At Home in the Restaurant: Familiarity, Belonging and Material Culture in Ecuadorian Restaurants in Madrid

Abstract

Making and consuming food are evident aspects in migrants’ construction and reproduction of memory, identity and belonging. Food consumption can also enable migrants to make themselves at home abroad by reproducing aspects of their past and relating them to particular places in the present. This article draws from ethnographic work in Ecuadorian restaurants in Madrid to investigate the ‘domestication’ of space through their material culture. It examines the representation and use of these restaurants to unveil multiple ways of displaying belonging and reproducing degrees of domesticity. Enacting private routines, embodying familiarity through food and decorating backbars are instances that reveal how the material arrangements in migrant-run restaurants facilitate the construction of a sense of home. From a sociological perspective, this article reveals how the boundaries between private and public, as well as migrants’ ethnicity and belonging, are constantly reshaped through material arrangements that operate as forms of domestication of space.

“It's Like Being a Parent at Work”: Antiviolence Frontline Work, Boundaries, and Intimacy During COVID-19

“…At various points during the COVID-19 pandemic, “safer at home” policies turned many service providers’ homes into a space of work. Street-level bureaucracies scattered beyond the walls of an office cubicle or public building, blurring boundaries between private and public space to the point where workers’ homes became integrated as a semipublic space (Kumar & Makarova, 2008; Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni, 2020). Unsurprisingly, this semipublic integration carries its own complex matrix of benefits and consequences for individual workers.…”

“…Sometimes work is desired to also be home, in the case of what Miranda-Nieto and Boccagni (2020) describe as a process of domestication, or “homemaking,” in the public sphere. In their research on Ecuadorian restaurants, the authors describe the methods that service workers use to make their restaurants reminiscent of “home” through decorations, layout, and menu and music choices.…”

“…These more static artifacts end up colliding with individual aspects of private life—what is done “at home,” like restaurant owners’ children doing schoolwork at a nearby table—to become part of the materiality of a public space and evoke a shared experience. Miranda-Nieto and Boccagni (2020) frame this as emotional and intimate, as “the ongoing enactment of domesticity and a sense of familiarity in a foreign environment” can bridge feelings of difference for both clients and service workers (p. 1037).…”

“…In this paper, we build on a growing body of scholarship centering these antiviolence service providers (Garcia et al, 2022;Lipp & Johnson, 2022;Murugan et al 2022;Renov et al, 2022;Shadik et al, 2023;Toros et al, 2023), highlighting the tensions of working in a sector positioned toward a public good-ameliorating and preventing violence-while facing increasingly risky, taxing, and boundary-pushing workplace conditions. Using insights from street-level bureaucracy theory (Lipsky, 2010;Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003), which intentionally foregrounds frontline workers, and critical explorations of work/home dynamics (Kumar & Makarova, 2008;Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni, 2020), we show how COVID-19 expanded and contracted public/private boundaries in antiviolence workers' daily experiences. Thus, this research adds to the extensive, necessary body of scholarship exploring violence against women under COVID-19 (Evans et al, 2020;Kofman & Garfin, 2020;Leslie & Wilson, 2020;Quinlan & Singh, 2020;Sorenson et al, 2021) from another angle.…”

Selling a house, staging a dream

“…It was not rare for customers to start spontaneous conversations about their daily lives, concerns and politics in Spain, as much as in Ecuador. Several of them seemed to experience those places as their own homes (Miranda-Nieto & Boccagni, 2020). This was the perfect environment for real estate agencies to step in, evoke the clients' homeland, and circulate their own mottos: 'invest in your country and achieve your dream -buy your house in Ecuador'.…”