Food, place, and memory: Bangladeshi fish stores on Devon Avenue, Chicago

Abstract

This article explores the importance of food in the production of immigrant identity and placemaking in Chicago. The Bangladeshi fish stores located on Devon Avenue, Chicago, serve the unique culinary needs of immigrants from Bangladesh and Bengalispeaking regions of India. Based on interviews with store owners and customers and architectural analyses of these stores, this research explores how everyday engagements with food, specifically fish harvested in the delta region of Bangladesh, trigger cultural memories and reproduce particular forms of shopping practices and place identities among this relatively less-studied group of South Asian immigrants. This case study suggests that immigrant world-making is Janus-faced: simultaneously looking back and remembering the past while adapting to the present and reconstituting hybrid places in both societies of origin and settlement. An examination of this tension between past and present, near and far, local and global shows how diverse material contexts influence the way we interpret and invoke food memories. By tracing the trajectory of fish, this article demonstrates that food defines a variety of immigrant places-retail streets and grocery store aisles-as well as larger ecologies and spatial imaginaries, otherwise invisible in the studies of immigrant architecture.Place is a local and tangible concept. Descriptions of place speak a language of anchored stability of location as well as meaning. However, when we examine the world of immigrants, the term "place" ceases to remain local, permanent, anchored or stable. 1 Immigrants travel to and settle down in multiple locations, often separated by physical, cultural, and temporal distances. They carry place-based memories with them and place becomes a mnemonic device in the remaking of diasporic geographies. 2 These mental and symbolic conceptions of place, or spatial imaginaries, are produced during everyday lived experiences, perceptions, and interactions. 3 Spatial imaginaries are fundamental strategies of immigrant world-making and, as geographers Cook and Crang argue, "displaced materials and practices, inhabiting many times and spaces which, far from being neatly bounded, bleed into and mutually constitute each other. " 4 Much has been written about immigrant geographies

Migration and the senses

“…For instance, Zavos (2020) describes the “loose aura of diasporic animacy” that Sikh and Muslim organizations foster by serving homeless communities at street kitchens throughout the U K , facilitating intercultural engagement and contesting problematic tropes. Emplacement and place‐making are deeply sensorial acts as well (Sen, 2016). Belonging is performed through color and aesthetics (Liebelt, 2013); transnational presence is claimed through multisensual “showing off” (Fumanti, 2013); space is ritualized “through sonorous, loud and auspicious music” (David, 2012, p. 449); and the diaspora is marked with “sites of clamour and work, boisterous communal gatherings, of cultural exchange and artistic creative production” (Morgan, Rocha, & Poynting, 2005, p. 105).…”

Toward a Theoretical Understanding of Placemaking

“…Analysis of the case studies in this investigation also suggests that our senses are critical in helping us to form an attachment to a place. Sen (2016), in a series of interviews conducted in a Bangladeshi immigrant neighborhood of Chicago looking at food, place, and memory, found that the sights and smells of food were powerful reminders to the local immigrants of a place, time, and geography they had left behind. Sen referred to this food-place memory process as "presencing" or "praesentia", and described it through a response that was recorded from one of the subjects in the study.…”

Cooking up food memories: A taste of intangible cultural heritage

“…Food memories are one's remembrances of food related pasts (Holtzman, 2006). They are reassembled fragments of past narratives that tie individuals to their respective ancestral histories, sociocultural identities, ethnicities, ways of life, tastes, and preferences (Holtzman, 2006;Sen, 2016). Food memories do not only comprise material and sensorial aspects of food, but also the nuanced remembrances of social surroundings, communal practices, and bodily knowledge (Abarca & Colby, 2016;Sutton, 2001Sutton, , 2008.…”

“…Food memories do not only comprise material and sensorial aspects of food, but also the nuanced remembrances of social surroundings, communal practices, and bodily knowledge (Abarca & Colby, 2016;Sutton, 2001Sutton, , 2008. At the individual level, one's memories of food can become powerful indicators and taste preferences that make up one's identity (Gould, 2017;Heldke, 2016); while at a collective level, food memories can define a family's shared values or a community as a whole, becoming a food narrative shared across different people threading time and space (Abarca & Colby, 2016;Sen, 2016;Sutton, 2001;Truninger, 2013).…”