Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 09:39:50 -0400 (EDT) From: Lisa Knauer EATING IN CUBAN: PLACE-MAKING, CONSUMPTION AND IMAGINED GEOGRAPHIES Submitted by Lisa Maya Knauer Prof. Barbara Kirshenblattt-Gimblett "Tourist Productions" Class Spring 1998 Cubanness is in vogue throughout the United States, but particularly in New York. The current season of Jazz at Lincoln Center featured a mini-series on Afro-Cuban sounds. Nearly every other week, another musical group from Cuba is playing at a New York club. And in the rapidly shifting micro-climate of New York's restaurant scene, what we might call (with apologies to Appadurai), its gastroscape, the last few months have seen a recent flurry of new Cuban and Cuban-inflected restaurants, ranging from the ultra-chic Asia de Cuba, a sleek, slightly gimmicky place which combines Asian-Latin "fusion" cuisine, mandarin-jacketed wait staff, and Cuban music, to Little Havana, which serves up more easily recognizable Cuban fare in humbler surroundings (Asimov, 1998). And yet Cuban restaurants have been a constant, almost ubiquitous presence in the New York for decades. They lie scattered throughout city -- La Rosita and Caridad on the Upper West Side, the National in the East Village, Sam's Chinita in Chelsea. Most of these are well- established neighborhood institutions which, in some cases, serve as signposts or historic markers of areas which were formerly important pockets of Cuban settlement in New York City: Washington Heights, the adjacent Queens neighborhoods of Corona, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights (see Ojita, 1997). My interest was piqued by the emergence -- or re-emergence -- of Cuba, and Cuban cuisine, as an important node in the local and national imaginary. For tourism, as I will attempt to define it for this essay, not only involves the movement of peoples, objects, and cultures (Rojek and Urry, 1997), but is, in large part, a work of the imagination: ...the cultural experiences offered by tourism are consumed in terms of prior knowledge, expectations, fantasies and mythologies generated in the tourist's origin culture rather than by the cultural offerings of the destination. [emphasis in original] (Craik, 1997:118) A full analysis of this theme is beyond the scope of this paper, but I would like to sketch some of the contours. Prior to the revolution, Cuba was viewed by many middle class and wealthy Americans as a playground of sun, sensuality, and sin; it represented a familiar exotic. Although U.S. policy following the Revolution cast Cuba as an outlaw state, and U.S. citizens were virtually forbidden to travel there, an even more domesticated version of Cubanness became part of popular cultural understanding via I Love Lucy. Fidel Castro is a familiar, iconic (if malevolent) figure on the global political landscape. Cuba has played a disproportionately important role in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. It was one of the focal points of anti-communism. Yet Cuba still carries a mystique, an aura of the unknown. However, Cuba has recently resurfaced in the news. The latest wave of refugees, the balseros (rafters), whose numbers increased dramatically during the economic/political crisis of the early-mid 1990s, occupied the national spotlight for several months. The politically powerful anti-Castro Cuban "establishment" actively works to keep national politicians' attention focused on Cuba and U.S. Cuba policy. Finally, the much-publicized visit of Pope John Paul II put Cuba squarely on the (global TV) map. I was curious about what, if anything, spectacular, trendy new places had to do the old time neighborhood establishments, and about whether Cuban restaurants were designed to appeal to Cubans (and other Latinos) or non -Latinos, or both. Each of the three sites I have chosen functions within a different cultural and social economy; geogrraphy, and serves somewhat different clienteles. Victor's Cafe 52, which styles itself as a "traditional" Cuban restaurant, has been in business for 35 years. It is listed in many tourist guides to New York as one of the places to go for "authentic" Cuban cuisine, and is also featured in Zagat's and other gastronomic bibles. La Esquina Habanera (Havana Corner) is a small neighborhood "corner" restaurant in the "enclave" community of West New York/Union City New Jersey, the second largest Cuban community in the United States (after Miami). Patria is a flashy, trendy restaurant "imported" to New York from Miami, The purpose of this comparison is not to create a hierarchy of authenticity, but to explore how these sites mark, map, invoke or enact Cubanness. What inventory of existing tropes or gestures (whether serious or parodic) does each draw upon? Who is the clientele, or perhaps more accurately, who is the audience, for these performances? How does each site invent itself, and what traditions (invented or other) does it draw upon? (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) I was also interested in using Cuban, or Cuban-inflected restaurants, to explore intersections between several different lines of analysis concerning diaspora, cultural transformation, and tourism. I analyze ethnic restaurants as a specialized kind of tourist production -- one that draws upon strategies of place-making and multiple touristic discourses. Ethnic restaurants, I argue, wrap themselves in the language of both heritage and the exotic. They are gathering places, boundary markers and memory palaces for diasporic communities. For "others", they invite travel without leaving home. For visitors, they are part of the attraction of the metropolis. For both home-grown and foreign cosmopolitans (Urry, 1995), the city is where you can get the world on a plate (Cook and Crang, 1996). They thus become destinations for very different journeys -- a voyage to the unknown, an encounter with a neighboring other, or a pilgrimage to a portable homeland (Appadurai, 1983). I am utilizing an expansive understanding of tourism. On a very simple level, I am looking at a set of "spatial practices," (Clifford, 1996) which "range from individual routines to the systematic creation of zone and regions". (Urry, 1995:23). In some ways, all of New York can be seen as a tourist zone: New York, like many other cities in the service and information- oriented global economy, attempts to use tourism as a "motor" for economic growth (Judd and Collins, 1986; see also Zukin, 1995). Metropolises differentiate and promote themselves as tourist destinations -- beginning in the 1950s and 60s, New York's boosters proclaimed it "the cultural capital of the world". Part of the drawing power of cities is that they offer both residents and visitors the opportunity for a density and intensity of collective social experience: Other people give atmosphere to a place by indicating that this is the place to be and that one should not be elsewhere. The presence of other people from all over the globe (tourists in other words) gives capital cities their distinct excitement and glamour. (Urry, 1995: 138). Restaurants -- eating out -- have characterized urban life for several centuries. But they play a particular role in distinguishing contemporary cities; "urban promotion is increasingly seeking to capitalize on a city's culinary associations in the race for prominence on the world-city stage." (Bell