Vanessa Castañeda, Davidson College: “Acarajé and Barbie: Baianas’ Refusal to Whiten a Legacy of Afro-Diasporic Resistance in Salvador, Brazil”

Vanessa Castañeda is the James B. Duke Assistant Professor of Afro-Latin American Studies at Davidson College, where she teaches and conducts community-engaged research at the intersections of race, gender, food, culture, and political economy in Latin America and the African diaspora. She completed her PhD in Latin American Studies from Tulane University, where she was trained as an anthropologist and Latin Americanist. Her scholarship centers on Afro-Brazilian women’s labor, heritage, and resistance, with particular emphasis on the cultural politics of the baianas de acarajé--  predominantly working-class Black women who sell regional foods in the streets of Salvador, Bahia with culinary origins in West Africa. In the last century, the baianas de acarajé women become key figures in regional and national Brazilian identity and, more recently, central icons of African heritage tourism.