For over a decade I’ve been documenting the cultural, political, and economic transformations to Southern communities that undergo demographic changes due to an influx of Latino migrants. I’m particularly interested in the changes to the landscape and soundscape. In places where I’ve conducted fieldwork—Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi—the number of Latino-owned businesses have increased in recent decades. These businesses tend to be concentrated in commercial spaces where Spanish-language advertising and storefront signs create a distinctive cultural landscape, and the Spanish language can be heard as frequently as, if not more frequently than, English. The response to these cultural changes and to the incoming migrants responsible varies from place to place. In this article, I compare Buenaventura Lakes (commonly shortened to BVL), a suburb in Osceola County, Florida, and Summer Avenue, a six-mile-long commercial district in urban Memphis, Tennessee. I document different reactions to the increasing availability of food from Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Both BVL and Summer Avenue experienced an influx of migrants who introduced restaurants, markets, and other places where international food was sold and served. However, the meaning those places held for the incoming and receiving residents differed. Some residents saw these businesses as evidence of the migrant population’s economic success and incorporation into the community, a means for preserving Latin American and Caribbean foodways in the U.S. South, and an opportunity for community revitalization. For others, the changing foodways served as a daily reminder that the population was now majority Latino.
When I moved to BVL, the process of Latinization was already well under way. Puerto Ricans and other Latinos migrated to Central Florida in large numbers several decades before my arrival in 2010. As a result, the landscape and soundscape changed and the Latino presence could be felt. In Osceola County, one of four counties in Greater Orlando and the location of BVL, the proportion of Latino residents increased from 2.2 percent in 1980 to 45.5 percent in 2010. By 2020, Latinos were over 50 percent of the county’s total population and numbered approximately 211,089. The growth of both small and large Latino-owned establishments, where business was conducted primarily in Spanish, and the transformations to other commercial spaces made it evident that the Puerto Rican diaspora had already reached a critical mass. In his 1993 book Divided Border: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity, Juan Flores described the similarities between Los Angeles and New York’s huge Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. In these two urban spaces, he wrote, “all of your senses inform you that you are in Latin America, or that some section of Latin America has been transplanted to the urban United States where it maintains itself energetically.” The words of Flores came to my mind as I traveled around the region. In the suburbs of Greater Orlando, I found that the Puerto Rican diaspora was already influencing political, economic, and cultural life.
A decade ago, I lived in Greater Orlando to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in suburban communities with a concentration of Latinos. I was completing graduate school at Rutgers University, and for my dissertation research I planned to document the influx of Puerto Ricans to suburban Orlando and the impact of their settlement on the region. Puerto Ricans are the largest group of Latinos in Greater Orlando, and the migration included both professional migrants and low-paid service sector workers. Still, this was not simply a labor migration. Multiple push-pull factors fueled and sustained the migration over the decades, including real estate marketing and the opportunities for homeownership, labor recruitment, powerful social networks or chain migration, and the perception that Florida offered a better quality of life because of its tropicality and the opportunities for upward mobility. Push factors from the island included the social consequences of Puerto Rico’s economic instability, such as crime rates and the fear of violence. Deindustrialization in the U.S. North during the 1970s led to layoffs of Puerto Rican workers living in Northern cities and contributed to outmigration to other regions of the country like the South. Since Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, many of the barriers faced by foreign-born immigrants during the migratory process were avoided and the population’s growing political power and cultural influence was evident in Greater Orlando.
In the early 2000s, a plethora of restaurants and supermarkets opened to cater to Latinos by providing familiar products, communicating with customers in Spanish, and including bilingual advertisements and signage. During my interview with Sandra Lopez, a schoolteacher from New York City, she recalled driving to the City of Orlando to find Latin American and Caribbean products in the late 1980s. “It took between forty-five minutes to an hour to get platanos [plantains] or pernil [roast pork]. As time progressed, the food changed.” Food, she explained, was a measure of the demographic transformations. “Eventually the supermarket created an international food aisle and you knew that was your section.” Over time, however, entire supermarkets replaced the single international food aisle. Some of these restaurants and markets replaced existing establishments that once catered to non-Latino white residents. Through interviews and participant observation, methods common among cultural anthropologists, I became aware of the multiple meanings of food for BVL’s diverse population. For some residents, the availability of familiar Latin American and Caribbean foods was central to the preservation of their culture through food, and at the same time a symbol of their incorporation into the community. However, for others the availability of these products was a daily reminder that BVL was changing and non-Latino white residents were becoming a demographic minority for the first time. My interview with Sandra reminded me of the newspaper articles I had already encountered while doing archival research and the online conversations that resulted from the media’s coverage.
