Victor Valle’s latest book returns to the culinary themes he began to explore in the 1970s, when he and his wife, Mary, prepared several feasts based on family recipes and the garden produce and goats they raised. The praise he received from his friends and family during this decade helped him appreciate that culinary legacy in a new light.

He also immersed himself in the translation of Latin American poetry and prose that earned him an NEA fellowship and the cronista gaze he brought to the Los Angeles Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to a multi-part series on Southern California’s Latino community.

He next wrote Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine (1995) as a culinary crónica of the poems, recipes, and letters the women in his family had curated since the 19th century. The book garnered literary nominations from the Julia Child Cookbook Award and the James Beard Foundation Awards, an Italian-language edition, and a chapter included in the Library of America’s American Food Writing: A Literary Anthology.

In his next book, Latino Metropolis (2000) he wedded urban theory to gastronomy. As its principal author he wrote a much-cited chapter that explored the relation between culinary representation and the exploitation of undocumented LatinX restaurant workers. He then dove deeper into urban studies his next two books. The late Mike Davis praised City of Industry: Genealogies of Southern California Power (2009), a critical genealogy of a privatized city, as “a stunning non-fiction sequel to Robert Towne’s Chinatown.” LatinX Writing Los Angeles: Nonfiction Dispatches From A Decolonial Rebellion (2018), a co-written anthology with critical essays exploring how LatinX nonfiction has been disappeared from the city’s literary canon, would guide his genealogy of the more than five centuries of chile-eating metaphors.