and Valentine, 1997:121). Tourism thus interfaces with what Zukin (1995) calls a cultural strategy of redevelopment. Cultural consumption (museums, gourmet restaurants, boutiques) helps valorize real estate and aids in the process of gentrification. Zones of consumption are created, but consumption -- the accumulation of cultural or symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984) also becomes what defines (middle class) values and lifestyle. Food becomes a marker of social position and differentiation, and "authenticity" (which MacCannell locates as the crux of the touristic impulse), becomes incorporated into the matrix of consumption: ..a taste for the real thing' becomes a strategy of social differentiation. Yet the real thing refers to two quite different sorts of goods. It refers to goods that offer the authenticity of the past, and those that suggest the uniqueness of new design. [emphasis added] Zukin, 1991: 202-3 Middle or upper-middle class urbanites, whether they travel the globe or travel across town, are encouraged to learn about other cultures in order to acquire cosmopolitanism, which involves the cultivating of globalized cultural capital' as a form of lifestyle shopping which , crucially, involves possessing considerable knowledge about the exotic', the authentic', and so on -- often referred to as a colonisation or intellectualisation of popular culture. (Bell and Valentine 1997: 136) "Kitchen table tourism" is reinforced through the media -- food is an increasingly important "lifestyle" feature in "serious" newspapers like The New York Times; chefs are accorded the celebrity status reserved for rock stars and actors; and food-related TV shows are increasing in number and popularity. Urry (1995) argues that touristic practices and "structures of feeling" (Williams) have become pervasive, omnipresent in contemporary urban life: If disorganized capitalism involves the predominance of culture, consumption, the global, the local..then all these characterize contemporary travel and hospitality ..People are tourists most of the time whether they are literally mobile or only experience simulated mobility through the incredible fluidity of multiple signs and electronic images... (148, 150). Ethnic restaurants, and the ubiquity of ethnic dining experiences in a multi-ethnic global metropolis like New York, which is both a center for many types of tourism and home to multiple diasporic and ethnic communities, complicate, in an interesting way, descriptive or analytic categories used in tourist analysis and discourse. Who are the tourists at a neighborhood ethnic eatery -- everyone from outside the immediate area, or everyone who doesn't belong to that ethnic group? Is a "native" New Yorker a tourist when she treks off in search of the best Turkish, Thai, or Indonesian restaurant? Some immigrant groups, such as Cubans, are characterized by distinct migratory waves, which may involve different reasons for leaving the home country, and different sets of social and economic conditions in the host country. Later immigrants may find increased hostility, not only from the host culture, but from their own ethnic cohort. Ethnic institutions may become a space for intra-cultural (as well as inter-cultural) negotiation and contestation: whose diaspora is this, anyway? Restaurants are a particular kind of social institution. They are intimately entangled with our personal needs and desires (Finkelstein refers to the restaurant as a "diorama of desire") but simultaneously provide an inherently social experience. Restaurants involve sharing a private experience (consuming food) in the presence of other people (Finkelstein 1989). But they are also businesses, geared not only toward taste-making but profit-making (the hospitality industry as a whole is one of the most rapidly-growing sectors of the economy, although the failure rate, especially in New York, is extremely high); they "represent the apotheosis of free-market capitalism ... a consumption economy." (Fine, 1996:1) Drawing upon the concept of "traveling cultures" (Said; cited in Clifford, 1996), I look at ethnic restaurants as resulting from multiple movements and dislocations of people. Restaurants occupy and mark particular geographies, both "real" and imagined. They are part of the production of locality (Appadurai, 1997), and their interiors incorporate forms of socio- spatial structuring. (Crang 1997:147). But they are also temporal. They exist in the lived time of their owners, patrons, communities, but also embody or recall other times and places. Foucault's concept of heterotopia is particularly useful here. A heterotopia, as I read it, is a space or location which references, gathers, or juxtaposes several different, often divergent, real locations or geographies. But heterotopias are not timeless or static; the imaginaire they create or invoke is time-based, and they exist in real (and ever-changing) time (Foucault, 1986). Another useful concept, which I use as a counterpoint and complement for heterotopia, is the chronotope, which James Clifford has adapted from Bakhtin to apply to tourism and travelling cultures. For Clifford, a chronotope is a structure of spatialized time, a setting or scene which represents a particular locale and a corresponding time frame, in a holistic and recognizable fashion (1997: 25, 360n). I will argue that all three sites draw upon chronotopic strategies, and can be seen, to different degrees, as heterotopias. . There is a certain logic in choosing three very different restaurants to explore the production/performance of Cubanness for both Cubans and non-Cubans, New Yorkers and out- of-towners; it allows me to play with issues of time and space, and also different modes of performativity. Joanne Finkelstein (1989) distinguishes three basic types of restaurants: the fete special, where the restaurant as spectacle is often as much of an attraction as the food; restaurants chosen for amusement and entertainment, which include the bistro mondian, frequented by people who dine out a lot and where food and atmosphere are equally important; and convenience restaurants, which include local ethnic eateries. These in some rough ways correspond to my three sites, although I will argue that each restaurant involves spectacle, food, ambience and place-making/community. Small businesses like neighborhood ethnic restaurants, food stores, or newsstands, have often served as an economic stepping stone for immigrants. They require only modest initial capitalization. Ethnic entrepreneurs who cater primarily to members of their own "group" do not need fluency in English; and labor costs can be kept low by relying upon family members or other recent immigrants who may be willing to work for low wages. The physical presence of ethnic businesses can signify that the community has reached a certain critical mass, and both needs and can support a range of ethnic enterprises. These institutions then become a locus for the preservation and transmission of a cultural heritage. Eating a particular "home country" food acquires a symbolic importance in New York that it never had at home; it serves to distinguish one's community from both the dominant culture and other immigrant groups. And for the American-born second generation, the restaurant or bakery is the home country. Ethnic businesses also serve as