Households in transit: Migration and commensality in Mexico

Abstract (English)

In many branches of social sciences and public policy, including anthropology, the household has been a key unit of measure and analysis for understanding a range of questions, ranging from poverty levels to spending habits to food insecurity. But what exactly does the household mean when we speak of food practices and food security? What types of social and kinship formations are reified and which are hidden when we speak of the household? How can an ethnographic approach expand or challenge prevailing understandings of the household?
This paper takes these questions as a theoretical point of departure, in order to analyze food security practices among populations who are difficult to categorize in terms of the conventional unit of the household: migrants who find themselves in the process of transit in Mexico. Drawing on recent studies of migration in anthropology and related disciplines, the paper looks at how mobile populations enter into different configurations of commensality, conviviality and residence while in transit, and asks how these constitute or challenge a household unit. How, the paper asks, are households constituted when we separate hearth from home? What spaces or practices emerge as central? Empirically, the paper analyzes how migrants in transit eat, with whom, and why in order to trace the social groups and spaces of intimacy which are constructed when people find themselves far from and without home. The paper combines anthropological studies of food with theories of mobilities to suggest that food practices of procurement, sharing, and commensality may serve as useful ways to understand “households in movement.”