The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food is Transforming the American City by Robert Lemon is an ode to the taco truck, specifically the lonchera, and those who migrate from Mexico and operate these mobile meccas of traditional Mexican street food. Each chapter takes a look at how local politics and city culture influence the operations of taco trucks. Lemon provides case studies from Oakland, San Francisco (grouped with Oakland to comment on the Bay area in general), Sacramento, and Columbus, Ohio. Lemon aims to get his reader to see landscape through the lens of social practices, stating that people and their actions complete and even create the landscape. The taco truck, as both a landscape feature and a type of social practice, is an ideal place to start, argues Lemon.
Taco trucks and the practices that surround them (eating, gathering, conversing, contesting, etc.) create what Lemon terms ¬taco truck spaces, “an evolving cultural and culinary environment in which influences of local life continually converge with economic, political, and social forces at myriad scales” (3). While this definition, folklorists might argue, is applicable to most environments (give or take the culinary), the taco truck space is interesting in that Lemon qualifies it through the taco trucks’ ability to “abstract space and create cultural ambiguities” (3). The focus on the truck itself as a creator of a type of space results in a tension throughout the book between the truck as the creator of the space and Lemon’s stated desire to center the actions of people in the creation of a landscape. Tensions and ambiguities are par for the course when talking about taco trucks in that they are mobile and yet occasionally immobile, private and public spaces, cheap eats for the working class at once obfuscated and co-opted as symbol of neoliberal multiculturalism.
Chapters 1 and 2 make up Lemon’s case study of the Bay Area, which he examines via the taco truck scenes in Oakland and San Francisco. In Oakland, he argues, immigrant street food dynamics create empowerment as vendors employ their own culture to negotiate the ever-changing policies and zoning laws of the city. In San Francisco, Lemon looks at how Latino practices are adapted and changed for cosmopolitan consumption through a cultural imperialism that reinforces existing inequalities. Interviewing taco truck owners, local activists, and politicians, Lemon begins to demonstrate the complex ways in which taco truck owners navigate an often-hostile system to feed their families.
Chapters 3 and 4 offer a case study of trucks in Sacramento, California, a city that prides itself on its farm-to-table restaurants and dynamic food scene. Chapter 3 focuses on how the city actively takes part in the construction of its “farm-to-fork” narrative and examines the social structure of Sacramento. Chapter 4 shows how taco trucks became sites of intense contestation, since they were seen as disrupting the carefully crafted narrative of the city and the existing neoliberal, white, middle-class social structure. Using discourse analysis, Lemon shows how city campaigns are driven by neoliberal ideals that reinforce existing inequalities and middle-class ideals that, on one hand, view taco trucks as a symbol of multiculturalism, and, on the other, see them as foreign and unclean.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 bring the reader from California to Columbus, Ohio. These three chapters make up the most in-depth case study in the book. Returning as a researcher to the Greater Hilltop Area of Columbus—where he was a community planner from 2004 to 2006—Lemon is able to study the trucks in the area over time and chart changes in acceptance. His examination of Columbus includes more interviews with actual taco truck owners and patrons than his work in the previous cities. Lemon’s more extensive fieldwork also provides some of the most compelling evidence backing up his arguments regarding the influence of White privilege and middle-class sensibilities in conditionally accepting taco trucks or in refusing them altogether. It is in his interviews with taco truck owners and patrons that the reader gets a sense that not only is the city changing taco trucks, but also that taco trucks are, at a very local level, changing the city.
The title indicates that Lemon’s book is an examination of how taco trucks transform American cities; the reality, according to Lemon, is much more reciprocal, with the uneven power dynamics forcing the taco truck to change in order to survive in the city it is purportedly changing. Lemon’s case studies lay bare the neoliberal politics at work in attempts to control marginal populations, as the taco-truck space becomes a microcosm of the struggle between poor laborers trying to eat cheaply, and middle-class sensibilities that see the lonchera as dirty and foreign as they pass by the gourmet taco truck around the corner. The systemic racism at play in the conditional acceptance of these trucks is apparent from his analysis of local politics, but it is in the all-too-brief interviews with truck owners that the reader gets a sense of the human cost and human ingenuity required to navigate and survive these politics.
Folklorists interested in culinary tourism will find aspects of this study good food for thought. Several examples of citizens becoming tourists in their own cities as they partake in festivals and even bus tours of taco trucks illustrate the ways in which destinations and foods are exoticized and also rendered palatable and exciting. The social and legal processes through which taco trucks are turned from matter out of place into exotic experiences are elucidated in some detail and can serve as useful examples for folklorists studying similar processes.
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[Review length: 929 words • Review posted on September 17, 2020]