A Culinary Quest: Peruvian Women in California Negotiating Gender and Home
A Culinary Quest: Peruvian Women Entrepreneurs in California Negotiating Gender and Home
The research is related to my Ph.D. dissertation in Latin American studies and focuses on Peruvian women entrepreneurs on the culinary market in California. It explores how the women negotiate gender and home in a context of migration and entrepreneurship and adopts an intersectional lens to understand how gender intersects with other dimensions of identity like race, ethnicity, class and legal status. I will discuss preliminary findings from data collected during fieldwork, August 2017-March 2018, based on in-depth interviews as well as participant observation. The discussion will be informed by three hypotheses: (1) Immigration challenges patriarchal relations, and activates a renegotiation process, influenced by a variety of intersecting social locations. Their role as entrepreneurs intensifies these processes. (2) Immigration and the entrepreneurial project related to ethnic food, generate a process in which home and belonging is negotiated. Apart from creating a home for themselves and the family, the women contribute to construct a home for the co-ethnic community, as well as a space where home and belonging is negotiated on the borders between the ethnic and mainstream market. (3) Undocumented informants and informants operating in the informal economy, claim a home, and thus a right to belong, for themselves and their family, through culinary and homing practices, conquering a space on the culinary market, despite being denied the possibility of commercial formality.
The research is related to my Ph.D. dissertation in Latin American studies and focuses on Peruvian women entrepreneurs on the culinary market in California. It explores how the women negotiate gender and home in a context of migration and entrepreneurship and adopts an intersectional lens to understand how gender intersects with other dimensions of identity like race, ethnicity, class and legal status. I will discuss preliminary findings from data collected during fieldwork, August 2017-March 2018, based on in-depth interviews as well as participant observation. The discussion will be informed by three hypotheses: (1) Immigration challenges patriarchal relations, and activates a renegotiation process, influenced by a variety of intersecting social locations. Their role as entrepreneurs intensifies these processes. (2) Immigration and the entrepreneurial project related to ethnic food, generate a process in which home and belonging is negotiated. Apart from creating a home for themselves and the family, the women contribute to construct a home for the co-ethnic community, as well as a space where home and belonging is negotiated on the borders between the ethnic and mainstream market. (3) Undocumented informants and informants operating in the informal economy, claim a home, and thus a right to belong, for themselves and their family, through culinary and homing practices, conquering a space on the culinary market, despite being denied the possibility of commercial formality.
Publisert i Annual Conference of the Pacific Sociological Association, 2018
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