Making Chicanx foodways : rhetoric, Mexican cooking, and cultural continuation

Making Chicanx Foodways: Rhetoric, Mexican Cooking & Cultural Continuation is an oral history-based research project that engages with Chicanx rhetorics by examining the foodways of Mexican communities in Michigan. Central to this project is its development of community-making as a methodology for how cooking practices in particular are used to perform cultural continuation. Through a series of cooking and discussion sessions with community members, the study delineates how food is used to sustain connections between Chicanxs and their home communities, as well as to create new cultural networks amidst the experiences Chicanxs have with migration. By drawing from traditional and contemporary approaches to Mexican cooking, this research also uses community-making to reframe scholarly conversations about pedagogy, technology, and community-based research in Writing & Rhetoric around the practice of relationality, a way of viewing oneself in relationship with the world.