Who doesn’t love tacos? But again, what is a taco? What are our expectations for what has become an American staple? Who determined them? And have all expectations equal importance and visibility on the food scene? These are some of the topics that constitute the background for the new Netflix series Gentefied, produced by America Ferrera and written by creators Linda Yvette Chavez and Marvin Lemus.

The show follows the stories of an extended family of Mexican descent in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Some are first generations, some are second and third, some are documented residents, some do not have papers… But they are all more or less connected to the taqueria Mama Fina’s, managed by Casimiro, the patriarch of the family, who prefers to speak in Spanish and constantly misses his deceased wife, Fina. He started the business with her, and her memories and traces are still painfully present in the store, from the menu board to the choice of toppings for the tacos. The restaurant has a no-frill, no-nonsense look, making it a welcoming space for the local community. The items on the menu are familiar, affordable, and comforting to the clientele.

Troubles start when the owner of the building, a young professional of Mexican descent himself, raises the rent, trying to take advantage of the gentrification process that is changing the neighborhood. Gentefication (from gente, people in Spanish) refers precisely to the dynamics that see members of the communities leverage their education and their access to financial tools to become gentrifiers themselves, with the goal of finding lower priced properties in working class neighborhoods in the hope their value rises. By doing so, they improve their social profile and their economic situation, even as working class neighbors are often pushed out. As Casimiro struggles with rising rent, he falls behind, with the risk of being evicted, he decides it is time to rethink the offering of the restaurant in order to attract more customers.

Decisions have to be made, and two of Casimiro’s grandchildren take very different positions on how to proceed. Erik, who has never left the neighborhood and struggles with his roles as an adult, a soon-to-be father, and a responsible member of the community, resists any profound change to the menu and its prices, but rather focuses on ways to expand the local clientele while providing support. An avid reader himself, he launches a program that promises a free taco to any child who borrows a book from his make-shift library and can prove they have actually read it.

His cousin Chris, who has studied business in a midwestern college, works as a sous-chef in an elegant restaurant owned by a mercurial and quite racist white chef, and aspires to attend culinary school at the Cordon Bleu, prefers a completely different approach that reveals his preferences for fine dining and refinement. He proposes creative tacos, charges for adds-on, and overall tries to lift the profile of the place to entice a new clientele beyond the locals. However, when he tests his curries chicken tikka tacos with current regulars, the reactions are of shock and disgust. His attempts at charging for little extras are met with even more disdain.

While Erik has little issues concerning his belonging to the community, Chris is often referred to as a coconut (brown on the outside, white on the inside) because of his education and class: in other words, an outsider among other Mexicans. He struggles to connect with his Latino coworkers in the upscale restaurant where he works, and he goes as far as to accept to submit himself to a hilarious series of tests to prove his Mexicaness, which include the ability to recognize Mexican junk-food snacks and sweets. The tension between Erik and Chris, who have clashed since childhood but in the end love each other as family, is one of the narrative elements that the show writers use to make the contemporary dynamics of gentrification in Mexican communities visible and readable to the viewers.

Eventually, Casimiro himself gets convinced of the need to spruce up the menu, but he does it by starting from his wife’s recipes, carefully kept in a metal box, and experimenting with variations on those. The final results, although innovative, are within the palate standards and preferences of his habitual customers, while they allow him to entice white foodies always looking for the new hot thing. Inevitably, the store and its owners find themselves in the online world of social media, with mixed results. Eventually they decide to be featured on a food tour meant to present Boyle Heights to tourists and hipsters from other parts of town. The move provokes the ires of the local anti-gentrification activists, including the girlfriend of Casimiro’s niece. One of the main characters in the series, Ana is trying to make her name as an artist and ends up working and painting a same-sex-love-themed mural for a white realtor that is bent on changing the neighborhood by buying buildings and creating a local art scene (to the delight of his white peers).

Despite a constant temptation of showcasing food shots in a food-porn style, the show manages to stay realistic, with full-fleshed characters that do more than just symbolizing different components of the complex and multi-layered Mexican community in Los Angeles. It is these protagonists that endear themselves to the viewer, making the show entertaining without being preachy or condescending.

A similar set of issues (migrant workers and their centrality in the US food industry) is the focus of the first episode of Andrew Zimmern’s new show What’s Eating America on MSNBC. The network on which it airs inevitably influences the perspective on the topic, which is likely supposed to get the approval of well-meaning, liberal, left-leaning, pro-migration middle-class viewers (full disclosure: I am part of that demographic). Zimmern travels through the US following the supply chain of the ingredients featured in the dishes enjoyed during a catered meal in Congress. This narrative tool provides Zimmern with the opportunity to meet Mexican harvesters in California on H2A visas, documented non-immigrants (but non-citizens) from the Marshall Islands in the chicken industry in Arkansas, foreign crab meat pickers on H2B visas (meant for meat and fish processors), and restaurant workers, including one that worked for many years in one of President Trump’s resorts without proper documentation.

The differences and implications of the various kinds of foreign guest worker visas are discussed at length, and useful information is provided. We learn that most of these workers do pay taxes but have no right to access Medicaid or Social Security, that 22% of restaurant staff are foreign born, and this percentage goes to up to 62.8% in the case of workers in the fish and meat industries. The migrants’ fundamental role in the US food system is made visible, also through conversations with Spain-born star chef José Andrés, well known for his humanitarian interventions and his political positions.

However, What’s Eating America normalizes the presence of foreign workers as a necessity because no American would do their work. Which is true, but the narrative fails to underline how those jobs are paid very little, are physically exhausting and at times dangerous, and the workers survive in basic living conditions. While the revenue from their stays in the US certainly helps them support their families at home, they are represented as content and grateful, despite their dire situation. Moreover, no mention is made of the tensions surrounding the presence of temporary workers, whose low salaries make it more difficult for local labor (often citizens of color) to get well-paid, long-term, and possibly unionized jobs.

The questions the two shows ask are not simple. They offer very different perspectives which in turn reflect diverging political agendas and contrasting attitudes toward the migrant population. However, both agree on the fact that without immigrants and migrant communities of second or third generations Americans would eat very differently, if any food at all could actually land on their tables.

Thanks to my colleague Mireya Loza from the NYU Nutrition and Food Studies Department for discussing the two shows with me.