Building Home, Building Success: Oaxacan Chefs in Columbus, Ohio

Abstract

This article examines how Oaxacan chefs from Columbus, Ohio make their home and build their success. Prior scholarship shows how chefs establish home to offer themselves a springboard for future success, how chefs foster home through cooking and enjoying familiar dishes, and that food is only truly ‘at home’ when found outside of its original context. Ethnographic interviews with Oaxacan chefs working in food hall stands, taco trucks, bakeries, and restaurants in Columbus demonstrate how they move and adjust to the city; obtain their eateries; and shape their menus and future goals. Oaxacan chefs in Columbus have cultivated a sense of belonging and established a foothold in the city by employing strategies that combine preservation of cultural heritage and adherence and adjustment to local tastes.

1. Introduction

Chefs from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca in Columbus, Ohio live and work in a “new gateway” destination (Chambers 2017, p. 27). They and their families first moved from Oaxaca to states like California and Texas for its lower cost of living, economic opportunity, and family reunification. Columbus, and the surrounding Central Ohio region, has experienced demographic and economic growth over the past few decades. Oaxacan chefs in the city have seized on these conditions, and local infatuation with Mexican food, to open their own bakeries, taco trucks and restaurants in the city (Cohen and Merino-Chávez 2013; Lemon 2019; Walker and Schemenauer 2014). The Midwest is no stranger to such demographic change: for over a century, various Latin American communities have moved to cities like Chicago, Illinois and states like Indiana and Iowa for seasonal agricultural labor, jobs in industries like meat-packing, and other economic opportunities (Cullen 2018; Fernández 2012; Millard and Chapa 2004; Vega 2015).

Though Oaxacans first arrived in Columbus in the 1990s, a persistent narrative of newness surrounds them shaped by both ignorance and dismissal of their cuisine and culture and the contention that they represent an existential threat to the Midwest’s commitment to whiteness (Beltrán 2020; Chávez 2008; Gómez-Cervantes et al. 2018; Licona and Maldonado 2014; Halvorson and Reno 2022).

Oaxacans chefs in Columbus make their homes and work toward success in a context where reactions to their food include acceptance, ambivalence, and even rejection; in many cases, their food is welcomed, but their presence is not. Chefs persevere in the face of local conditions and consumer preferences, responding to these challenges as they adjust to the city of Columbus, structure their eateries, and shape their menus and goals.

I ask, how do Oaxacan chefs work to make Columbus their home? How do they build their businesses for sustained growth?

Columbus offers a key site to examine how Oaxacan chefs engage in placemaking and pursue success as the various overlapping stages of these processes are occurring in the city simultaneously. Some chefs are only beginning to secure a foothold in the city, while others are orienting their business for long-term success. All chefs in this setting balance between cooking heritage foods and producing “locally palatable versions” of their dishes they believe diners expect to eat (Ayora-Díaz 2012, p. 164; see also Abarca 2004; Gottlieb 2015; Heldke 2003). Chefs achieve a sense of belonging and business success as they pragmatically negotiate satisfying diners, pursuing success, and honoring heritage.

1.1. Home and Food

Connecting notions of home to culinary traditions are key in migratory contexts. Oaxacan chefs who live and work in Columbus balance making dishes of nostalgia and cooking to diners’ expectations in their city (Mares 2012). Prior studies of these chefs focus on the socio-economic and spatial elements of this process. Lemon described the many challenges taco truck operators face in Columbus as they establish their businesses, pursue upward mobility, and win over local diners to their vision for affordable, local food (Lemon 2019). Walker and Schemenauer, meanwhile, note that those who open restaurants, markets, and other small businesses in Columbus’ “inner ring suburbs” have helped revitalize the city’s “deteriorated commercial zones and residential neighborhoods” (Walker and Schemenauer 2014, pp. 7, 8). I expound on these examinations to explore how chefs make home and establish success as they arrive to the city, establish their businesses, and shape their menu and ambience to reflect Oaxacan tradition and meet local expectations.

