Chicano Lite

Abstract

This article is an ethnography of working-class, Mexican-American consumer patterns on the US-Mexico border. Through a study of locally-owned grocery stores, family parties and fast-food restaurants in El Paso, Texas, I examine the double-edged nature of border consumerism. Minority consumers, such as Mexican-Americans, often modify mainstream consumer products and processes to suit their own needs and values. The resultant consumer styles embody a considerable degree of creativity, contradiction and hybridity, especially for immigrant minorities. I show how, despite their subordinated class and status positions in US society, Mexican-Americans create spaces of resistant cultural meaning within consumer spheres normally treated as generically (Anglo-) American. I conclude that US consumer culture is both a source of self-fulfilment and a means through which Mexican-Americans become further enmeshed in a system of vastly unequal political and economic power.