Cooking as Mestizaje in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s “Making Tortillas”: Reconciling Chicana Lesbian Identity through the Space of the Kitchen

Abstract: Feminist and queer food studies scholars have read the kitchen simultaneously as a place of oppression and of liberation, where the regulations of the heteropatriarchy are enacted but also subverted. This space has been explored by Chicana lesbian poets such as Alicia Gaspar de Alba, who in “Making Tortillas” uses the images, sounds, smells, and flavors of Mexican cuisine as metaphors for sex and intimacy between women, reclaiming and, at the same time, queering her heritage. By drawing from Chicana and food studies scholarship, I argue that Gaspar de Alba uses cooking in her poem as a tool to reconcile her sexual and cultural identities, and that the kitchen is a particularly suited space for the work of mestizaje—the epistemology proposed by Monica Torres, based on Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories, which moves away from dichotomies to give place for assumed contradictions to coexist and interact.

In her book La Frontera/Borderlands: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa locates the Chicana lesbian at a crossing of many borders: between Anglo-American and Mexican culture, between indigeneity and colonial heritage, and at the margins of heteropatriarchal structures—the latter making her an outcast even among other Chicanx.