symbolic markers, making the community visible both to itself and others (Kasinitz, 1992: 39). In Cuban-American author Cristina Garcia's novel, Dreaming in Cuban, when one of the characters is about to open a business in New York, her father advises her: "Put your name on the sign, too, hija, so they know what we Cubans are up to, that we're not all Puerto Ricans." (Quoted in Grosfoguel and Georas, 1996). These sites also serve as gathering places for community members, for informal events like birthday and holiday dinners, and more organized activities like club meetings, cultural performances, and beauty pageants. (Kasinitz 1992). In Consuming Geographies, Bell and Valentine propose several ways of looking at the relationship between food and community, particularly for diasporic or other ethnic populations. Community can be thought of as a locality or territory -- that is, as a spatial fact or practice -- but also as a series of interrelationships or shared values -- in other words, in ideological terms. Food becomes a way of maintaining cohesion, creating a sense of affiliation, distinguishing oneself from the dominant or "host" culture and from other ethnic communities: it is a way of marking difference, or even resistance. Historically, ethnic foods are initially produced for the community itself, but they can also create a bridge to the host culture. Hybridization or what Philip Crang prefers to call "displacement" (Crang, 1996) "traditional" cuisines are adapted and transformed; rather than simply being a static representation of identity, food becomes a terrain in which identify is negotiated (Bell and Valentine, 1997). Or, to draw upon a different spatial metaphor, food becomes a theater in and through which cultures are remolded. In thinking about how to analyze these restaurants, +I have found it helpful to use multiple frames and constructs. Ethnic restaurants can be seen as ethnographic sites, which have overlapping (and sometimes contradictory) functions, since they invite both cultural insiders and outsiders. They can be sites for intercultural encounters. Simultaneously, they can be places to preserve and transmit "traditions", and fantasy worlds which serve as a surrogate or simulation of "real" travel. Alan Shelton suggests thinking about restaurants as a form of theater, as a symbolic stage. Where we eat says something about who we think we are: "To choose McDonald's over a local cafe is also to choose a different theater for thinking and fashioning a self." (Shelton: 507). Gary Alan Fine argues that all food preparation is a form of cultural production, and both preparation and consumption involve a set of aesthetic choices. (Fine, 1996:178). Fine's aesthetic frame complements Shelton's notion of the theatrical, dioramic quality of restaurants, and allows us to explore the museological aspects. Restaurants are also sites where social boundaries and structures are experienced and reinforced through a series of codes: "The architecture, the foods, and even the customer are codes built up to the total consumable image." (Shelton: 524). Shelton provides a useful framework for analyzing and comparing restaurant experiences, focusing attention on the interior, the human actors, the type of menu and the specific language used. He also stresses that no restaurant exists in a social vacuum but is connected to larger social forces. Fine also notes the importance of looking at language, or what he calls "culinary discourse" (Fine, 1996:200). For Fine, language not only expresses sensory or aesthetic judgements but is also part of how people create common understandings and shared meanings about food. I look at restaurants, then, as spaces of performance and spectacle (both museological and theatrical). Philip Crang suggests looking at tourist sites as "perfomative geographies of display", but cautions against romanticizing the performative aspects of tourist sites -- there are, after all, real and unequal relations of power at work here. He also emphasizes that the "imaginative geographies" (Said 1978) of tourism are related to much broader cultural circuits of flows. "Tourist places are not just imagined places, they are also performed places." (Crang, 1997:138, 141, 146). Victor's Cafe 52 is a sleek, "white tablecloth" restaurant at the northern end of Manhattan's midtown theater district, an area whose side streets are dotted with a variety of restaurants, ranging from matchbox-sized luncheonettes to mid-priced ethnic restaurants such as Cabana Carioca, grand old institutions like Gallagher's Steakhouse, and upscale establishments. A large awning, visible from halfway down the block, proclaims "Cuban cuisine since 1963." On the sidewalk outside the restaurant are a lone set of handprints belonging to former boxing champion Roberto Duran, one of the many celebrity friends of the owner, whose pictures line the wall behind the hostess' station/reservation desk inside. Victor's history in many ways typifies a version of the immigrant success story. A self- described campesino (peasant) from the countryside surrounding Havana, Victor del Corral worked as a butcher and then ran two restaurants in his hometown of Guanabacoa prior to emigrating to the United States. At the time of his arrival, New York was home to the largest concentration of Cubans in the continental United States, including descendants of families who had emigrated in the 19th and early 20th century, and more recent arrivals who left Cuba in increasing numbers during the 1940s and 50s for a combination of political and economic factors -- recession, unemployment, political unrest (Poyo, 1984, 1989; Poyo and Diaz-Miranda, 1994). Although Cubans never constituted a numerically strong community, they were a long established presence in the city, and at the time of the Cuban revolution in 1959, they were the second most numerous Latino group in the city. Their visibility was perhaps out of proportion to the community's size; after the first World War, New York became the center of the international recording industry, and became an important site for the production and dissemination of Cuban and other "Latin" music. Cuban musicians and other performers such as Desi Arnaz and Chano Pozo flocked to New York from the 1920s through the 1950s, playing in Broadway and Harlem theaters, jazz bands, and Cuban and Latin dance bands. In the 1940s and 50s there were numerous Cuban restaurants, butchers, grocers and other small businesses throughout the city. Most were small, unpretentious, family-run and family- style enterprises, and not well-known outside of the Latino community. After working at a succession of jobs, Victor opened his first restaurant at what was then a fairly seedy, dangerous intersection at 71st Street and Columbus Avenue. The restaurant was initially a corner storefront, with a small counter and less than a dozen tables. According to restaurant folklore, the kitchen was so small that Victor's wife baked the desserts in an upstairs apartment and sent them down to the restaurant (Presilla, 1987). Over the years as the restaurant grew in popularity, Victor enlarged the dining room, added an outdoor cafe, and later a second level in the basement. While popular with local residents (friends who grew up on the Upper West Side recall it as a hangout, or a local place to experiment with an ethnic cuisine other than