Chicana/o Food Imaginaries in New Mexico

This essay develops the concept of Chicana/o food imaginaries to illuminate how food practices, both material and representational, shaped political vision, collective memory, and everyday life in the Chicano movement. Focusing on two New Mexico–based political publications, El Grito del Norte (1968–1973) and 450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures (1974–1976), I analyze how foodways—defined here as the cultivation, preparation, sharing, and symbolism of food—appear in visual and textual traces to assert cultural continuity, critique colonial and capitalist systems, and imagine alternatives rooted in land and community. Attending to both visual iconography and first-person narratives, I argue that food in these archives functions as a decolonial mode of world-making and a form of querencia: an embodied sense of place and belonging forged through struggle. Drawing from food studies scholarship on embodiment and everyday practices, the essay contributes to an emergent field of Chicana/o food studies and expands how we understand political print culture in the US Southwest. The essay links daily food practices with broader systems of dispossession and resistance, offering a regionally grounded, interdisciplinary approach to Chicano movement history.