For the final event of the Fall 2025 Pépin Lecture Series, author and historian Lori A. Flores joins us to discuss her latest book, Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19.
Copies of Awaiting Their Feast will be available for purchase.
About the Book:
Though Latinx foodways are eagerly embraced and consumed by people across the United States, the nation exhibits a much more fraught relationship with Latinx people, including the largely underpaid and migrant workers who harvest, process, cook, and sell this desirable food. Lori A. Flores traces how our dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor has evolved from the World War II era to the COVID-19 pandemic, using the US Northeast as an unexpected microcosm of this national history.
Spanning the experiences of food workers with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America, Flores's narrative travels from New Jersey to Maine and examines different links in the food chain, from farming to restaurants to seafood processing to the deliverista rights movement. What unites this eclectic material is Flores's contention that as our appetite for Latinx food has grown exponentially, the visibility of Latinx food workers has demonstrably decreased. This precariat is anything but passive, however, and has historically fought—and is still fighting—against low wages and exploitation, medical neglect, criminalization, and deeply ironic food insecurity.
About the Author:
Lori Flores' research and writing focus on Latino life, labor, immigration, and food history, particularly when it comes to the US Northeast. She is an expert on the Bracero Program and Mexican guestworkers, the US farmworker rights movement, food laborers' conditions, and relationships between citizen and immigrant Latinos. She is the author of the new book Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19 and Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement. She also directs Stony Brook's Latin/x American and Caribbean Studies Center and Program.
