Lechón Asado y El Macho: Exploring the Symbolic Dynamics of Cuban Identity in Miami through Food Performance

Annually during Nochebuena (Christmas Eve), immigrant Cuban families engage in the continual reconstitution of a fragmented food habitus by roasting a whole pig. This exhibition explores spaces within the local, hyper-masculine foodway of lechón asado in Miami, FL and the roles, symbols and meanings reproduced through performative interaction(s) with the human and inhuman body and its shifting relationship to the grotesque. Through an attention to the procedural aspects of the ritual performance, the artist captures how negotiations with space through material emplacement parallel issues of identity formation among multigenerational immigrant communities. El lechón asado is a cultural marker, a vessel for embodied knowledge(s), a source of cultural hybridity, a site of power, and an exotic commodity.