"Boast now, chicken, tomorrow you'll be stew": pride, shame, food, and hunger in the memoirs of Esmeralda Santiago.(Critical essay)

"My Mami and Papi can feed us without your disgusting gringo imperialist food!"

--Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican (82)

"If you teach a man to fish, he will eventually grow tired of mackerel and want lobster."

--Esmeralda Santiago, The Turkish Lover (218)

Reflections on food bookend the three memoirs Esmeralda Santiago has written to date: When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), Almost a Woman (1998), and The Turkish Lover (2004). The first memoir opens with a nostalgic meditation on a green guava--a bittersweet reflection that seems to romanticize her memories of being Puerto Rican and to suggest that her childhood environment will be remembered with a measure of pride, and even a sense of cultural superiority. Her last memoir, by contrast, closes with an old Puerto Rican saying that warns against assertions of pride via an analogy with chicken: "Alabate pollo, que madana te guisan. Boast now, chicken, tomorrow you'll be stew" (Lover 337). In between these two bookends, her memoirs are characterized by an often contradictory relationship to pride and food. The epigraph to a key chapter in When I Was Puerto Rican, for example, highlights the power of food, and perhaps pride, to harm: "L0 que no mata, engorda" ("What doesn't kill you, makes you fat") (63). And some of the other cultural rules about eating that she is raised with also create ambivalent responses. For example, rules such as "once you kill the animal, it's a sin to waste anything that can be eaten" (Puerto Rican 43) and "when somebody gives you something to eat, you eat it, even if you throw it up later" (136) seem thoughtful and sensitive, and yet somehow unappetizing to follow. Taking my lead from the prominence of these ambivalent food-related pronouncements, I will show that close attention to Santiago's vexed relationship with food and food practices can shed new light on a critical understanding of her memoirs.

Critics most often discuss Santiago's memoirs in order to define her ethnic identification as either "Puerto Rican" or 'American." Evaluating her behavior and attitudes within a framework of anti-colonial politics, these critics note a progression from greater cultural identification with Puerto Rico and a corresponding rejection of colonizing forces, which they celebrate, to greater identification with and even assimilation to the colonizing culture, which they decry as evidence of an opportunistic striving that requires Santiago to reject and even betray her "own" culture. By focusing instead on some of the mechanisms that underlie both identifications, I will reveal a degree of continuity in her apparently contradictory choices and so complicate the evaluation of those choices--her former position is not so clearly to be valued, especially if it is valued uncritically, and her latter position is not so clearly to be devalued.

One mechanism that makes Santiago's relationship to culture so vexed has been identified by Frances Negron-Muntaner as paramount in the constitution of a prideful Puerto Rican or boricua identity. (1) Negron-Muntaner argues that Puerto Rican attempts to value themselves have "frequently been staged through spectacles to offset shame" and that boricua identity as we know it would not exist without the "shame" of being Puerto Rican (xiii). The shame that she theorizes is not the product of an individual inferiority complex, but a mechanism that constitutes "social identities generated by conflict within asymmetrical power relations" (xiii). Boricua identities have been produced in a political environment marked by various "sites of 'colonial' shame" in which Puerto Ricans have been degraded; as a result, boricua pride is not a freely chosen affirmation but the "effect of a subjection" (6). Since the identity that defines itself as a source of special pride is so closely tied to shame, the identity is "constitutively shameful" and is, inevitably, an "ambivalent" identity (8).