Negotiating Space and Taste in Los Angeles’ Oaxacan Community

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As I crested the hill leading up to my scheduled interview at Las Maneras Oaxaqueñas, a restaurant and market along the famed Oaxacan Corridor of Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, the first thing I saw was a mural. This mural captures the organized chaos of the Tlacolula marketplace in Oaxaca, near the restaurant owners’ hometown, depicting a woman spooning atole, a hot drink made of ground corn, milk and cinnamon, into small bowls as customers wait for a tlayuda, a Oaxacan open-faced corn tortilla topped with beans, cheese, and vegetables, while a wholesaler looks on selling corn, cocoa, and wheat.

This mural might imply that this business replicates these uniquely Oaxacan sights, smells, and flavors in L.A. But this is a distinct space, as Tlacolula is not on Pico Boulevard. This juxtaposition, and my discussion with the restaurant owners, prompts me to consider migration as both spatial movement and a renegotiation of taste.

Vicente and Maria, the owners of Las Maneras Oaxaqueñas, negotiate both their own migratory journey and notions of taste as they balance adherence to traditions with adaptation to new conditions in their site of settlement. Their lived experience and restaurant demonstrate that both people and taste migrate. Carolyn Korsmeyer describes it as a suite of shared preferences representing a consensus; in food, this is when diners agree a dish is perfect as is, needs more salt, or is too spicy. Can a shared consensus emerge between what this business considers good to cook and what their Angeleno diners view as good to eat?

To interview Vicente and María, the two siblings who run Las Maneras, I sat down in their restaurant located just across the street from the mural and market on a chilly January Monday, chilly at least for Southern California standards. This eatery is a small and inviting space of eight tables in a typical Los Angeles strip mall: an L-shaped grouping of a liquor store, Las Maneras, and a laundromat. The design of the space emulates Oaxaca: beyond its black chairs and brown faux-wood tables, its off-white walls were adorned with a hand-painted etching of characteristic Oaxacan clay pots sitting on top of a wood fire, alongside paintings of two famous Mexican women: the Virgen de Guadalupe and Frida Kahlo.

The menu was a laminated purple, brown and yellow sheet featuring an extensive list of Oaxacan breakfasts, soups, stews and entrees, and also Salvadoran dishes including eleven types of pupusas. Vicente and María took over this space, originally a Salvadoran restaurant, during the pandemic and retained this legacy, opting to keep the mostly Salvadoran staff and add their Oaxacan specialties to the pre-existing menu. This is a space where Oaxacans and Salvadorans live, work, shop and, most critically, eat side by side. Since they operate within a multi-ethnic mosaic, they understand their unique space in the community and shape the tastes of this eatery to meet the expectations of both a Oaxacan clientele, and also long-term patrons who still come for this Salvadoran food. 

Vicente arrived at the table to begin our interview; he is in his early 20s and wearing a dark blue polo and jeans with an apron over the top. He began telling me in Spanish about his hometown: “I am originally from a town close to Tlacolula in Oaxaca’s Central Valleys. There, I was able to learn the origins of our traditions, dishes, and really all about our food.” This proud connection to a particular municipio, or market town, speaks to the vital connection to home for Oaxacans who have moved abroad. They are part of a diasporic community continuously rooted to regional ties and other commonalities, including culinary traditions. 

Vicente views Oaxacan food as both world-renowned and deeply tied to place: “We have intense, extensive gastronomy in Oaxaca… In every town, even those that are close to one another, they prepare their food, like their mole, differently. Every town has their own toque (touch).” This variety and intensity of flavor  allows chefs like Vicente to replicate their municipio’s toque in new confines and maintain a base of customers who still want to enjoy Oaxacan dishes in the same form as they were back in their ancestral home. Migrants seeking out Tlacolula food like that painted in the mural have found exactly what they are looking for at Las Maneras.

Vicente said he migrated to L.A. to be reunited with his siblings, “who first came here when I was thirteen or fourteen… My parents, they had immigrated to the U.S., but then they went back to Oaxaca, and I was born there.” This separation was hard on the family: Vicente first studied music in college in Mexico before deciding to join his siblings and run Las Maneras with his sister: “I was in Oaxaca the first nineteen years of my life; it’s only been three years since I arrived here… I came during the pandemic.” During this long and arduous journey, he again noted he had support from family: “My mom came to meet me [in Mexico]. She helped me, and so did my brother … and now we are all reunited here, where we live together and work together.” 