Chefs pursuing these strategies in Columbus do so through a localized form of Farrer’s mobility lattice: they move through physical space and the figurative culinary field as they open and grow their eateries; expand their own career chances, and those of their employees; form social ties to diners and other local business owners; and build out formalized organizations of fellow chefs and new locations of their eateries (Farrer 2021; also see Appadurai 1988; Ferguson 1998 on the culinary field). For Oaxacan chefs in Columbus, belonging is more than a feeling: it coalesces within these overlapping decision-making processes. For migrants, home is said to emerge wherever the four feelings of “security, familiarity, community, and a sense of possibility or hope” coalesce (Hage 2010, p. 418). This fourth notion denotes that only when a location feels and functions like ‘home’ can it serve as “an existential launching pad for the self” (Hage 2010, p. 419) toward upward social mobility and economic expansion. According to this concept, then, for migrants like Oaxacan chefs in Columbus to meet their goals, they first have to establish belonging where they live and work. Only then, can they “go places” (Hage 2010, p. 419) in an economic sense and open food hall stands, taco trucks, bakeries, or restaurants with menus intriguing enough to warrant customer interest and loyalty, yet familiar enough to avoid disgust and confusion (Chen 2011; Pilcher 2012). Chefs enact their own notions of what home means to them as they work toward personal and professional success in Columbus.

Food and home also combine through the co-constructed use of foodways to “define one’s self in terms of [both] a place and a past” (Ray 2004, p. 131). These spatial and temporal elements of food are entangled into the rhythms of daily life; Ray describes how the Bengali migrants he worked with eat quick meals like breakfast before work construed as American, while also creating time to cook and eat traditional meals like lengthy Sunday dinners (Ray 2004). Oaxacan chefs working and living in Columbus strive to maintain cultural connections to heritage, culture and family. They use known ingredients and flavors to structure conceptions of ‘here’ and home by traveling from their sending communities with their food, recipes, and cookware; activating transnational networks of family and community members who send them food; and obtaining desired foodstuffs through the international supply chain at spaces like ethnic grocery stores (Grieshop 2006; Kinder 2016; Komarnisky 2009; Williams-Forson 2014). Chefs make changes as they work to meet the expectations of diners who lack knowledge of Oaxacan dishes and food adventurers who use their cuisine to claim a cosmopolitan identity (Bookman 2013; Heldke 2003; Gottlieb 2015; Long 2004). Oaxacan chefs in Columbus utilize a variety of strategies to both preserve foods of nostalgia and pursue business success.

Heldke also shows the ways food and home are linked by arguing “food is at home everywhere except its purported ‘home’” (Heldke 2003, p. 36). Her example of curry powder points out that while this spice mixture does not replicate the original process of toasting and grinding specific spices in Southern Asian cookery, this derivative is the form of curry whose taste and consistency meets the expectation of non-heritage diners. Such alterations are formed within a social imaginary of food, which Wolff refers to as selective, “consolidated, homogenized, and naturalized” (Wolff 2025, p. 8) to stand for particular notions and expectations in a given cultural and social context.

Being a Oaxacan chefs in Columbus requires flexibility to connect food across cultural divides as they cook to meet both personal definitions and outside expectations of their food (Duruz 2015; Lugosi et al. 2023; Miranda-Nieto and Boccagni 2020). Given these syncretic alterations and co-constituted imaginaries around appropriate, edible dishes migrants are proud to serve to their largely non-heritage diners, chefs form home and push for business success by negotiating broader classification of their food and adjusting to consumer tastes, preferences and trends to stay open and achieve success. Oaxacan chefs make Columbus their home and join family, friends, and community members in this new site for its low cost of living and ample job opportunities. They have worked to obtain the needed social and economic capital to open their own places. Once established, they work towards success by shaping their food and goals to their own preferences, but also the context of Columbus.

