Awaiting Their Feast

Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19

Lori A. Flores

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781469679860, 9781469679853
• eBook ISBN: 9781469679877
• Subtopic: North American History

Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with Latinx people, including the largely underpaid and migrant workers who harvest, process, cook, and sell this desirable food. Lori A. Flores traces how our dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor has evolved from the World War II era to the COVID-19 pandemic, using the US Northeast as an unexpected microcosm of this national history.

Spanning the experiences of food workers with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America, Flores’s narrative travels from New Jersey to Maine and examines different links in the food chain, from farming to restaurants to seafood processing to the deliverista rights movement. What unites this eclectic material is Flores’s contention that as our appetite for Latinx food has grown exponentially, the visibility of Latinx food workers has demonstrably decreased. This precariat is anything but passive, however, and has historically fought—and is still fighting—against low wages and exploitation, medical neglect, criminalization, and deeply ironic food insecurity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terminology
• Introduction: A National Craving and Contradiction
• Part I: We Need to Be Fed: Latinx Guestworker and Farmworker Food Activism, 1940–1980
• Part II: How Latinx Newcomers Transformed Foodscapes, 1980–2011
• Part III: Food Labor Flows and Futures, 1990–2024
• Conclusion: Food Is Pleasurable and Political
• Notes
• Index