In 2005, for example, the Orlando Sentinel featured an article entitled “Orlando Develops Hispanic Accent,” and mentioned the opening of the first Publix Sabor supermarket in BVL as evidence of the growing Latino population’s influence. At the time of my fieldwork, the Publix Sabor in BVL was one of four supermarkets in Florida introduced by the Publix Supermarket, Inc. chain to appeal to the growing Latino population. All product information and signs were bilingual, and the store offered a wider variety of Latin American and Caribbean products than the other Publix supermarkets. As I browsed the aisles, I immediately spotted a variety of frozen Goya products that are difficult to find in other parts of the South where the Puerto Rican population is smaller. Platanos maduros (sweet plantains), empanada dough, and a selection of frozen Goya dinners—arroz con pollo (rice with chicken), ropa vieja con arroz (rice with shredded beef), and arroz con gandules (rice with pigeon peas)—were just a few of the products that lined the freezer shelves. However, I quickly realized that not everyone in the community was celebrating these additions. On a hot summer day in July of 2010, I stood outside of the Robert Guevara Community Center in BVL, named after the first Puerto Rican elected to the Osceola County Commission, with a small group of non-Latino residents who were discussing their frustration with the local supermarkets and businesses that they saw as “catering” to Latino consumers. They seemed annoyed by the presence of these products and were also astounded by the lack of English-speaking store clerks. One of the residents who stood outside with me mentioned his experience in a local supermarket where several store associates had to look around to find an English-speaking worker to assist him while he waited in disbelief. Michael, another BVL resident, also expressed his frustration with the Publix Sabor when they stopped carrying his favorite brand of cheese and instead introduced several Latin American brands. He decided to submit a formal written complaint to the manager, but he never received a response. Michael decided to start traveling to another part of town to do his grocery shopping. A woman named Jennifer chimed in and mentioned another supermarket, Sedano’s, that opened earlier that year and replaced her former market.
On December 29, 2009, journalist Sandra Pedicini published an article in the Orlando Sentinel entitled “New Grocer in Town,” about the Sedano’s supermarkets that were opening in January of 2010. The supermarket started in 1962, catered to the Cuban market, and grew to a chain of about thirty South Florida markets. Sedano’s purchased three already established Albertsons markets in Central Florida and planned to keep them open while they made the conversion. At Sedano’s, salsa music played, pastelitos (pastries baked or fried with sweet or savory fillings) were available in a café, and clerks greeted customers in Spanish, although signs were in English. While the South Florida Sedano’s catered to a Cuban American clientele, those in the Orlando area would stock items for the growing Puerto Rican customer base. Still, customers were not limited to Goya, which opened an Orlando distribution center in 2003. Brands such as Iberia, Conchita, and Norteno were also available. According to Augusto Sanabria, president and CEO of the Hispanic Business Initiative Fund, “Anytime that a big Hispanic company comes into town, it just re-emphasizes the power of the Hispanic community here in Central Florida. . . . That’s recognizing that in Central Florida, the Hispanic community is growing and it is powerful. It’s music to my ears.” Yet the presence of these supermarkets was contested. On January 8, 2010, an internet user who went by the name of tim [sic] posted two responses to the Orlando Sentinel article about the new chain. “Hispanics need their own supermarkets . . . wow! . . . the regular supermarkets are not good enough for them??” tim wrote. He went on to accuse Latinos of dividing the community and causing segregation.
Supermarkets and formal businesses weren’t the only signs of Greater Orlando’s changing culinary landscape. When I drove around the BVL suburb on weekends, I encountered garage sales, yard sales, and poster boards advertising the sale of alcapurrias (fritters made from plantains and stuffed with meat), empanadas, or pinchos (meat kabobs). These types of “plate sales” are common in other parts of the South. I lived in BVL for several months and my neighbor consistently set up his grill on the front lawn, arranged folding chairs around the grill, and prepared pinchos to sell when cars pulled over and the passengers congregated. On other occasions I found grills set up and food sold in commercial parking lots.
