front cover of Helping Out
Helping Out
Miri Song
Temple University Press, 1999
The growing body of literature on ethnic businesses has emphasized the importance of small family-based businesses as a key form of immigrant adaptation. Although there have been numerous references to the importance of "family labor" as a key ethnic resource, few studies have examined the work roles and family dynamics entailed in various kinds of ethnic businesses.

Helping Out addresses the centrality of children's labor participation in such family enterprises. Discussing the case of Chinese families running take-out food shops in Britain, Miri Song examines the ways in which children contribute their labor and the context in which children come to understand and believe in "helping out" as part of a "family work contract." Song explores the implications of these children's labor participation for family relationships, cultural identity, and the future of the Chinese community in Britain. While doing so, she argues that the  practical importance and the broader meanings of children's work must be understood in the context of immigrant families' experiences of migration and ethnic minority status in Western, white-majority societies.
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front cover of Local Flavor
Local Flavor
Restaurants That Shaped Chicago’s Neighborhoods
Jean Iversen
Northwestern University Press, 2018

The neighborhoods that make up Chicago’s rich cultural landscape have been defined by the restaurants that anchor them. In Local Flavor, the popular food writer Jean Iversen chronicles eight beloved local eateries, from Chinatown on the South Side to Rogers Park in the far North, tracing the story of how they became neighborhood institutions.

Iversen has meticulously gathered the tales, recipes, and cultural traditions that define Chicago’s culinary past and present. Rich with firsthand accounts from local restaurateurs, their families, long-time customers, and staff, Local Flavor is a community-driven look at Chicago through a gastronomical lens.

Including recipes for popular dishes from each restaurant that readers can try at home, Local Flavor weaves together ethnography, family, and food history into a story that will enthrall both food and Chicago history lovers.

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front cover of Magical Habits
Magical Habits
Monica Huerta
Duke University Press, 2021
In Magical Habits Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family's Mexican restaurants and her life as a scholar of literature and culture to meditate on how relationships among self, place, race, and storytelling contend with both the afterlives of history and racial capitalism. Whether dwelling on mundane aspects of everyday life, such as the smell of old kitchen grease, or grappling with the thorny, unsatisfying question of authenticity, Huerta stages a dynamic conversation among genres, voices, and archives: personal and critical essays exist alongside a fairy tale; photographs and restaurant menus complement fictional monologues based on her family's history. Developing a new mode of criticism through storytelling, Huerta takes readers through Cook County courtrooms, the Cristero Rebellion (in which her great-grandfather was martyred by the Mexican government), Japanese baths in San Francisco—and a little bit about Chaucer too. Ultimately, Huerta sketches out habits of living while thinking that allow us to consider what it means to live with and try to peer beyond history even as we are caught up in the middle of it.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
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