Though Latin American cuisine has fully permeated and been embraced by the United States, Latin American/Latinx food workers of all kinds—from farmworkers to restaurant workers to street vendors—experience a paradoxical amount of criminalization, invisibility, and exploitation in the country.

In Awaiting Their Feast I trace how the nation’s dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor has evolved from the World War II to COVID eras, using the US Northeast as a fascinating microcosm of this larger history.

Illuminating the experiences of food workers with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America, this book travels from New Jersey to Maine and examines different links in the food chain, from farming to seafood processing to restaurants to delivery apps. What unites this eclectic material is my argument that as our national appetite for Latinx food has grown, the visibility of Latinx food workers has drastically decreased, by design. This precariat is anything but passive, though. They have fought—and are still fighting—against low wages, medical neglect, criminalization, and deeply ironic food insecurity.