Life had clearly changed since the 1980s, when Sandra Lopez had to travel forty miles for familiar Puerto Rican foods. In BVL, the concession stand at the Archie Gordon Memorial Park sold empanadas and pernil sandwiches while the cashier behind the counter blasted loud salsa music on a radio. I was even able to purchase pasteles during the holiday season from the local Walmart parking lot when a vendor leaned a wooden sign against his vehicle advertising the sale of food from his van. Pasteles are a traditional Puerto Rican dish made of a masa from root vegetables, stuffed with meat, and boiled in a plantain leaf. I quickly learned that while some of my interviewees appreciated the availability of familiar Caribbean foods in residential spaces and commercial parking lots, other residents interpreted this practice as a health code violation and evidence of the cultural changes in the suburb that they had called home for decades but now felt foreign. I finished my Orlando research in 2012, returned to my home in East Harlem, and completed my dissertation before preparing for a new faculty position that would give me the opportunity to continue documenting the experiences of Latinos and other ethnic groups that migrated to the South. When I began my research in Florida, my focus was not on foodways. Restaurants and markets emerged as important sites of contestation as my fieldwork progressed due to the multiple, symbolic meanings of food.
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Years later, I found myself on Summer Avenue, in Memphis, Tennessee, documenting once again the changing landscape and place-identity of a community that experienced an influx of immigrants, primarily Latino, in recent decades. There was no growth in Memphis’s Latino population of 5,225 between 1980 and 1990. However, between 1990 and 2000 the population increased by an astounding 333.6 percent. By 2000 there were 19,317 Latinos in the city, and this pattern continued. Preliminary data from the 2020 U.S. Census revealed the Latino population reached approximately 62,167. I first became interested in Summer Avenue while working on an oral history project that focused on Latino-owned restaurants in Memphis and Oxford, Mississippi. While I was collecting interviews in 2017, I quickly became aware of the concentration of restaurants and markets on Summer Avenue that were owned by Latinos and other immigrants from around the world. I met Allen Ampueda, for example, the owner of Caiman Authentic Venezuelan Restaurant and Bakery. On August 12, 2017, I was sitting in his restaurant and overheard a conversation between two young women at a nearby table. The women ordered tequenos (white cheese sticks wrapped in dough) and appeared physically devastated when Allen told them they were all out for the day. I’m pretty sure I heard one of the women utter the word muerte (death) in disappointment. Their expressions changed, however, when the other woman suggested arepas. Shortly after they ordered, a milky drink was brought out to them and they asked for cinnamon. Before long one of them proclaimed, “Este es vida”(this is life), after taking a long sip of the drink. I later learned it was called a chicha, an iced drink made with rice similar in taste to horchata. The young women’s reaction to the Venezuelan food made me think of a previous conversation I had in the restaurant.
Less than thirty minutes earlier, I had been chatting with a couple about food and Venezuela’s civil war. The woman at the table, Maria, told me she was having a tough day not long ago. She decided to patronize Caiman that day because she needed to eat the pain away. I didn’t ask what was troubling her, but the conversation immediately turned to Venezuelan politics. “There’s a civil war, right?” I asked. Maria immediately whipped out her cell phone to show me the picture of a bullet-ridden house that belonged to someone she knew. Then she played a video of a group she called the “collective” pushing down a fence in an attempt to charge toward an apartment building where a family member lived. Maria had to leave Venezuela because she feared for her life. “It’s a dictatorship, they want the oil. Venezuela is a rich country. They imprison anyone who opposes,” she explained to me. Her family is now scattered around the world, and she mentioned Canada, Europe, and Mexico. “It’s an exodus!” she proclaimed. Maria only needed to complete a few more credits to earn her master’s degree, but she couldn’t feed her children on her teacher’s salary. She described herself as an activist and wanted me to understand that the people in Venezuela were suffering. Now she continues her activism, but only through the internet. Food, familiar Venezuelan cuisine, provided comfort during a time of unrest and uncertainty.
During my interview with Allen, the owner of Caiman, he also talked about the political turmoil in Venezuela. In 2004, he migrated to Arkansas, where he was sponsored by his sister. Prior to opening the restaurant, however, he was remodeling houses and working on semi-trucks as a mechanic until his sister put the idea of a restaurant in his head. “Why did you leave Venezuela?” I asked. “I never thought of residing in the United States, but because of the political issues in my country we had to leave our country,” he responded. Allen mentioned the economic security and freedom he once felt in Venezuela, but now the country was facing a civil war, communist government, and economic instability:
One day there is one price and in the evening there is another, and in the morning has another. But always going up, never going down. In the very least you can buy food for a week [due to food shortages]. And they’re killing a lot of people. . . . We had never, ever been in that situation.
