LWRS June 2020 Volume 1, Issue 1

Mexican Food, Assimilation, and Middle-Class Mexican Americans or Chicanx
can be and often is for many Mexican Americans. To their credit, white students do
enroll in a class focusing on Mexican food but can clearly be disadvantaged because
they often have no organic knowledge of the culture and of the social and political
history of Mexico and its diverse variety of foods, there and in the US. Their
knowledge of Spanish is often also quite limited if not altogether nonexistent. Because
of the effects of white colonization, they must tread lightly in a class focusing on
Mexican food taught by a brown professor whose origins are unquestionably Mexican.
Their understanding of Mexican cultural foodways and of the people creating them
often thrives on stereotypes which for them are almost always laughable. If it weren’t
for the fact that they are enrolled in an upper-level English class in a major American
university, a course like this, which could otherwise operate exclusively on superficial
racialized stereotypes, would be a breeze for them. Their rhetorical situation in a class
like this serves notice that colonizing tactics like racialized stereotypes and of
essentializing ethnic human figures are grounds for failure.
Aside from white students, the school where I teach also draws African
Americans, Mexican Americans, as well as students whose heritage stems from Latin
American countries. There are also students from racially blended families, with half
of that blend often being Mexican. Thus far, the kinds of students this class draws
have largely been ethnically, racially, and culturally mixed, as well as notably mixed by
gender and sexual preference. Because my classes represent a vision of the future of
this country, how we manage ourselves in our mixed rhetorical situation has become
increasingly important. We nevertheless have to remember that this upper-division
English class at my school still mainly draws white students—but all that’s changing.
Increasingly, all classes at my University are mixed, and most of the classes I teach,
including my Mexican food classes, are no exception. These mixed students, like in
most all my classes, obviously represent part of a rhetorical situation that I as their
teacher must entertain, just as I, as a Chicano, have long represented a part of my
students’ rhetorical situation when they are writing for my classes. In my Mexican food
writing classes, situated as they are in a central Texas university, students come from
all over Texas, so our discussions often cover predictable and at the same time
surprising cultural dimensions related to Mexican food.
The school where I work became a Hispanic-Serving Institution, an HSI,
about three years ago. Since that time, our campus has become a minority-majority
school. The difference this change has made in student demographics is nothing short
of astounding, given that this school has historically been populated predominantly by
white students. This change, though, is unlike the diversification which occurred in the
late 60s and early 70s when many universities began implementing open-admissions
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