Natalie Santizo wins Career Enhancement Fellowship award for foodways research

Natalie Santizo, assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies, grew up in the San Gabriel Valley (SGV) where she gained a first-hand understanding of the relationship between food, labor, and placemaking in Latinx populations.  

Santizo was awarded a C&S Career Enhancement Fellowship (funded by the Mellon Foundation) for a book project tied to her research on Latinx foodways in the early 20th century. Santizo is one of a cohort of 13 junior faculty members who received 12-month fellowships while another 16 won six-month fellowships.

The Institute for Citizens & Scholars (C&S, formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) is a nonprofit whose Career Enhancement Fellowship supports young faculty across the nation with “engagement and thought-provoking research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.”

Santizo is using this academic year to research and publish her first book, “Mexican Foodways in the San Gabriel Valley: Regional Identity and Placemaking in El Monte, Baldwin Park, and La Puente, California, 1890-1950.”

“I approach this work by drawing from the fields of Chicana/o studies, history, food studies, and geography, which helps me contextualize the localized role of Latinx people within the larger movement of food across borders,” Santizo stated in her application for the award.

Here she answers a few questions about her research and the fellowship.

About the book project

My forthcoming book, “Mexican Foodways in the SGV,” pieces together a history of early 20th century Mexican-American food vendors in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California.

It weaves together a cultural history through foodways. So I think about that as the production, consumption, and movement of food and food laborers across time and space.

Legal scholars and sociologists that talk about the regulation of food vendors in Los Angeles today, trace early regulations back to the 1930s, though we know there's a larger history of regulating Chinese vegetable peddlers in the late 1800s. I think there will be an important contribution with my book to really think about the early 1900s and how food vendors were regulated through edibles peddler licenses in Los Angeles county.

What was the impetus for digging deeper into this subject?

Two summers ago, I was a Huntington Summer Research Fellow, and I was digging into different collections, but mostly the John Anson Ford papers, to try to find more information about edibles peddler licenses issued to Mexican food vendors.

It led me to even more information regarding Mexican-Americans in the SGV, the labor camps and walnut production. During my two months there, I got to meet so many different scholars. Every time I met a historian, I asked them, “Have you heard of these edible peddlers' licenses?” Invariably their answers were, “No.” 

What do you hope the reader will come away with?

I hope they come away with the realization that food vendors are placemakers. They're critically shaping how we think about and how we experience cities and regions.

I think it's also very important to see how food vendors shape how people experience and give meaning to space. It's not just about placemaking, but really thinking about a history of regulating people of color, ostracized people, and how the multilayered facets of foodways is a very important part in understanding that history. 

There's a hub of gender, race, labor, discrimination when we think about food and what we eat. Part of what my work does is also piece together a cultural history, so thinking about Mexican restaurant owners, tienditas (small stores), and workers in the labor camps, for example, in El Monte. 

Baked into your research is culture and memory — how do students engage?

I think about food, not only as production and consumption, but also as a method. For me, it's thinking about a foodways lens inside and outside of the archive, but also remembering that people's recipes and what they pass down within their families is part of cultural memory. It's a method. So often we think of food as a mere representation of culture when it's also a medium that maintains, shapes, and recreates culture (I learned this from Meredith Abarca, professor of food studies and literature in the Department of English at the University of Texas at El Paso). It's a means to recover, to piece together, and to tell those histories.

In my fall 2025 Latinx Foodways (CCS-325) course, students learned about production, consumption, movement of food, and food laborers across time and space. It's definitely more of a culturally focused course versus a nutrition course. They built their own ArcGIS StoryMaps, and they got to choose the topic related to Latinx foodways. Students presented projects such as: “Food Identity in Honduras” by Lizeth Martin “Food Access and Food Insecurity: Understanding how access, mobility and everyday barriers shape food security in Chula Vista and surrounding areas” by Emma Perez, and “Avocado Economics: When tariffs turn green gold pricier” by Nitza Novarro.

The history element, and collaboration in doing the GIS component with the Digital Humanities Center (Pamella Lach, Digital Humanities librarian) was excellent, because students gained a tangible skill. Mapping can transcend different fields, and my students, too, were from all different types of majors. Having them take what they learn about the historical element and apply it into the contemporary is super important for me. And, especially with CAL —  we're focused on developing agents of social change.

How did it feel to win the fellowship?

I feel honored to be able to represent San Diego State University, and to be one of the fellows who shows them the type of work and scholarship that we do here.