Who Is Oakland?

This site-specific installation at the Oakland Museum of California examined the influence of diverse immigrant communities on Oakland’s food and street culture. The objects in the installation include popular food items from the busiest Asian and Latino food markets in the Fruitvale and San Antonio districts, two large immigrant neighborhoods in East Oakland. The piece is a homage to the powerful and emotional role of food and cultural symbols for migrants families who strive to hold fast to their home countries. In my own migrant family, food symbolized a ritual through which we resisted assimilation. I would desire fast food as a child because it represented what it meant to be American. But after years of learning about food justice and environmental racism, I realized the many ways in which the food economy exploits migrant labor, while fast food restaurants dominate in migrant neighborhoods and contribute to diseases like...