Food, Race and Working-Class Identity: Restaurantes Populares and Populism in 1930s Peru1
… And tell me, which President looked to the future? It was, believe it or not, [Sánchez] Cerro. I fully recognize that he was able to look to the future and … he grabbed the rich [by the neck] and took part of their wealth, you there [he said], you’re going to give me potatoes, you’re going to give me yucca, you’re going to give me sweet potatoes, he told them, to feed the poor neighborhoods, you bring me rice, meat, you tell me you have five hundred cows, well then, kill only five cows, otherwise, slash-slash, I’m going to snuff you too, and then, no!, you have to do what Nine-Fingers [Sánchez Cerro—who lost one of his fingers during a military uprising] says. He was a strange president. What did he do? He’d bring out the military officers, the soldiers, [and he would say] you here, you’re going to cook, and he’d go off with the trucks to the poor neighborhoods with the food, all ready to eat, the people should not be dying of hunger he would say, but he saw that that too was indecent, so he built the comedores populares [sic]. Who inaugurated them? One-eyed Oscar R. Benavides, but who started them? [Sánchez] Cerro [my emphasis]. This article examines the creation, in the 1930s, of restaurants, known as restaurantes populares, which were funded and run by the Peruvian state in order to “solve the urgent problem of [the provision of] easy, comfortable and healthy nutrition to the popular classes.”