1.2. Moving to Columbus

Chefs move to Columbus and other gateway destination across the Midwest as receiving communities in U.S. cities like Los Angeles and Chicago become saturated and on a recommendation from family who have already lived in these new locations (Light et al. 1999; Vega 2015). These migrants build community with fellow Oaxacans and other Latinxs as they find work, seek social outlets, and adjust to local conditions. They come to Columbus, a Midwestern city “born a capital” (Dunham 2010, p. 1) whose growth is tied not to solely manufacturing jobs but a wider array of “recession-proof” (Chambers 2017, p. 41) sectors like city, state, and federal government offices; The Ohio State University (and its Wexner Medical Center); corporate headquarters for companies like Nationwide Insurance; data centers and distribution hubs; and new projects like Central Ohio’s planned Ohio Intel One Campus (Intel Corporation 2025; Otiso and Smith 2005; Walker and Schemenauer 2014). Oaxacan migrants find work in jobs within the service and information economy that surround these roles, especially in food service (Chambers 2017; Cohen and Merino-Chávez 2013; Tuggle et al. 2018).

1.3. Obtaining Eateries

Many Oaxacan chefs began their journey in the Columbus foodscape working in corporate food settings where they develop and hone their cooking skills, navigate cultural differences, and form work environments emphasizing teamwork and respect (Malpica 2005; Wilson 2017). Chefs who start their own eateries have gained the needed capital to make their own investment and establish a taco truck or restaurant amidst structural factors like discrimination and language barriers that limit who advance out of back-of-the-house roles (Wilson 2017). Oaxacan chefs in Columbus also learn that, to achieve their goals, they cannot solely serve co-ethnic costumers in the Latinx enclaves of the city; most have opened their eateries or parked their taco trucks in parts of the city where they serve a primarily non-heritage clientele and offer them a “Mexican cultural atmosphere” (Lemon 2019, p. 120). Examining the “receiving institutional context” (Miranda-Nieto and Boccagni 2020, p. 1023) chefs work within across Columbus demonstrates how chefs establish themselves in the city and the specific strategies they take to achieve success in their new home.

1.4. Shaping Dishes and Forming Future Goals

Oaxacan chefs cook for members of their own community, other Latinxs, food adventurers with knowledge of Oaxacan specialties like mole and tlayudas, and diners with limited to no knowledge of their regional cuisine who instead anticipate known Mexican favorites like tacos and burritos (Iannone 2017; Long 2004; Martínez-Cruz 2019; Pilcher 2012). Chefs gain loyal customers and build their success through negotiating outside tastes and using their cooking skills to balance introducing and explaining their heritage foods to new audiences and producing the types of more streamlined Mexican cuisine legible in the Columbus food scene (Gottlieb 2015; Hansen 2008; Hernández-Rojas and Huete Alcocer 2021). In these ways, these chefs fashion their restaurants as livelihoods for their families that dually capture their background and culture in a form packaged for a Midwestern clientele.

2. Materials and Methods

Interviews with Oaxacan chefs in Columbus took place over three periods of dissertation fieldwork: October 2021, September through November 2023, and April and May 2024. I visited eateries across the city that either branded themselves as overtly Oaxacan, or thanks to contacts and connections within the community, I learned were run by Oaxacans. Using this technique of snowball sampling, I obtained a diverse, representative sample of eleven interviews with four men and seven women across Columbus. My interviewees worked in a range of settings, including in bakeries, food hall stands, taco trucks, and restaurants. By capturing a wide swath of business models, I can compare experiences and strategies chefs use to establish Columbus as home and strive for success.

I refer to all my interviewees as chefs as they are pursuing cookery in a professional setting; many of them not only work directly in their kitchens but also manage their businesses with family, overseeing operations, marketing, and logistics. Their relative autonomy as business owners positions them to speak to placemaking and success from both the culinary side of altering or preserving dishes, and the managerial side of shaping the business plan of their eatery.

For this project, I devised interview questions to elucidate chefs’ migration histories; how they devise their eateries and pursue success; and how they balance cooking foods from their heritage and those that they anticipate local diners expect. Interviews took place in English and/or Spanish as I sought to gain an understanding not only of their perspectives on home and success, but also broader cultural realties, local terminologies, and chefs’ positionality in their local social and economic context in Columbus (Tierney and Ohnuki-Tierney 2012; Weisner 1997). The interviews were semi-structured, combining free-flowing conversation with planned questions to provide interviewers the “discretion to follow leads” (Spradley 1979, p. 212) while maintaining focus on key topics of importance to this study.