Caiman closed prior to the Covid pandemic. However, while it was open the restaurant was an important social space for Venezuelans to gather, converse about Venezuelan politics, and enjoy cuisine that reminded them of home.
I completed the oral history project about Latino Oxford and Memphis and continued to patronize the restaurants where I had conducted fieldwork. However, my academic interest in Summer Avenue was renewed several years later when I read about the Summer Avenue Merchant Association’s effort to brand the avenue as Memphis’s “Official International District,” naming a roughly three-mile section of Summer between Highland Street and White Station Road as “Nations Highway.” I began archival research and oral history interviews with business owners on Summer Avenue. Like Greater Orlando, the transformations were a result of the growing immigrant population. The restaurants and markets in particular became key to the international place-identity. In a 2018 article from High Ground News, Meghan Medford, the association president, explained that “Summer Avenue used to be the place where everyone wanted to go to, where everyone hung out. . . . We’re trying to bring that energy back to Summer.”
The avenue was the location of the first Holiday Inn in the United States and the location of the City of Memphis’s first McDonald’s, I was told in more than one interview. Summer was lined with restaurants and motor courts, and there was a thriving business district. According to Meghan, “we just want to brand to where it’s a destination spot, people will want to come and recognize, ‘oh, this is Summer Avenue,’ it’s an international district.” During our 2021 interview, I asked Meghan why they decided to introduce the initiative to brand Summer Avenue as part of their revitalization strategy. “Just by the demographics of the area,” she replied. “There’s just so many different nationalities and countries represented here, and you can get any kind of food from anywhere. And so we were thinking, what is this area and what does it mean to people? . . . And we just thought, it’s like a melting pot, and it’ d be a great international district just to brand the area.”
When I asked interviewees about the increasing presence of immigrants, some pointed to the white flight that resulted from the desegregation of schools in Memphis. “I think when there was white flight and everyone was kind of leaving the city, a lot of the immigrants moved into those houses that are in the area, and they rented ’em. And it’s an area that welcomes everyone and they felt comfortable. And so, I’m guessing that’s probably why they set up their businesses along Summer Avenue,” said Meghan. Andrew Gattas, owner of the school supply company Knowledge Tree, spent much of his childhood and adolescence working for the department store his father opened on Summer Avenue in 1970. Andrew’s business is also located on Summer Avenue and he reflected on the transformations he witnessed over the years:
I didn’t really fully understand the impact until probably five or six years ago, when you drive down and you genuinely see every type of ethnic restaurant you could imagine. . . . I’ d say five or six years ago was when I really understood the impact of it fully in terms of the cultural change in Summer Avenue. I think it had happened long before that, long before I noticed.
During an interview with Abdullah Mohammed, a merchant from Taiz, Yemen, who opened the Stone House Market in 2016, he described the changes he witnessed along Summer Avenue. He decided to open his business because he saw Latinos, Yemenis, Iraqis, and individuals from Jerusalem in the area. It looked like it was going to be an international street, he explained. He went on to name a Turkish grill, a Japanese restaurant, an Iraqi investor, an individual from Jordan who owns a laundromat, a Mexican attorney who opened an immigration law firm, and a merchant from Jerusalem who opened a furniture store. “Now the street is just an international place,” he proclaimed.
Mirna Garcia, co-owner of Mi Tierra Colombian and Mexican Restaurant, recalled that in 1995 the Latino community was very small. “There was hardly anything here. There was one or two restaurants. It was a long [distance] to have a Mexican plate, and it was just Mexican.” When they first opened nineteen years ago, they only sold Colombian food, but “customers would look in and they’ d look and they loved the place, but they were not adventurous enough to try the food, so they would leave. So, we said we have to do something about this. So we added Mexican food to the menu, and that started letting customers stay trying the Mexican food and also try the Colombian. Now they come back and just order the Colombian.” Mirna also mentioned that she now owns instead of rents the building where the restaurant is located and has customers from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, and other parts of Latin America.
