesday on StLToday.com cites a recent study suggesting St. Louis needs more immigrants in order to “thrive economically”—another step in the right direction, many immigration advocates would argue.
Two books published this year—Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating and Gustavo Arellano's Taco USA—showcase the invisible minority. Undercover, McMillan traces vegetables from production (at farms in California) to commodification (on shelves in a Detroit Walmart) to consumption (at an Applebee’s in NYC) as a participant-observer in each step of the process. Along the way, she discovers that Hispanics provide much of the labor.
Taking a more historical approach, Arellano, who pens the “¡Ask a Mexican!” column for the OC Weekly, writes about how “Mexican food conquered America,” revealing that whites often appropriated Mexican dishes, leaving Mexicans themselves absent from the history books. Arellano criticizes famous white chefs Rick Bayless and Diana Kennedy who have found great success and celebrity in cooking “authentic” Mexican food. Moreover, he appears to be among a growing number of industry insiders—food writers and chefs alike—who wonder if someone from one culture can claim mastery over another culture’s cuisine. Food writer Francis Lam’s recent article in the New York Times about this very topic sparked a lively debate that carried over to Ruth Reichl’s Gilt Taste and beyond into the Twitterverse.
Even more recently, the NYT ran an op-ed by Mark Bittman, well-known cookbook author and the magazine’s food columnist, on the problem of low wages in the food industry, in which he offers this critical message: “Our food comes at great expense to the workers who provide it.” While Bittman doesn’t single out Hispanic workers, they fall under the larger umbrella of potential exploitation Bittman exposes. If exploitation does occur, an illegal immigrant has little recourse to recoup wages without exposing his or her status.
At the heart of this larger discussion are myriad, complicated issues: the potential for exploitation of an immigrant workforce; illegal immigrants; discrimination and marginalization of minorities; the complete elision of another country’s history, culture, and identity; and the appropriation of cuisines by the dominant majority, to name only a few. Add most people’s general aversion to having honest conversations about race, ethnicity, and class, and it’s easy to see why the invisible tend to stay that way.
In St. Louis, when a general manager or chef needs a reliable line cook, they know whom to call: Mike Johnson, former chef-owner of Boogaloo, El Scorcho, Momo’s, Barcelona, and Café Mira, among others. And 99% of the people he recommends are from Mexico. “It’s their work ethic,” Johnson explained. Over the years, Johnson has worked with a number of Mexican immigrants—hundreds—most of whom come from Michoacán, and has grown close to several of them and their families. Many a Sunday has been spent celebrating one of his three Mexican godchildren’s milestones, and he’s visited some of their families in Mexico. Scoffing at the stereotype of the lazy Mexican (something that Arellano addresses in Taco USA), Johnson said that he often hears “What can I do? What can I do?” from his Mexican workers as they complete one task, ready to master the next.
Johnson put us in touch with two Mexican immigrants he knows. Both men preferred to remain anonymous given how they arrived in the country, so we’ll call one “T” and the other “G.” “T” is 23 years old and has been in St. Louis for just a couple of years. Crossing the border in Arizona was surprisingly easy, according to T, but not cheap ($3000). Unlike some of his fellow countrymen who work in the US for a short time to make enough money to return home “wealthy,” T aspires to remain here and own his own restaurant someday. While he doesn’t speak English fluently, he can cook in a variety of styles, including French and Italian, and spells phonetically when he has to record a sauce, like beurre blanc (the same thing, by the way, Johnson does when he has to write in Spanish, which he speaks fluently but can’t write correctly). Preferring to work double-shifts five days a week, T attributes his work ethic to his parents. Like many in the restaurant industry, regardless of race, he doesn’t have health insurance. A slip with a knife on the job left him with a large, red scar at the base of his thumb. He paid $2000 in cash—nearly as much as what it cost to enter the country—at an area ER for treatment. In the little spare time he has, T likes to travel to Chicago to visit friends and relatives, and is thinking about proposing to his girlfriend.
At 40, “G” is a veteran of a number of St. Louis restaurants, and began his career as a dishwasher in a well-known Chicago establishment. He’s been in the country for 25 years, owns several homes, and wants to open a Mexican restaurant on Cherokee. G’s entrance into the country was more akin to what one sees on the news: it took nearly a month to get here, riding covertly in the backs of trucks along the way. Neither T nor G cooked before they came to The States. With their family connections and illegal status, both men, like many from Mexico, found restaurants were the ideal place to look for work. Rising to the level of chef, G knows everything about the business, from cooking all stations to ordering, and his English is fluent. Like T, he lacks health insurance and visits the ER when he gets sick or injured.
It’s easy to overlook many food industry workers because they’re literally invisible, working behind the scenes, out of sight, or because they’re metaphorically invisible, hailing from another culture, representing “the other” in race, ethnicity, or class. Once one attaches an individual face—an identity—to the invisible labor, it’s impossible to ignore the larger implications of what Bourdain is so upset about.
At the end of Taco USA, Arellano quotes Maribel Alvarez, a scholar who’s writing a book on the stereotypical image of “the sleeping Mexican” so often used as a mascot for Mexican restaurants. Alvarez claims that the image has been refashioned by Mexican Americans as a parody, “calling out its original references to the working masses, and attributing to its huddled position imaginary scenarios of quietly ‘spying’ on the powerful, or pretending to be quiet only to ‘wake up’ and take his/her place, or simply as a Mexican in America dreaming up a more just society.” Perhaps the JBF will “wake up,” and taking his or her place will be a Mexican chef earning an award—or at least a nomination—next year.