I coded interview transcripts for emergent themes and terms including ‘home,’ ‘heritage,’ ‘tradition,’ and ‘innovation’ to identify the strategies chefs used to root themselves in Columbus and push their businesses for sustained success. My approach draws from scholarship on how chefs negotiate the meaning of their food, reorient their dishes to preserve culinary essence, and respond pragmatically to market demands (Gottlieb 2015; Ray 2016).

Each interviewee name has been anonymized to protect their identities, and some quotations have been translated from Spanish by the author and edited to maintain flow and content. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at my home institution

3. Findings

These interviews document how chefs operate in Columbus as they move and adjust to the city, obtain their eateries, and shape their menus and goals for future success. The below vignettes capture the ways chefs first make their new confines in Columbus feel like home and then structure their livelihoods for continuing success. Within these decisions, these chefs take into account their own goals and ambitions and what is possible within localized economic and social conditions.

3.1. Moving to Columbus

Oaxacans move to Columbus on the recommendation from family. Once they arrive, they shape and respond to change as the destination becomes their new home.

Chef Rafaela Cartaya runs a Oaxacan bakery with her siblings that her mother started over twenty years ago. She said that when her aunt told her family to come to Ohio from California, “we got in the car and went. I have pictures of us in shorts and flip-flops in the Colorado snow. My mom and dad were blindsided; my dad didn’t even know where Ohio was. But he was like, ‘let’s go.’” They were seeking a new place to live, and she noted the only real push they needed was, in Rafaela’s words, that “my dad’s sister was already there” waiting for them to reunite and build a new life in this new space of opportunity.

Their bakery has become a key place to see and be seen in the local Oaxacan community, as Chef Rafaela noted “we have people that we know who [come in] on a daily basis. We know their name, their kids, where they live, basically everything about them.” This strong connection to her clientele fills Chefs Rafaela with pride, as her eatery has helped countless people feel at home in Columbus as, in their bakery, they can buy and taste pastries they miss from Oaxaca. She added they were

“one of the first Mexican bakeries in Columbus. I think what keeps us unique as that even though there are bigger bakeries now, we have this sense of community… I think what keeps us true and what identifies us as well too is our family setting, and our ingredients. And that our baker has been with us for more than twenty years.”

Though her bakery has remained essentially the same, there has been turnover in the community, with “people getting deported or going back home, but then new people come in… the older generation, they’re back in Mexico, but maybe their children are here… it’s bittersweet.” Even amidst this context of community change and growing competition, Chef Rafaela’s bakery has remained an anchor for Columbus’ Oaxacan community Her sense of belonging comes from the tight social bonds she has developed with her customers who also come from Oaxaca; she keeps culinary traditions alive by providing her community various bread, cakes, and pastries they grew up eating.

Chef Michael Reyes also described a familial move from California to Ohio, saying “my mom and dad met in California… they were both the first ones in their families in the United States… they heard Ohio was a great place to find work… now, we have been here for thirty years.” While this move was by no means easy, the move to Columbus made economic expansion possible for this family, as Chef Michael said, “here, my dad has his own landscaping business, and my mom has always had a business mindset, selling food at parks and working in restaurants… and then we got this spot, this taco truck, four years ago.” Chef Michael also noted his parents passed this work ethic and “business mindset” on to him and his siblings, “my dad, when we were working, he would ask us, ‘hey you tired?’ You cannot say that you are, because we still got a full day of work to do… he instilled that in us, just to keep going.” Their entrepreneurial spirit has prepared his entire family for the opportunities present in their new home.

According to Chef Michael, the taco truck his mother now runs (Figure 1) changed hands thanks to a family connection: “the lady who used to run it, she went to Mexico… and her daughter didn’t really want to do it, and she’s married to my mom’s cousin. So, my mom bought it from her, and that’s how we got it.” Oaxacans in Columbus like Chef Michael and his family seek out these spaces of opportunity to obtain a foothold in the local social and economic community and use localized connections and contacts to grow their own successes.

Another narrative of arrival into Columbus comes from Chef Verónica and her taquería specializing in tacos and other quick service Mexican dishes. She described how her family’s business, first opened in 2005, gave her family a place to work when they arrived in the city: “my sister first ran this place. When I came to take over, she went back to Mexico… my dad still lives there, but the rest of my family, they’re all living here in Columbus now.” This eatery has served as a foundation for members of this family, giving them a place to work as they adjust to their new surroundings in Ohio.

