Street Food Activism: A Reconceptualization of Brazil’s Baianas de Acarajé

Vanessa Castañeda earned her Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from Tulane University in 2021 and was the Guarini Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Afro-Latin American Studies at Dartmouth College from 2021-2023. Her research centers on the baianas de acarajé, predominantly older, working-class Black women who are street vendors in Salvador, Brazil, that sell typical regional foods with culinary origins in West Africa. The baianas de acarajé also have come to exist as central icons of the African heritage tourism and cultural figures of regional and national Brazilian identity. Using interdisciplinary methodologies, including archival research and twenty months of community-based ethnographic fieldwork with the National Association of Baianas (ABAM), Vanessa Castañeda's work reconceptualizes the baianas as political agents of Black feminism for self and collective liberation. She shows how the women have mastered navigating their mobility in accessing multiple spaces of power, both figuratively and spatially. Castañeda's research has been supported by the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) Initiative Scholarship, the Tinker Foundation, and the US Fulbright Program.

Vanessa Castañeda is also currently a Future of Food Fellow with the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN) with the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Her teaching has focused on the histories and cultures of the African diaspora in Latin America, food & identity across the Afro-Americas, and race across the hemisphere. She employs an interdisciplinary approach that centers diversity, social justice, and empathy.

As a first-generation student, Vanessa Castañeda is very committed to mentorship and educational equity, and was the founder of the Undocumented Student Support Committee at Tulane University.