The (Class) Struggle of the Kitchen: Food and Dialectic of Palatability in the Novel <i>Mamita Yunai</i> by Carlos Luis Fallas

Abstract

This paper on the classic Latin American novel, Mamita Yunai, by Costa Rican writer Carlos Luis Fallas, analyzes the miserable diet of banana plantation workers in Central America during the early twentieth century. This study proposes that the novel represents a varied textual menu of five discursive courses which underlies a “dialectic of palatability”, where the thesis is relish, the antithesis is disgust, and the synthesis is hunger. In this novel, the multinational United Fruit Company, or “Mamita Yunai,” represents an anti-mother who socially and economically exploits her children, the plantation workers, who subsist on limited rations of rice, beans, preserves, jellies, boiled bananas, and black coffee. In order to access products such as meat and fish, workers must hunt and fish under clandestine and dangerous conditions.