This original business shifted from serving as an ethnic market into its current form as a taquería. At first, Chef Verónica’s business “was a space offering various services to the community, including check cashing, money transfers, phone cards… we would also sell people bus tickets or trips to Mexico, especially for people who only went to places where they could speak Spanish.” She noted that use of these services declined as the local area shifted to become a more, in her words, “American market,” they too have transformed to achieve success. The COVID-19 pandemic led to the full change into a taquería, as Chef Verónica noted

“there was not a lot of business for our groceries. People are buying Latino products… at, like, Kroger. We did a lot of carryout during the pandemic, so we have just stuck with that model… now, when people want quick authentic Mexican food, they come to us.”

Chef Verónica shows not only how migrants establish a presence in Columbus through their businesses, but how they transform their mission to, in her case, serving offering quality, affordable dishes “really fast” to achieve success.

Chefs arrive in Columbus because of familial connections and either begin to work for them or build towards their goals of forming of their own businesses where they can both cook foods of heritage and shape their own goals for work in the city. Chefs make Columbus their home via the careful negotiation of cooking known dishes, shaping their food to local tastes, and utilizing their cooking knowledge to form their businesses.

3.2. Obtaining Eateries

Upon arriving and adjusting to local surroundings in Columbus, Oaxacan chefs open their own eateries by parlaying prior experience in food service work and persevering against challenges to their success. They work within a “mobility lattice” to expand the physical spaces where they cook, and the avenues where their food is accepted in the local foodscape (Farrer 2021, p. 2371).

Chef Esme Ruiz runs a food hall stall in Columbus with her family. They started in this industry by applying to a contest, for which they “only had so much time to create a menu. We literally just used five new recipes within a week… We didn’t have anything to start with; we just had our food.” By showcasing their “authentic, traditional, and family recipes” to serve their customers “colorful, fresh food,” they won this competition and can finally “work together as a family” in Columbus.

Chef Esme and her family had already worked in food service before gaining this food hall stand, as she said “it’s common for Oaxacans to work in restaurants… my brother worked at Chipotle, I was a general manager for Steak Escape… and my mom worked at Wendy’s. It was a dream for my family to have our own place.” Chef Esme and her family sought out work in food service and make use of the skills these roles have provided: she noted “everything I learned about food safety was at my old job… here, I teach our employees how to use a thermometer to ensure safety… and avoid cross contamination.” Skills like managing employees, providing standardized food quality, and ensuring safe conditions in the kitchen have prepared chefs like Esme for the rigors of operating their own places amidst consumer expectations and economic conditions in Columbus.

Chef Esme’s technical skills are complemented by her parents’ culinary expertise. Her dad is very “picky about avocados and tomatoes; they cannot be too soft or too hard… so we leave them out until they are ripe.” Such practices showcased not only the value of knowledge on food brought from Oaxaca to Columbus, but how it has aided this family business. Their emphasis on pairing modern technology and age-old practices to ensure high-quality ingredients and delicious preparations.

Doña Ana Torres runs a taco truck with her husband in the Clintonville neighborhood of Columbus. She got her start in fast food and made note of the skills she gained in these corporate culinary settings: “at McDonald’s, if you formed a strong team, it would stay that way. If not, you’re on your own. At Baja Fresh, it was also about teamwork. At our truck, I keep this in mind and emphasize strong teamwork.” Her emphasis centers the goals of their eatery: to “showcase our culture and dishes… we combine what we learned in our home cooking from people like my mom with our own creations.”

Obtaining a taco truck in Columbus is a time-consuming, arduous process. Doña Ana called it “so difficult… first we bought the truck in pieces, not fully made… we wanted something new; it didn’t matter if the things or parts were used… we designed it our way.” Doña Ana added another limitation for them was the “permits… we had the health one, and we had applied for the vendor’s permit… we had a lot of problems [with this], but never we gave up.”

