Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers & Activism From World War II to COVID-19
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Winner of the 2026 Nach Waxman Prize for Food & Drink Scholarship.
Americans have developed an enormous appetite for Latinx food while paying remarkably little attention to the people who grow, process, cook, and deliver it. Lori A. Flores examines that contradiction across eight decades, from the World War II era to the COVID-19 pandemic, tracing how the visibility of Latinx food workers has declined even as demand for their labor has grown.
The book takes the US Northeast as its lens, an unexpected but revealing choice. Flores moves from upscale New York City restaurants to remote blueberry patches in Maine, covering workers with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Central America. The geography alone challenges the assumption that this is primarily a story of the West and Southwest.
What emerges is not a portrait of passivity. Flores documents a history of sustained activism against low wages, medical neglect, food insecurity, and criminalization, from mid-century labor organizing through the deliverista rights movement of recent years. The workers at the center of this history have consistently fought for the same dignity that their labor helps provide to others.
Grounded in extensive fieldwork and personal interviews, this is a timely and carefully researched work of food and labor history that takes seriously the lives of people who are too often invisible to the people they feed.
Paperback.
