Latin American History Speaker Series: Street Food Activism: A Reconceptualization of Brazil’s Baianas de Acarajé with Vanessa Castañeda, Davidson College.
Vanessa Castañeda’s research centers on the baianas de acarajé, predominantly older, working-class Black women who are street vendors in Salvador, Brazil, that sell typical regional foods with culinary origins in West Africa. The baianas de acarajé also have come to exist as central icons of the African heritage tourism and cultural figures of regional and national Brazilian identity. Using interdisciplinary methodologies, including archival research and twenty months of community-based ethnographic fieldwork with the National Association of Baianas (ABAM), Vanessa Castañeda’s work reconceptualizes the baianas as political agents of Black feminism for self and collective liberation. She shows how the women have mastered navigating their mobility in accessing multiple spaces of power, both figuratively and spatially.