The next step to open their taco truck was finding a spot to park, which Doña Ana said necessitated speaking to

“seven, eight places about parking it before this [current spot], and they all said no … One day, we passed this convenience store, and I thought it looked perfect… When the owner arrived, we asked him if he’d agree to let use park. He said, ‘What can I give you for a space?’ and ‘What can I give you for electricity?’ And we were waiting to sign something, but he said, ‘No, no, no, I trust you, and I want you to trust me.”

Doña Ana has been extremely satisfied with their location (Figure 2), noting “people have told us that we are lucky to have such a good place. I don’t think we were lucky. We spent almost three months knocking on doors, waiting to see, until we got here. That isn’t luck, but perseverance.” They view this location as the space to build their new home and success for the future, as evidenced by their popularity from their first day: “we were not prepared for the number of people who came the day we opened… that’s when we realized everything we had gone through was worth it because of that crowd wanting to try our food.” They have since opened another location in a new Columbus food hall, showing they have been extremely well-received to the point of being able to expand their operations to yet another location. Their truck has served as a launching pad for their familial goals and dreams as they made prudent business decisions that shape their business for localized success (Hage 2010; Ray 2011).

Chef César Muñoz’s journey in food service “began flipping burgers in Chicago at Portillo’s” and has brought him to three Midwestern states, as he added “we then moved to Indiana also to work in restaurants.” He now lives in Columbus, a space that has brought him and his family stability even amidst local challenges, where he said

“first, I was working in Easton [Town Center], and after started my own business only selling fruit and juices. This was enough sufficient to sustain us, so I got another job as an executive chef in Polaris [Fashion Place] at a steakhouse… during the pandemic that closed, so we decided to open our own… full service restaurant.”

For Chef César, Columbus is a steady location to both work in food service and, under the right conditions, establish his own eatery with his wife and daughters.

Chef César, “a Mexican chef with an American culinary background,” noted the key difference in cooking for these audiences: “in American cooking, people don’t want overcooked vegetables, they want al dente… but in Mexican cooking, people like their vegetables softer.” Another example he gave is that, in his view, “Latinos, they don’t eat red meat, they don’t want to see any red, or ‘blood,’ because they think that it’s not cooked enough. But American diners, they like their medium rare steak.” Chef César also noted these varying spice preferences; at his restaurant, he said “we’ve had to adapt because we serve many Latinos here, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Colombians, Venezuelans… who said to us, ‘we’re afraid of your food, it’s really hot’… we had to adjust our dishes to be less spicy, especially our salsas.” Though a challenge, Chef César added “people who want different things prepared than what we have on the menu. We try to accommodate them to the best of our abilities.” By changing food in ways approachable to his new audience of customers, Chef César has shaped his business as a space that ensures customers enjoy his food and keep coming back. Serving diners with unique tastes means Chef César make changes to only to suit his own preferences, but those of the diners who have brought him business success.

Oaxacan chefs in Columbus establish their eateries following from their experiences and skills gained in food service at other restaurants and the knowledge they have within their families about food preparations and recipes. They position themselves for success in their new home by fusing what they know how to cook with what the local market mandates they create in their eateries.

3.3. Shaping Dishes and Forming Future Goals

Oaxacans in Columbus also shape their menus to local conditions and consumer expectations as they frame their future goals for continued expansion and growth.

The portfolio of Chef Kelly Delgado’s Mexican food empire that she runs with her husband and brother-in-law is vast: various taco trucks, catering services, three restaurants, and a commissary kitchen. Chef Kelly said they began “as a food truck eleven years ago… selling tacos with cabeza (head) and lengua (tongue) meat more specific to our Mexican culture” at a roadside taco truck, an original menu that “changed because our audience changed” once they became a more mobile operation. Chef Kelly said this occurred because they “found that people were looking for burrito bowls, burritos, tacos, quesadillas… so we had to pivot to keep people engaged.” She said that, even as they are compelled to “pivot” and serve approachable foods suitable to their new clientele in Columbus of non-heritage diners, they are still using their “fresh, authentic, family recipes” in new ways. She had to “pivot” because diners in Columbus hold “a certain experience” about her food; she meets their preferences by making the food “a little more familiar” and removing unpalatable elements like organ meat and Oaxacan dishes like tamales. These changes are not an abandonment of tradition, but reinvention of identity to cook dishes a form palatable to diners in Columbus.