The Summer Avenue Merchant’s Association, under the leadership of Meghan, was openly embracing and promoting the different ethnic groups that were contributing to the revitalization of the area. The association received a Community Enhancement Grant for $50,000 from the county to contribute to their efforts. Heidi Shafer, former county commissioner, told the press that “we’ve really been trying to bring Summer up for about a decade now . . . One of the things I thought would be helpful is if we could start to give Summer a sense of place.” The first phase of the project was the installation of banners that said “Nations Highway” and displayed flags from different parts of the world to demarcate the space. The second phase was focused on landscape design and other beautification efforts.
To my surprise, however, controversy over the branding effort emerged from within the international community and quickly became a topic of discussion on social media and in the local press. Residents questioned whether there was an equal investment in the surrounding communities and those individuals responsible for the diversity. For example, one respondent mentioned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recognized the growing presence of the immigrant population, including undocumented migrants, in the area surrounding Summer Avenue and therefore targeted these communities. Another individual criticized the effort as a project of “neoliberal multiculturalism,” arguing that the international identities of the business owners and the diversity they brought to the commercial strip was being used for marketing purposes and profits. However, the larger community of immigrants, they argued, are not fully accepted in Memphis, are criminalized and kept poor. Another individual remarked that “It feels like it’s for cultural tourism and extraction and not for the classes of people in the neighborhood. This absolutely means it will be policed to protect white and upper-class comfort and to subjugate and terrorize brown and black folks.”
The branding initiative received additional criticism from both native Memphians and members of the international community who objected to the banners that were placed on poles along the avenue. Each pole featured a flag from a different country with the words “Nations Highway” printed vertically. During my interviews, I was told that the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Israeli flags were challenged on social media and in the local news. Memphis is home to Vietnamese refugees who fled South Vietnam after the fall of Saigon during the Vietnam War. According to some reports, the local Vietnamese population wanted the yellow flag that represented South Vietnam on display instead of the red flag that represented North Vietnam before being adopted as the countries’ unifying flag. I later learned that the banner with the Vietnamese flag was torn down. The Chinese flag was also challenged for having communist symbolism while the Israeli flag was criticized because the Jerusalem Market was owned by Palestinians. One individual said, “Personally, I think the flags are great, but I am surprised to see the Israeli flag, which I presume is a nod to Jerusalem [Market], the owner of which I personally know identifies as Palestinian.” All of the flags were eventually removed.
In 2021, the Tennessee Department of Transportation awarded an urban transportation grant to the City of Memphis’s Division of Planning and Development to create a Complete Streets Plan to guide Summer Avenue’s future development. The planning team gathered data from a variety of sources with the intention of introducing concept designs that would lead to infrastructural changes that would satisfy safety, mobility, and community development goals. When I scrolled through the final design concepts published on the Memphis 3.0 website I was struck by the photographs that compared current images of the avenue to the potential designs the planning team introduced. The improvements would certainly improve the landscape aesthetic and make the avenue the destination space that many business owners hoped for. However, I couldn’t help but think of the opposition to the infrastructural changes and the emphasis on gentrification. There was fear that rents would increase and those who didn’t own their property would face increasing costs for their leases. I started to think about the business owners I spoke with during the Summer Avenue oral history project; several of them mentioned owning the buildings where their businesses were located. However, this certainly wasn’t the case for everyone.
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In both Memphis and Orlando—Southern places that experienced rapid demographic changes in the last decades—restaurants and markets signal the Latinization or internationalization of communities due to the influx of Latinos and other migrants from around the world. In both locations there is a strong connection between migration, food, and the identity of the place. The increasing availability of international foods was interpreted differently, however, due to the multiple meanings of food and of the places where it is sold and served. In Memphis, these businesses are key to the revitalization of the Summer Avenue commercial district and the incorporation of the international population. Establishments like Caiman were able to offer a space of belonging and familiarity by reminding newcomers of the food they enjoyed in the homes they were sometimes forced to leave behind. In contrast, food reminded some residents of BVL that their community was undergoing rapid change. Supermarkets catering to the Latino population—such as Sedano’s and Publix Sabor—replaced the establishments where longtime residents once shopped. More Latino-owned small businesses popped up in BVL’s commercial spaces, and in these restaurants, markets, and other businesses Spanish was commonly used during everyday conversations and exchanges. As a result, both Latino and non-Latino residents commented on the changing landscape and soundscape. To residents, BVL felt like an extension of Puerto Rico, where all of your senses inform you that you’re in Latin America or that a section of Latin America has been transplanted to the U.S. South, as Juan Flores remarked about Los Angeles and New York City.