Abstract
This paper investigates how Korean cuisine in Santiago’s Patronato neighborhood serves as a multiterritorial practice of cultural visibility and belonging within a multicultural urban context. Centered on sustainability and social inclusion themes, it demonstrates how migrant-run restaurants operate as both economic hubs and sites of meaning-making where claims of authenticity, diversity, and urban presence are negotiated. Through ethnographic methods including interviews, observation and visual documentation, the research uncovers how Korean food establishments in Patronato engage in performative practices—such as menu language, spatial aesthetics, signage and online representations—that create symbolic boundaries and cultural hierarchies. These sites of gastronomic multiterritoriality link diasporic heritage with local urban dynamics, challenging dominant narratives of homogenization. The analysis frames Korean restaurants as platforms for asserting cultural citizenship and navigating sociocultural positioning amid neoliberal multiculturalism. Food becomes a tool for migrants to carve space in urban economies and discourses, while resisting marginalization and foregrounding embodied identities. This case contributes to debates on cultural diversity, identity politics, and spatial justice, showing how routine consumer practices become political acts of representation. It is especially pertinent for themes of belonging and cosmopolitan coexistence in Latin American urban settings, where immigrant communities reshape social landscapes through everyday cultural labor.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Diversity, Cultural citizenship, Korean migration, Urban belonging, Gastronomic Multiterritoriality, Immigrant