Chinese or Italian), it attracted people from all over the city, including a carefully cultivated celebrity clientele. For many non-Latino New Yorkers, it became a prototypical or emblematic Cuban (or Latin) dining experience. Victor's Cafe was a place for a special meal, or to take out of town guests -- a destination on a tourist itinerary, a way of demonstrating aesthetic cosmopolitanism (Urry, 1995). Cubans and other Latinos also patronized Victors. It was one of the Cuban restaurants that offered traditional food in more elegant surroundings; and its popularity among non-Latinos may in fact have served as a sign of legitimacy, of having "made it" for the early exile generation. Especially in the early years, Cubans from the metropolitan area, including from the colonia in New Jersey, came to Victor's for weekend dinners, or to celebrate family-oriented holidays like Mother's Day, Easter, and Noche Buena (Christmas Eve). The fact that the restaurant did have a coherent Cuban clientele also served to "authenticate" it for non-Latinos. Part of Victor's appeal to non-Latinos is as an ethnographic reconstruction. It marketed itself as a place where you could go to get "real" Cuban food; the food thus becomes an ethnographic object, which must then prove its authority and legitimacy. Its"realness" did not stem from its having been grown or processed Cuba, because the U.S. blockade prevented trade between the two countries, but from its "authentic" preparation. Motivated as much by entrepreneurial instincts as by a cultural mission, Victor decided to invest in a property in the theater district, a site on West 52nd Street formerly occupied by a long- established Spanish restaurant. Victor's Cafe 52 was opened in April, 1980 (ironically, the month that the Mariel boatlift began, bringing over 125,000 Cuban refugees, a much poorer and darker section of the population than those who had emigrated during the 1960s and early 1970s; see Pedraza, 199?, Poyo and Diaz-Miranda, 1994, Masud-Piloto, 1988). The Upper West Side in the late 1970s was already undergoing a process of gentrification; as the neighborhood was transformed into what many people saw as the archetypal or prototypical yuppie stronghold, Columbus Avenue quickly became a showcase of consumption. By the time Victor opened his midtown location, Columbus Avenue was already being forcibly upgraded. Laundromats, bodegas and mom-and-pop delis were squeezed aside or replaced by pricey boutiques, middlebrow chains like the Gap, and gourmet cafes and restaurants -- what Sharon Zukin calls, in another context, "pacification by cappuccino" (Zukin, 1995). Victor's Cafe maintained a dual existence for several years. Victor leased the uptown location and the name to his former managers, who ran it as Victor's Cafe until 1993, and as Havana (also serving Cuban food) after a lawsuit over the rights to the name. Havana folded in 1994 or 1995, and the corner is now occupied by a branch of the successful and seemingly ubiquitous Malaysian restaurant Penang. I'm not entirely certain how to analyze or interpret Victor's decision to open up shop in the theater district. It initially occurred to me to frame this in terms of the "delatinization" of the area around West 71st Street during the 1960s and 70s; my hypothesis was that if the Latino population was being displaced by upper middle class, largely white, professionals, that perhaps the client base of the restaurant had moved away from the Upper West Side. If Latinos had been dispersed elsewhere, then the move downtown might represent an attempt to transform the restaurant from what Joanne Finkelstein refers to as a cafe mundane -- a unpretentious, everyday eatery catering primarily to a limited geographical or ethnic community -- to a bistro mondain, a restaurant with more worldly aspirations; that if Victor's no longer served to anchor a local ethnic population, if it no longer had a place-making function, then it had to remake itself as a tourist attraction, promoting its own exoticism, othering itself -- what Frances Aparicio and Susan Chavez-Silverman refer to as self-tropicalization (Aparicio and Chavez-Silverman, 1997). And what better place to do that than the theater district, which has been an important tourist destination and a site of spectacle and theatricality for over a century, where the forces of gentrification were beginning to work their magic, starting the cycle of "creative destruction" which continued through the 80s and 90s, tearing down SRO hotels, renovating and building theaters and hotels. But that proved to be too simple and not entirely accurate. Victor's Cafe was always, in some sense, a tourist production. According to Victor and his manager, a longtime family friend, even in its earliest days, the restaurant did not position itself -- either geographically or conceptually -- to cater to the city's Cuban and Latino communities; its target clientele were residents of the ethnically mixed (but largely white) surrounding area. In other words, from its inception, Victor's was not designed to be primarily a Cuban restaurant for Cubans, but a site in which Cuban culture (in the form of its cuisine) would be translated and made accessible to non- Cubans. When I asked Victor about the importance of his restaurant for Cubans in New York, he didn't really answer the question directly but proclaimed, "I conquered the [North] American market" and recounted how, during the heyday of Victor's popularity, people waited on line for 2 hours in the snow for his famous black beans. (Victor del Corral, private communication; Clara Chaumont, private communication) According to restaurant personnel, the current clientele of Victor's Cafe 52 is approximately 90% non-Latino; that, however, is not a recent development but has been characteristic since the restaurant's opening. The proportion of "out of towners" has increased since the move to the theater district, to about 60%. But there is a temporal segmentation of this clientele. Especially in the early years, Cubans from the surrounding area, including the "colonia" in New Jersey, have used the restaurant as a site for family gatherings, holidays, and other special occasions. It is still a "special event" restaurant for Cubans and other Latinos. On weekdays, at lunch and for pre-theater dinners, the customers are overwhelmingly non-Latino and "out of towners". On weekend evenings, and on holidays like Easter, Mother's Day and Noche Buena (December 24), the crowd is largely Latino. On a recent Saturday at lunch, the front room was filled with well-dressed, mostly middle-aged whites, while in the back room a large, extended Latino family held a lavish baby shower. The restaurant can thus be seen, in some ways, as a form of "cultural brokering" as defined by the Smithsonian's Richard Kurin -- it serves to mediate and negotiate representations (in this case, cuisine) of one cultural group (in this case, Cubans) to another cultural group or the society at large. Brokering, in Kurin's analysis, involves both individuals who serve as mediators, translators, interpreters, and advocates, and also various institutional frameworks within which the cultural brokers are imbricated, or with which they must engage. Adapting this model to my study, it is then possible to see each of the three restaurants as an institution engaged in a form of cultural brokering, and