Diasporic Foodways: A Relational Ontology

Abstract

As people move through diaspora, food travels with them—carrying cultural meaning, memory, and relation. This study asked: How do traditional food practices among Indigenous, Mexican, and Jewish diasporic people living in the United States help preserve collective memory, identity, and cultural survivance amid displacement? The subquestions examined foodways through four lenses: as relational onto-epistemologies; as sites where memory and resistance intersect amid displacement; as artisanal knowledges and ecologies of knowledges expressed through borderland thinking and survivance; and as shaped by relationships between people, land, and nonhuman beings. The study was grounded in decolonial, participatory, and relational frameworks and conducted with 10 co-participants who engaged in talking circles, journaling, storytelling, and relational interviews centered on food practices. Reflexive thematic analysis, conducted in dialogue with co-participant feedback, generated five themes: food practices as identity and cultural continuity; food practices as an embodied archive of cultural memory; living nepantla: foodways of liminality and survivance in diaspora; everyday resistance—foodways as cultural assertion; and food practices as relational ecologies. The findings underscore that diasporic foodways are partial and situated, resisting universal claims. Implications highlight foodways as relational practices that preserve cultural continuity, resist erasure, and sustain belonging across displacement. They also affirm foodways as living archives where memory, survivance, and relationality endure, offering possibilities for reimagining depth psychological inquiry and decolonial praxis.