Chef Kelly’s main goal remains “ensuring the food we serve is as authentic as possible, like what my husband and brother-in-law remember their grandma doing… using specific spices, things like banana and avocado leaves in our cooking.” Cooking in Columbus is about negotiation that, in the end, bringing both compromise and growth to these restauranteurs. Chef Kelly added that they “bootstrapped after starting very organically with ethnic food and traditional recipes. Each year, we just sustain and grow” to achieve success and make Columbus their home.

Doña Tina Guzmán and her family run a mobile taco truck that operates at events, breweries and other spaces across central Ohio. She said many customers “come to our truck and ask for a ‘regular old-fashioned taco with cheese and lettuce, sour cream and tomato.’” Her frustration with this version of Mexican food is outweighed by the demand by customers for this dish, as she noted, “I am not saying this taco version is not good, but that’s not how our traditional tacos are served.” She did, in the end, “add hard shell tacos” to the menu. Other requests have led Doña Tina to also add “ground beef to the protein selection. Many customers, they would come to our truck and ask for ‘taco meat,’ we assumed that meant ground beef… we’ve had to adapt to what our clientele asks for.” Doña Tina takes action to meet not solely the foods she feels connect to her own background and notions of homey food, but what her customers expect to eat. These constraints do present her with a challenge, one that she meets by innovatively reshaping her foods in ways that distinguish her offerings and keep diners coming back.

Even within the need and demand for changes, Doña Tina still wants to “showcase Oaxacan food to our customers… and for our children, so they are proud of their cuisine.” She noted her push to expand: during the interview, she noted they are “actively looking for a place to start a sit-down taquería! We want to expand and continue developing our gastronomy here, where we live.” Doña Tina and her family have since achieved this goal, opening a restaurant north of Columbus whose menu also features the same changes to Oaxacan fare she had previously noted. Such a move shows that, by balancing preservation and alteration, Doña Tina’s business was able to expand.

After a long career in the jewelry business, Don Nicolas Ramírez “always wanted a Mexican restaurant” and opened his own in Columbus in 2021. He developed a menu for his eatery by first doing his “homework” of “checking other Mexican restaurants” around the city “to see the kind of food they offer.” He concluded a fusion was necessary, noting “we combined things so people can enjoy both traditional Mexican food and Tex-Mex1 food.” He said he hopes to bring more of these “traditional” dishes to his menu: “right now, we have fifty percent Mexican and fifty percent Tex-Mex… I would like to have eighty percent to ninety percent authentic Mexican food in the future.” As of now, his menu remains a fusion, with a steak dish called the Texas Outlaw appearing next to Pollo Oaxaca (Figure 3). Don Nicolas works to combine his goal of establishing his eatery in Ohio with serving “more modern, cosmopolitan” menu, yet knows his cookery is shaped by the prevalent tastes for Mexican food that exist in Columbus. Don Nicolas shows pursuing success means navigating what diners expect to eat and understanding the local conditions that limits the possible options for the styles of food that can be cooked. These alterations are not obvious or inherent, but they do explain the decisions chefs make as they work to run successful eateries in Columbus.

Don Nicolas noted his goal is sustaining one eatery, as he described the pitfalls of overexpansion he has worked to avoid: “when you have a successful restaurant and decide to open another… you have to get a different chef. You don’t have the same time to put in… I’m working hard for my reputation… One restaurant, that’s good enough for me.” This preference for improved quality and service in his one location over opening another location shows Don Nicolas is ambitious, but that his goals in the restaurant business are not profit maximization but cooking high quality Mexican food in his one eatery.

Columbus is a space where chefs actively renegotiate the composition and meaning of their food to ensure diners enjoy their food and their eateries stay open. Once Oaxacan chefs in Columbus establish their eateries, they craft their menus by balancing cooking heritage dishes and foods known to local consumers. They also push for success by evaluating changes and innovations they can make in Columbus as they pursue their passions and expand their business in the city. They pursue strategies that reframe their food to meet local conditions, and work to introduce heritage dishes in relatable, engaging ways.