both the owners and restaurant staff as cultural brokers, or people who assist in the process of brokering (Kurin, 1997). Victor's Cafe 52 does not fully disclose itself to the street; its windows offer only a partial view inside. It is a large, high ceilinged space, decorated in a subdued fashion. The floors are carpeted; the walls are painted in pastel hues of mint green and ocher. Most of the chairs and tables are wooden, solid, heavy. They look and feel like family heirlooms (especially if one's family were upper-class Cubans before the revolution). Plates and silverware are also large, heavy, and distinctly pre-modern. One wall of the back room (referred to as the "patio" because of a skylight in the center of the room) is covered with a large mural painted in bright colors depicting a variety of scenes of people enjoying themselves in tropical locations -- swimming in and relaxing by a pool, sipping drinks on a balcony, walking on a beach. It draws upon widely circulated and non-site-specific images of the Caribbean as a vacationer's paradise (the image are remarkably similar to those used in print advertising by the tourist boards of Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, etc.). The people depicted are happy, having fun, and are mostly white or light-skinned. The images may not be site-specific, but they are class-specific this is a vacation paradise for the elite. There is little (to my eye) that marks these images as specifically Cuban. They certainly do not recall the landscape of contemporary Cuba -- or at least images of a Cuba that is accessible to most contemporary Cubans. The visual iconography is thus of a generic tropicalism, designed to be consumed by those who can afford it. The mural invites and implies, in fact almost demands, a touristic gaze (Urry, 1991). Other non-specific tropical artifacts displayed throughout the restaurant include maracas and pre-Columbian looking ceramic figures. However, there are artifactual displays and museological that invoke memories (or fantasies) of a more specifically Cuban setting. On the walls of the front room, there are three glass picture frames containing distinctly pre-revolutionary Cuban icons. One displays several engraved cigar-box designs; another, pre-revolutionary Cuban currency; and the last, a neat arrangement of swizzle sticks from swank Havana nightclubs and restaurants dating from the 1940s and 1950s: the Montmartre, the Hotel Riviera, the Hotel Comodoro Vedado. Cubanidad is also coded and invoked through the music played in the dining room, which customers who are familiar with Latin music would recognize as distinctly Cuban (and primarily from the 1940s and 50s). The restaurant thus deploys a series of codes and images which are open to multiple interpretations by cultural "insiders" and "outsiders". Both the generic and specific references would be recognizable as "tropical" by non-Latinos. For most Latinos, these would read as "Cuban". For Cuban exiles of Victor's generation, the references would be even more specific: these images work as a nostalgic invocation of a (vanished) world they left behind. But these icons are even more narrowly referential. Both aural and visual icons are relics of pre-1959 Cuba; in other words, they are temporally, spatially, class and racially specific. There is an almost religious quality to the way these artifacts are framed and presented: the word "reliquary" came to mind. This dovetails with MacCannell's description of the process of sight sacralization, which involves framing, elevation and enshrinement (MacCannell, 1989). For the exiles of the 1960s, who still "dream in Cuban", Victor's recalls the comfortable elite lifestyle they were forced to abandon. It is a shrine, a lieu de memoire. Victor's Cafe prides itself on serving "traditional" Cuban cuisine. The menu features well-known "standards" like lechon asado (roast suckling pig), frijoles negros (black beans), and ropa vieja (literally, "old clothes"; a dish of shredded beef). But, in order to differentiate itself from "ordinary" Cuban and Latin restaurants like Caridad or La Esquina Habanera, and continue to attract upscale customers who are increasingly knowledgeable about different cuisines, or whose expectations have been honed by recent trends towards fusion or Pan-Latino cuisine, the menu has been expanded to include "innovative" dishes, and all of the dishes are "plated" with an eye to visual presentation, drawing upon strategies devised by nouvelle cuisine chefs. Ropa vieja, a Cuban "standard", is still cooked according to the restaurant's time-honored recipe but is served in a basket of plantain strips (a presentational strategy developed by Patria's Douglas Rodriguez), and the plate is sprinkled with chives. In addition to yuca con mojo (boiled cassava with garlic sauce, a "standard" side dish), yuca is also served in the form of "fingers" with a cilantro salsa. Portions are reasonable but the emphasis is on presentation and not quantity. One of Victor's Cafe 52's challenges is to educate non-Cubans about Cuban food. As noted above, the restaurant estimates that 90% of its customers are non-Latino, and that perhaps 60% are from out of town (this 60%, of course, includes Latinos from out of town). According to the manager, a lot of people don't know what Cuban food is: "They come in, they say, Cuban, is it like Mexican food?' We try to explain that our food isn't spicy, that we marinate our food ... But it's known worldwide, everyone knows Mexican food.." (Clara Chaumont, 4/98). Like a museum, then, the restaurant has a pedagogic mission: most simply put, to demonstrate that it is not Mexican. In other words, it has to construct a form of differential othering: to differentiate Cubanness as a specific other within a world of others. To look at it another way, the restaurant has a multifaceted ethnographic project: cultural preservation, transmission, and translation. The culture is preserved as both a lieu de memoire (Noa, 1989) for older-generation Cubans, a place of vicarious memory for younger Cubans who were born or grew up in the diaspora, and a way of encountering difference for non-Cubans. But, importantly, the culture has not been frozen or embalmed; while the restaurant harkens back to 1950s Havana in many ways, the food is not an exact replica. It is rooted in the past, but acknowledges the passage of time and the need for adaptation and change (if for not other reason than to be competitive). The written menu, then, functions as a guidebook for the uninitiated, or as a set of explanatory labels. The text is vivid, enticing, but more descriptive than evocative. The names of the dishes are given in Spanish; the accompanying text is sometimes simply a translation of the "title" but more often includes details on seasonings and preparation. Even something as simple and "standard" as black beans is presumed to need explanation: Frijoles negros: Quintessentially Cuba, a velvety-rich black bean potage scented with the aroma of bay leaf, cumin, and oregano. Victor's specialty. Occasionally, the language slips into a level of sensuality that verges on what Alexander Cockburn calls "gastro-porn": Yuca con mojo. Chunks of meltingly-rich boiled cassava smothered with a tangy garlic sauce. (Victor's Cafe menu, undated, from 4/98) For most Latinos, the bulk of the menu reads as familiar cooking, but