The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands

by Victor M. Valle

Overview

In The Poetics of Fire, Pulitzer prize–winning journalist and Chicano author Victor M. Valle posits the chile as a metaphor for understanding the shared cultural histories of ChicanX and LatinX peoples from preconquest Mesoamerica to twentieth-century New Mexico. Valle uses the chile as a decolonizing lens through which to analyze preconquest Mesoamerican cosmology, early European exploration, and the forced conversion of Native peoples to Catholicism as well as European and Mesoamerican perspectives on food and place. Assembling a rich collection of source material, Valle highlights the fiery fruit’s overarching importance as evidenced by the ubiquity of references to the plant over several centuries in literature, art, official documents, and more to offer a new eco-aesthetic reading—a reframing of culinary history from a pluralistic, non-Western perspective.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826365552
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	11/15/2023
Series:	Querencias Series
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Victor M. Valle is a professor emeritus at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. He writes extensively on urban politics, economy, and food for a variety of media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. He is the author of Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine.

Editorial Reviews

...this book makes a significant contribution to the fields of folklore studies, food studies, environmental studies, Indigenous studies, Latin American studies, and Latinx studies... The Poetics of Fire is an indispensable book for considering the place of heat, specifically through chile eating, in Mesoamerican aesthetics.

Journal of American Folklore  - Mónica B. Ocasio Vega

A deep exploration into chile's ontology, mythology, epigenetics, and indigenized place-making.—Enrique R. Lamadrid, coeditor of Water for the People: The Acequia Heritage of New Mexico in a Global Context

In this brilliant analysis, chiles emerge as protagonists in the multicultural wars that date from the sixteenth century to the present. Victor M. Valle calls out all the contradictions that entangle culinary practices of heat and flavor with prejudice, misunderstandings, and derision and offers instead erudite theorizations of meaning and power through a taste-based methodology that respects the botanical product as much as its fiery eaters—both equally qualified warriors of memory and dignity.—Maribel Alvarez, coeditor of Hungry for Change: Borderlands Food and Water in the Balance

In this brilliant analysis, chiles emerge as protagonists in the multicultural wars that date from the sixteenth century to the present. Victor M. Valle calls out all the contradictions that entangle culinary practices of heat and flavor with prejudice, misunderstandings, and derision and offers instead erudite theorizations of meaning and power through a taste-based methodology that respects the botanical product as much as its fiery eaters—both equally qualified warriors of memory and dignity.—Maribel Alvarez, coeditor of Hungry for Change: Borderlands Food and Water in the Balance

From the Publisher