1. Visiting the Mexican American Family:
Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism
by: Laura Lindenfeld
 Tortilla Soup is a „food film‟ released in 2001
 English remake of movie: Eat Drink Man Woman
 Tells the story of the Naranjo family
 Mexican American family portrayed as:
 Middle class
 Educated
 English-speaking
Legal
 Father 1st generation immigrant
 Daughters – assimilated into American culture

2. Visiting the Mexican American Family:
Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism
 Lindenfeld uses ideological criticism
 Movie is a “mediated culinary tourist experience”
(Lindenfeld,304)
 Family portrayed as light skinned
 Not scary
 In opposition to California‟s anti-Mexican initiatives
 Whites can safely observe „ethnic otherness‟
 “Viewers will have the illusion of experiencing
ethnicity without ever coming in contact with actual,
potentially fear-invoking racialized
bodies”(Lindenfeld,305). This type of movie makes it
so white viewers feel as though they have had the
Mexican experience without ever having to leave the
safety of their own environment.

3. Visiting the Mexican American Family:
Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism
Objective/Rationale
 Food as a cultural experience
 It is considered a safe tourist experience
 Commodification of Latinidad
 Does this process diminish diversity
 White Mexican vs. non-white
 Are light skinned Mexicans considered safer
 Authentic food vs. mainstream authentic food
 Reality vs. portrayed reality assimilates cultures

4. Visiting the Mexican American Family:
Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism
OBJECTIVES/RATIONALE
 Cultural Appropriation
 Have Americans adopted Mexican food
 Representation of Latina Women
 Is there a dichotomy – American vs. stereotype
 Neocolonialism
 Does this movie perpetuate a historical movement

5. Visiting the Mexican American Family:
Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism
Approaches
 Lindenfeld: Ideologic Criticism
 “Ideological criticism is concerned with the ways in
which cultural practices and artifacts produce particular
knowledge and positions for their users”(White, 2012).
 Critical Approach
 “…focus on macrocontexts such as the political and
social structures that influence communication …and the
historical context of communication” (Martin, J. &
Nakayama, T., 65).

6. Visiting the Mexican American Family:
Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism
Method
 Lindenfeld watched the movie
 Compared movie to other movies
 Researched current trends in Californian/Mexican
immigrant relations
 Literature search

7. Visiting the Mexican American Family:
Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism
FINDINGS/SIGNIFICANCE
 White middle class Americans prefer to
experience Mexican culture through
Americanized lenses.
 This movie combines all Latin cultures making
them homogenic.
 White Americans are less afraid of people who
look, act and talk like themselves.
 The food in the movie was Americanized
authentic Mexican. No barbacoa de
cabeza/barbecued beef head (Lindenfeld,310)
was served.

8. Visiting the Mexican American Family:
Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism
FINDINGS/SIGNIFICANCE
 White Americans have adopted Mexican food and
culture only to the extent that it is more American
than Mexican.
 The movie showed the Mexican American sisters
as mostly American but included the stereotype
Latina woman –fiery, “sexual spitfire”(Lindenfeld,
311) also in their characters.
 This movie continues the idea of neocolonialism
by embracing the American version of Mexican
culture.

9. Visiting the Mexican American Family:
Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism
“Tortilla Soup’s representation of Mexican
Americans as middle-class, educated, English-
speaking, and “legal” challenges Hollywood‟s
stereotypes and counters negative metaphors of
Mexicans as animals, weeds, diseases, parasites,
and invaders, simultaneously assuaging white
middle-class anxieties about the brown
population of the United States”(Lindenfeld, 305).
By making the characters in this movie look and act
more like white middle-class Americans than
Mexicans made the movie far more desirable and
marketable to white middle-class America.

10. Visiting the Mexican American Family:
Tortilla Soup as Culinary Tourism
QUESTIONS
 How do you relate to other cultures as they are
presented in Mass media? If the culture is more
like what you are familiar with do you think you
enjoy the experience more?
 How much of other cultures do you relate to food
you have eaten or mass media you have been
exposed to rather than actually traveling to other
places or meeting/knowing people from other
cultures?

11. References
Lindenfeld, L. (2007). Visiting the Mexican
American family: tortilla soup as culinary tourism.
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4(3)
303-320.
Martin, J.N., and Nakayama, T.K. (2010)
Intercultural communication in contexts. Boston,
MA. McGraw Hill.
White, M. Ideological analysis and television.
Retrieved 9/22/2010 from:
http://journalism.uoregon.edu/~cbybee/j388/ideol
ogical.html