served in elegant surroundings -- in other words, edible heritage. For non-Latinos, these same dishes are a trip into the unknown -- that is, the exotic, a different "world on a plate" (Cook and Crang, 1996) -- and the written menu and verbal assistance from the wait staff are designed to provide information and reassurance (the food may be unfamiliar but it's not that strange and here's how we make it). In many ways, then Victor's Cafe 52 can be interpreted is as a heritage site. Both Victor and Clara, emphasized the restaurant's "traditional" nature. Callers who get put on hold are reminded that Victor's has been "serving authentic Cuban food for over 30 years." One of its heritage narratives is the restaurant's own history. Part of its authority stems from the fact that Victor was a pioneer and that the restaurant has been around and successful for 35 years. The restaurant's longevity is emphasized through multiple media -- in all the restaurant's print advertising, on the outdoor awning, and in the outgoing phone message. The numerous photos of Victor surrounded by well-known entertainers underscore the importance of this narrative of cross-over success. The restaurant published a small booklet for its 25th anniversary, which situates the history of Victor's Cafe within a broader historical/ethnographic narrative about the evolution of Cuban cooking from pre-Conquest times to the present (Presilla, 1987). The management is designing a new menu for the 35th anniversary, which will feature a collage of images including the Cuban flag, an American car from the 1950s, photos of Victor and his family upon their arrival in the U.S. The restaurant then becomes, in part, a museum of itself. La Esquina Habanera -- which translates as Havana Corner, a name that directly evokes the "homeland" -- is imbricated within a very different cultural and economic geography or ethnoscape (Appadurai, 1997), across the Hudson River in the "enclave community" that straddles the towns of West New York, Union City and Weehawken, New Jersey (for the sake of brevity, I will refer to the area as "Union City"). During the 1970s and 1980s, the Union City area became the second largest Cuban settlement in the United States, after Miami. A large number of the Cubans who arrived in the Mariel boatlift settled in the Union City area. According to 1990 census figures, approximately 80% of the area's population is "Hispanic", and of that number, a majority are of Cuban origin. Bergenline Avenue, the main commercial street in Union City, was lined with photo studios, florists, bakeries, restaurants, music stores and other businesses catering to Cuban emigres. Although there are pockets of Cubans, and Cuban- owned businesses, scattered throughout the metropolitan area, these establishments are more geographically concentrated in Union City, and in some ways this community functions as a symbolic center, or at least a point of reference, for other Cubans in the area. Many Cubans who live in other parts of the metropolitan area have friends and family in Union City, or they travel there from time to time to shop, eat at Cuban restaurants, and soak up atmosphere. Visiting Cuban artists and musicians who come to New York have heard about Union City and often ask to go there. La Esquina Habanera is one of dozens of small, informal Cuban restaurants that line the main avenues of Union City. There are also some fancier, although still very traditional, "white tablecloth" restaurants on Bergenline Avenue. The nearby suburbs also boast at least one or two trendier establishments, whose menus, style of food presentation and promotional strategies are clearly influenced by New York's "fusion" or "pan-Latino" eateries such as Patria. La Esquina Habanera (also the name of a restaurant in Miami's Little Havana district) was established by Tony, a Cuban immigrant who arrived in the Mariel boatlift in 1980. However, the surrounding community has changed. there has been an modest influx of new Cuban emigres -- the balseros or rafters, who left Cuba in increasing numbers during the early 1990s and those who have emigrated legally through the lottery established in 1994. As the earlier generations of Cuban emigres have matured, there has been a modest exodus from the Union City area, in two directions. Some have moved from the more urban, working class ambience of Union City to more affluent and suburban parts of New Jersey. The children of these earlier arrivals have moved away from "the old neighborhood". In addition, many Cubans did not "choose" Union City. Between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, new Cuban arrivals were strongly encouraged to settle outside of Miami, and the U.S. Cuban refugee program offered economic incentives to prevent an "overconcentration" of Cubans in Miami and Florida (see Croucher, 1998; Masud-Piloto, 1988; Grenier, 1998; Grosfoguel and Georas, 1996). Many Cubans, after living in New Jersey for a decade or more, have moved to the Miami area to rejoin family and friends, to get away from the colder climate of the northeast, or to take advantage of real or imagined business opportunities offered by Miami's recent -- and volubly hyped -- economic ascent. There is a popular perception among many local Cubans that "everyone's moved to Miami ... almost every week someone else leaves for Miami". (Armando Guiller, personal communication). But Union City's demographics have also shifted in response to new immigration from other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. As Cubans have moved out, other Latinos have moved in. The changing composition of the community can be seen along Bergenline Avenue, where decades-old Cuban-owned businesses have been joined or replaced by Salvadoran, Ecuadoran and Colombian restaurants, bakeries, and travel agencies. A recent feature article in The New York Times dubbed this "A Pan-American Highway of Food on Avenida Bergenline." La Esquina Habanera, then, is one of the remaining bastions of cubanidad in a community where Cubans are still a majority but are seen and see themselves as less hegemonic than in the past. The restaurant looks like a typical neighborhood ethnic eatery. The furnishings are modest -- formica tables and lunch counter, red leatherette cushions on the stools and chairs. For most of the week, it primarily serves the nearby community. It's not a place to which one would travel because of the food, served in large portions but with little attention to presentation. "These restaurants [ethnic cafes] are inexpensive enough to allow individuals to dine there regularly and the foodstuffs are consistent enough to give patrons confidence in what to expect." (Finkelstein, 1989:97). Most of the patrons seem to know each, the owner, and the wait staff. But on weekend evenings, and some special occasions like New Year's Eve, the restaurant doubles as a nightclub, featuring live music, and its character and clientele change somewhat. And there's an interesting bifurcation. On Friday and Saturday, to attract or be responsive to an increasingly diverse Latin population, dance bands play a variety of Latin -- but not always Cuban -- music. Cubanidad is certainly present, but downplayed. The crowd varies, but seems to be a more heterogeneous mix of Cubans and other Latinos. On Sunday nights, however, cubanidad -- but in an overtly performative, and