Available for the first time in English, Cruz Miguel Ortiz Cuadra's magisterial history of the foods and eating habits of Puerto Rico unfolds into an examination of Puerto Rican society from the Spanish conquest to the present. Each chapter is centered on an iconic Puerto Rican foodstuff, from rice and cornmeal to beans, roots, herbs, fish, and meat. Ortiz shows how their production and consumption connects with race, ethnicity, gender, social class, and cultural appropriation in Puerto Rico.

Using a multidisciplinary approach and a sweeping array of sources, Ortiz asks whether Puerto Ricans really still are what they ate. Whether judging by a host of social and economic factors--or by the foods once eaten that have now disappeared--Ortiz concludes that the nature of daily life in Puerto Rico has experienced a sea change.

BIO

Cruz Miguel Ortiz Cuadra is senior lecturer in the department of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico, Humacao, and author of Puerto Rico en la olla, among other books.

REVIEWS

"Cruz Miguel Ortiz Cuadra's innovative methodology relies on primary sources, such as menus at religious convents, hospitals, prisons, and public schools; home economics class records; and cookbooks. The book is an important contribution to the social and cultural history of the Caribbean and may also be fruitful as a primary source for studies of colonialism, Third World poverty, and underdevelopment." --The Historian

"Charming and learned . . . [but] also bittersweet. . . . One ends up wondering whether, finally, the question has to be: 'Who really determines what choices are available?'" --Sidney W. Mintz, Gastronomica

"As much as Ortíz Cuadra succeeds in demythologizing the basic staples of Puerto Rican cuisine by explaining how rice, benas, cornmeal, codfish, beef, and pork arrived on the island and how they became as popular ad they did, he also skillfully deconstucts the category of Puerto Rican into multiple populations defined by gender, rural vs. urban, literacy and education levels, laboring class, immigrant or island-born, government vs. private sector, and colonizer or colonized, among others." --American Historical Review

University of North Carolina Press  /  August 01, 2016 

1.0" H x 9.1" L x 6.1" W (1.28 lbs) 408 pages