Sandra C. Mendiola García

Sandra C. Mendiola García (Associate Professor) is a historian of food and labor in Mexico. She has studied how the displacement of street vendors from downtown Puebla (an UNESCO World Heritage Site) resulted in the gentrification of the city center. She notes that before 1986, the residents had access to prepared and unprepared food from street vendors; now they eat and drink from retailers connected to the global economy such as Dominos' Pizza. Part of her current project examines the production and marketing of pastes (the Mexican version of British pasties) in silver mining towns of central Mexico. She is the author of Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth Century Mexico and a contributor to Latin@s' Presence in the Food Industry: Changing How We Think about Food, edited by Meredith Abarca and Consuelo Carr Salas. She recently wrote a roundtable piece for the journal Gastronomica about markets and street foods.

Dr. Mendiola teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on food history in the Americas, as well as colonial and modern courses about Latin American and Mexican history. She is affiliated with the Latina/o Mexican American Studies Program.