somewhat folklorized or touristic mode -- comes to the fore when La Esquina Habanera hosts a weekly rumba, which refers both to an African-based complex of music and dance forms, and also an event featuring rumba music and dance. La Esquina Habanera also hosts, from time to time, special performances of other Afro-Cuban musical forms, such as sacred bata drumming from the Palo Monte religion. These events are primarily advertised by word of mouth; however, many Cubans throughout the metropolitan region have heard about the Sunday evening rumba. The rumba is a time when La Esquina Habanera clearly operates in a mixed mode. Because there are more customers, and even a professional, staged rumba invokes some degree of audience participation, the rumba generates a feeling of community, and for many Cuban patrons, invokes memories of home. It becomes a living, active lieu de memoire. Rumba itself is also a result, and a medium, of travelling culture, rooted in the forced migration/ displacement of Africans to Cuba. The site can be understood as series of overlapping spatial axes -- the double diaspora from Africa to Cuba to the U.S.- and time frames -- pre-colonial Africa, to colonial Cuba to the pre-migratory moment (which could be 1959, 1980, 1994, last week), to the present day. The rumba thus functions as a heterotopia, but one which encompasses multiple chronotopes (for a fuller discussion of rumba and diaspora, see Knauer, 1997). There is a written menu, but it is not automatically proffered; visibly non-Latino patrons are sometimes asked if they want to see a menu. The restaurant presumes that customers and staff form a gastronomic or culinary "knowledge community", and that there is no need to interpret, translate or even, in some cases, inform customers about the food. Posters on the outside window announcing the $3.49 lunch special and some of the restaurant's specialities such as Cuban sandwiches and batidos (a shake made with milk, ice and fruit). Inside at the counter, there are other signs announcing daily specials, and "fast food" offerings like batidos and croquetas de papas (potato croquettes). Significantly, none of this signage is translated into English. The written menu is bilingual, but the menu simply lists the titles of the dishes and translates them. The menu is straightforward, basic, featuring standard offerings of black beans, roast pork, steak, Cuban sandwiches, yuca con mojo. There are no surprises, and no gestures towards or acknowledgement of other gastronomic cultures. Portions are generous, but the food is simply heaped onto a plain white porcelain plate; there are no flourishes, garnishes, or architectural renderings here. La Esquina Habanera does not try to translate cubanness for non-Cubans. While the decor, at first glance, seems non-descript and unimportant, it provides an extremely useful gloss on the site's exilic performativity. The glass-walled front room is fully visible from the street. Examining the restaurant as theater, during daylight hours, the street is an omnipresent backdrop for indoor performances. In a series of photomontages shot in Miami's "Little Havana" sectionm, Cuban photographer Arturo Cuenca uses the ironic title "This is not Havana" to interrogate and disturb exilic nostalgia. Union City may not be Havana, but the restaurant's streetcorner setting, and the way it creates a dialogue between exterior and interior, echoes the intensely social and interactive street life of many Havana neighborhoods. The windows are about both looking out and looking in, and allow for an ongoing interplay between the street and the restaurant. The window also frame the restaurant's interior as a diorama to be viewed from the street. There are decorative elements that utilize stereotypical tropical motifs, such as palm leaves. But its place-making iconography is largely site-specific: murals depicting Havana streetscapes which would be recognizable and familiar to most patrons. One is called La Memoria (memory). Patrons are thus invited to imagine themselves somewhere else -- transported "back home" (for Cubans) or to a strange new place. Patria is a sleek, ultra-chic restaurant on Park Avenue near Gramercy Park, an area that in recent years has become one of a series of new gourmet meccas, a highly visible "zone of consumption". It does not style itself as a Cuban restaurant, but rather as a pioneer what chef/co-owner Douglas Rodriguez labels nuevo latino, cuisine. Rodriguez was born and raised in New York City; his parents left Cuba in the 1950s. Patria is the most high-profile of my three sites; it has become a benchmark a kind of cross-cultural innovation currently in vogue. Rodriguez has become a celebrity-chef; his cookbook, Nuevo Latino, has generally received good reviews. Rodriguez is often mentioned and quoted in newspaper stories about food trends, and recipes from Patria frequently appear in The New York Times. Its outgoing phone message encapsulates the restaurant's mission, message, and strategy: Welcome to Patria, the home of nuevo Latino. New York Times 3 star chef Douglas Rodriguez has reinterpreted classical Latin American dishes with an emphasis on flavor, freshness and exotic ingredients. Patria combines an extremely unique dining experience that is fun and exciting with an atmosphere that is lively and elegant. This reads as unapologetic tourist discourse. This restaurant is not merely a place to seek nourishment but to have an experience. We are invited into a thematized environment, which draws upon both heritage discourse (classical Latin American dishes) and tourisms of the exotic (exotic ingredients, unique experience); the language, in fact, suggests the restaurant as theme park (fun and exciting, lively). Rodriguez' cookbook (1995) also plays upon this mixture of heritage and exoticism: Many Latins will recognize the foods from their homeland, but will notice that they are served in nontraditional ways. For many non-Latins, this book will be an adventure into the unknown and and introduction to dishes that instantly become new favorites. For me, cooking is all-consuming, and a creative connectoin with my heritage. All of my dishes are founded on tradition and home cooking -- the type of food I was raised on and still love. I invite you to enter my world of cooking...Nuevo-Latino style. [emphases added] Patria's interior is sleek, ultra-modern, somewhat subdued. The bar occupies a central and elevated location, and a long curved counter in the back is a visible staging area where finishing touches are placed on plates before they are carried to tables. The decor is tropical postmodern -- an unobtrusive elegance replete with tropical references (paintings of tropical fruit; brightly colored mosaics and an extravagant floral arrangement at the entrance). The wall art is paintings and not murals, framed and hung gallery-style, which heightens the museum-like character. Patria courts both Latino and non-Latino customers; according to Rodriguez, non- Hispanics come looking for something different, while Latinos come to experience familiar ingredients in non-familiar interpretations. There is also an appeal to ethnic pride: "They [Latinos] also like the fact that it's a white tablecloth restaurant with a good wine list and stylish food that places an emphasis on presentation...It's a restaurant they can be proud of." (Quoted in