Taco truck urban topographies and the spatiality of orderly disorder

This dissertation examines Mexican immigrant socio-spatial practices around taco trucks in four cities across the United States: Oakland, California; Sacramento, California; Columbus, Ohio; and Austin, Texas. The dissertation is an empirically grounded analysis of the trucks’ social performances. Taco truck space is a representational practice that takes on a myriad of meanings to divergent community groups. Taco truck owners traverse the city to find spaces where they are most appreciated and least harassed. As they navigate these often invisible and uneven topographies, their methodical movements produce atypical rhythms in municipalities across the nation. These idiosyncratic patterns denote various American ideologies toward taco trucks in particular, and Mexican immigrants in general. Moreover, because the trucks are mobile and cannot be completely eradicated, the taco trucks become symbolic spaces of empowerment. They come to represent Mexican cultural perseverance, as well as resistance to the existing community hegemony that may try to erase them from the landscape. The dissertation elucidates the obscure social processes that sculpt a city’s cultural contours across the United States. For instance, taco truck space in some cities is often manipulated by discriminatory planning initiatives that dictate where Mexican food practices can take place; while in other more affluent neighborhoods, new artisanal food trucks plagiarize proletariat Mexican street food practices, which are primarily celebrated by non-Latino middle-class patrons. It is not uncommon for many of a city’s restaurateurs to perceive taco truck space as blight. This notion rings especially true in cases where a city adopts the new urban mantra, “Farm-to-Fork,” where the urban environment continues to be upgraded by the hands of developers. These improvements lead to the proliferation of urban landscapes with sidewalk cafes and new restaurants that ultimately push Mexican food practices to the city’s periphery. In contrast, some city planners capitalize on Mexican cuisine culture and promote taco truck space as a way to market a city’s open-mindedness and ethnic diversity to attract the creative class to further economic development. The dissertation argues that eating at taco trucks is more than just a simple act that reinforces identity to the Mexican immigrant—it is also a spatial representational practice that performs one’s right to inhabit public space and the city at large.Geography and the Environmen