4. Discussion and Conclusions

Oaxacan chefs face challenges and persevere in Columbus as they move and adjust to the city, obtain their eateries, and shape their dishes and future plans to local conditions and consumer expectations. They move to reunite with family and pursue economic opportunity and, once established, serve as community anchors, and pursue opportunities for success and actively participate in the “construction of the future” for themselves, their families and their businesses (Hage 2010, p. 419). They also root their menus in foods of tradition that allow them to sustain a sense of home, even as they respond and cook not only heritage dishes like mole and tlayudas but known foods like hard shell tacos. Oaxacan chefs fashion Columbus into a space for the preservation of heritage cookery, experimentation and innovation of new hybrid dishes and flavors, and incorporation of preexisting consumer notions about Mexican food.

Chefs forge ahead along a clear forward path using strategies that reflect their perspectives on how they make Columbus their home and achieve success in this locale. Chef Esme and her family have “always wanted a full-service, sit-down restaurant where we can cook our recipes from Oaxaca, but we are concerned people in Columbus are not ready for that.” Home here is shown to be a tenuous space of balancing local tastes; some aspects of Oaxacan culture and cuisine do change in this Midwestern setting.

For Chef César, meanwhile, success is the much less lofty goal of “having my family around. I have three daughters… in ten to fifteen years, I hope that they want to spend time with me… right now, they’re all here working, getting the knowledge, learning, and training.” He notes what is important to him is not solely the exact dishes or style of food he is cooking, but who he is cooking it with. Such goals position these chefs as committed to Columbus for years to come, but unsure of what the future holds with regard to the reception for their specific culinary specialties and familial cohesion.

Oaxacan chefs in Columbus balance their identity with the expectations placed upon them and their food as they make the city their home and pursue success in the local market (Cohen and Merino-Chávez 2013). The chefs I interviewed discussed the strategies and techniques they used to fuse nostalgia and adaptation as they preserve foodways, satisfy diners, and meet market demands (Duruz 2015; Hage 2010). Chefs are working within the confines of the commodification of their food in ways they deem acceptable through both “culinary experimentation and entrepreneurial innovation” (Lugosi et al. 2023, p. 111) by combining personal preferences and consumer tastes (Heldke 2003; Ray 2011; Vázquez-Medina 2017).

Columbus emerges as a key site for understanding the entwined dynamics of migration, entrepreneurship, and belonging. Recognizing how chefs work to meet their goals and adhere to broader pressures underscores why studying Oaxacan chefs in this setting matters; their anecdotes and labor reveals how nascent communities reshape local foodscapes and showcase broader patterns of immigrant adaptation and success, especially in the food service sector. Chefs are able to pivot and serve foods that fit local tastes to pursue success and do so using the mobility lattice of the physical space of eateries; the pursuit and establishment of their role and position in the culinary field; the formalization of social ties; and the connection to formal organizations and business goals (Farrer 2021; Ferguson 1998; Hage 2010).

The work contributes to theories of familiarity, context of reception, and culinary negotiation (Heldke 2003; Ray 2004), showing how belonging emerges through the interplay of personal memory, communal identity, and pragmatic strategies. These insights point toward the need for more comparative work to understand other immigrant groups in Columbus, such as Somalis (Chambers 2017), navigate similar dynamics of placemaking and business success. Future study on placemaking, food, and the strategies of chefs can also examine how Oaxacan, and Mexican, communities in other ‘gateway’ destinations develop parallel forms of belonging and success (Schmalzbauer 2014; Stuber 2021). As sites of cross-cultural contact (Walker and Schemenauer 2014), restaurant spaces reveal how migrants negotiate the pull of past, present, and future, crafting both home and opportunity within landscapes that start unfamiliar but, over time, become home.

Oaxacan chefs navigate the various complexities placed on their pursuit of home and success in Columbus, embodying both agency and resilience. They work tirelessly with their staff, and often their families, to establish eateries that honor their heritage and respond to local tastes and conditions. Ultimately, these chefs contribute the diversification of Columbus’ foodscape and represent a broader narrative of the migration story. They illustrate that, in the pursuit of culinary excellence and business success, the essence of a given culture can equally evolve and endure in new spaces these chefs call home.