The New York Times, 1/17/96, Section C:1). Again, an appeal to both heritage and the exotic. The restaurant's clientele is fairly heterogenous, at least in terms of race and ethnicity. On the nights I have been there, the majority of customers were not Latino but the restaurant does attract affluent Latinos. Rodriguez estimates that 80% of the clientele is from the New York area. The food is complicated and the presentations are meticulous, whimsical, almost extravagant. Some dishes are so elaborately constructed they look like a miniature stage set. The restaurant's "signature" dessert is called a "chocolate cigar". A plate appears with a perfect cigar-shaped cylinder molded from dense chocolate cream, with a foil label reading "Douglas Rodriguez". An edible matchbook, is placed to one side, with the "matches" sticking upward. A whole fish is balanced vertically on a brilliant transparent blue plate, so that it appears to swim. These are meals that have to be consumed visually. The food is literally staged, and becomes a performing object. Or one can look at the food presentation as a form of framing and display. We might, then, look at Patria as object theater, museum theater, or a hybrid of both. The written menu is surprisingly restrained. The language is descriptive rather than romantic/evocative; the text is nearly adjective-free. But reading the menu is like taking a quick journey through the Americas: Honduan ceviche Colombian arepas (corn cakes), Cuban sandwich, Chilean Salmon. On one level, this can be raed as an overdone pastiche, food that belongs to everywhere and thus nowhere. This is heritage in a blender, Latin America under glass. But it can also be read an as attempt at interculinary/cultural dialogue. Patria's heterotopia also encompasses multiple chronotopes, or at least chronotopic elements. Although not a Cuban restaurant, it does invoke Cuba, and Cubanness, through multiple strategies. Patria means homeland or fatherland; nationalist discourse in most Latin American countries is replete with references to "la patria". But Patria was also the title of a newspaper published in New York by Cuban exiles fighting for independence from Spain. Cuban patriot Jose Marti served as its editor for many years. So even though Patria's "fusion" cuisine connotes layers of displacement, multiple diasporas and hybridizations, and bespeaks a kind of placelessness it is possible to read the restaurant's name as a (coded) marker of Cubanness. Patria also references Cuba through its use of background (and occasionally performed) music. Discerning listeners will recognize that Patria moves to a distinctly Cuban beat -- the restaurant's "soundtrack" is comprised primarily of Cuban music from the 1950s and Cuban- inflected "classic" salsa from the 1960s and 1970s. Patria thus situates Cuba securely within an (imagined) pan-Latino cultural-culinary community. In this regard, it stands as a salutary rebuttal to continued efforts to isolate or exclude Cuba from the hemispheric community. It also can be viewed as an attempt to transcend a rigid nationalism that has unfortunately characterized much political and cultural discourse in Latin America over the last century. We might read Patria as an embodiment of Cuban patriot Jose Marti's sweeping, hemispheric vision of nuestra America -- our America (Marti, 1891). How, then, to read these restaurants against, or alongside, each other? And how to read them all together, as part of a larger narrative about diaspora, cultural transformation, and urban change? I have not found a definitive framework which ties everything into a neat bundle. Loose ends keep on unravelling, and new ones appearing. It is tempting to read the three restaurants as embodying the world view or "structure of feeling" of distinct generations of Cuban migration to the U.S. Victor's, as I have noted, is in many respects a chronotope, a memory-palace of pre-1959 Cuba. Its glitz and showbiz associations can be seen as corresponding to an ethos of successful entrepreneurship, of Cubans as a successful immigrant community, a "model minority". The more modest accomplishments of La Esquina Habanera, which doesn't try to compete outside of its own somewhat circumscribed locale, can be read as a parable about the less-than-meteoric success of the post- 1980 Cuban immigrants (to put it briefly and somewhat simplistically, the marielitos and balseros "generations" were more black and working class in origin; they tended to be more motivated by economic factors; they were not greeted as anti-communist heroes but especially the marielitos castigated as "scum" and "criminals", even by Cuban-Americans; they did not receive the same economic and social benefits as pre-1980 Cuban immigrants; and have not "assimilated" or "acculturated" as much). Clearly, a full demographic/sociological study of the restaurants, their staffs and clientele are beyond the scope of this study. A more complete analysis would also have to look more closely at the dynamics of the surrounding areas, which I have only been able to sketch in a very summary fashion. Another useful frame would be to look at the multiple and perhaps colliding cartographies of Cuban life in the New York area -- how these restaurants together with other Cuban restaurants (and perhaps other Cuban enterprises, cultural/social institutions, and gathering places) create a fluid, shifting map of the Cuban community(ies). Shelton, whose work on restaurants as theater I cite above, used Raymond Williams' typology of emergent and residual traditions as the basis for a comparative study of several local restaurants. For Williams, a residual tradition is one that is fully formed in the past but still active in the present, while emergent traditions involve the creation of new values and meanings. However, Shelton stresses that restaurants are not static but processual,and draw upon both residual and emergent features (Shelton: 509). Using these as fluid concepts and not rigidly bounded categories, each of my three sites can be seen as incorporating elements of past, present and future, in different degrees and combinations. One could argue that Patria is more fully emergent than residual, that La Esquina Habanera is more residual and Victor's strike a more even balance between the two. However, in some ways I was surprised to find that these restaurants exhibited more similarities than I had expected to find. They initially appeared world apart from each other, occupying completely different market niches and performative registers. If I had to encapsulate each site, I would say that Victor's is about translating Cuba for non- Cubans, as producing itself as a site of differentiated otherness, through ultra-narrow and generic strategies. La Esquina Habanera's goal is to maintain itself as an outpost of Havana, playing upon nostalgic and site-specific memories. Patria embodies a grand cosmic vision of post-national, pan-ethnic latinidad. But, as I have stressed, all of these sites involve multiple frames and cartographies. Each restaurant drew upon heritage and tradition but also appealed to the exotic. I also argued that each of these sites incorporates both chronotopic and heterotopic elements. I choose to look at them as three different instances of how Cubanness is framed, utilized, and consumed. 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