Operating a restaurant with family members is a task Vicente is familiar with, as he ran a taco stand back in Mexico with his mother. They sold “coal-grilled tacos, and people went crazy for them… They received great support and acceptance in L.A.; people go crazy for it, both others from Mexico but those from elsewhere too.” Food moves across borders: people like Vicente find there is a hungry audience of diners who want to continue to eat as they did in Mexico, but also those from other backgrounds who enjoy trying, and enjoying again and again, a variety of Mexican foods, like coal-grilled tacos from Tlacolula.

At this juncture, María joined the conversation. She was in her mid-30s and wearing a pink sweatshirt, jeans, and an apron. She spoke, also in Spanish, about the roots of their business in Los Angeles:

“We started as street vendors, selling small crafts and clothing to family members and friends. Then those same clients were asking for Oaxacan food products like bread, tlayudas, quesillo (Oaxacan cheese), and so we grew and now we’ve had the market across the street for six years. Then our clients, they were asking us for food, that’s how the idea of ​​opening a small restaurant was born.”

Responding to the recommendations and requests from their clientele, Las Maneras grew from a business solely on the street to now occupy two storefronts. Many in the community continue to rely on Las Maneras market for produce, canned goods, imported cheese, homemade tortillas, and Oaxacan cuts of popular meats like chorizo sausage, cecina (marinated pork), and tasajo (thin-sliced beef). This supportive community of customers who want these Oaxacan products fosters demand. Not only do these friends and family offer economic and moral support, but their desires for the familiar tastes of Oaxaca permitted the growth of Las Maneras into a market and eventually a sit-down restaurant. 

Vicente and María told me they do little to alter their food, contending that “all the dishes are the traditional recipes from our family. We do not make modifications.” Their earnest assertion clashed with what became clear to me later, that they do indeed make changes to suit local tastes. Modification to dishes is necessary, especially given the Salvadoran roots of the restaurant space and their goal of expanding their clientele beyond Oaxacan and Salvadoran customers to include all Angelenos. 

Vicente proudly described Las Maneras’ ability to transform traditional Oaxacan dishes to be meatless and allergen-free and thus suitable to a health-conscious customer base in Los Angeles: “Now, we have to adapt… [and make] things like mole without nuts… We’re trying that out with other dishes, making them vegan, organic. We have soups, vegetables like chepil greens, beans, all that can be made without any animal products.”

Why would they assert both that their recipes are unmodified, and also that they are expertly modified to meet the needs of their diners? I would urge us to carefully consider that Vicente and María did not lie and are not confused. Rather, their responses reiterate their stated goal of the direct replication of Oaxacan dishes. This goal has shifted as they must be flexible to the realities of local conditions where they share space with people from around the world. Running a Oaxacan restaurant in L.A. means Vicente and Maria must continue to unearth what it even means to cook foods from home, and shape dishes and economic decisions to what customers (and potential customers) want to eat.

This constant negotiation of taste shows the impact of migration on Vicente and María, who work every day to simultaneously “bring Oaxacan food to the top, to the highest level… so that everyone tries the food.” Can their food both be elevated to the highest level, and still remain accessible to everyone? Using ingenuity, resilience, and a distinctive toque, they are attempting to do both: thus, their eatery cannot simply transpose Oaxacan dishes and flavors to Los Angeles. Vicente and María have worked hard to build a loyal, wide-ranging customer base, to achieve monetary success, and to grow their eatery. They make changes that they believe in, that suit the desires and expectations of their diners. 

The mural that welcomes visitors to Las Maneras Oaxaqueñas depicts a part of Tlacolula’s foodscape. The Tlacolula market, depicted in the mural at Las Maneras, is 2,000 miles away from this corner of Los Angeles. Yet this unique, hybrid business is still part of Tlacolula’s foodscape, extended through the careful renegotiation of taste at Las Maneras.

Note: Names of people and businesses are replaced with pseudonyms, and quotations originally in Spanish are translated by the author.

Ariana Gunderson is the section contributing editor for the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition.