All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned at the Convenience Store

Say you were in a grocery store in a foreign country—let us say, for the sake of simplicity, that it is France. While perusing the aisles, you pass by the racks of potato chips, crisps and other delights. And there something catches you eye: it is a bag of chips with a small, soft-focus image of a football cheerleader leaping in the air, pom-poms flying, in front of a football stadium. The chips are called "Les Americains." (Or, to translate this to an English idiom, let's say the woman is decked out in Burberry drinking a pint of Scrumpy Jack and the crisps are called "Les Anglais"). Well, this is precisely the kind of experience Old Ken had on a recent trip to a convenience store in greater London, where he found a variety of chips called "Latinos."

Now, coming from a country that has a substantial Spanish-speaking poplulation, Old Ken is well aware that the term "Latinos" is a common term for those who identify with a Latin American heritage. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first usage of this term, which adds the Spanish masculine/inclusive plural suffix "os" to an abbreviation of Latin-American, to a Texas newspaper in 1946. Old Ken, never much of one for figures, can't quote to you the population of those of Latin-American heritage in Britain, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is much, much lower than in the US.

Surely we have many cases where a people or a place gives name to a food or food-related item: turkey (which is an abbreviated form of "turkey-cock," a North African bird akin to the American turkey, which was imported to Europe through Turkey) or china (the high-quality porcelain imported to Europe and later America from China). So, isn't it just a bit of marginally offensive commercialism that one can buy a bag of "Latinos" in Britain? Said differently, is attention to cultural eccentricities such as this any more than that "narcissicism of insignificant differences," which seeks to produce distinctions where profound similarity is really operative?

Perhaps; but it strikes Old Ken that the historical legacy of the British "Latinos" is informative. As you will no doubt recall, Britain has a long heritage of distrust and animosity toward things Spanish—a "black legend" that can be traced back to Elizabethan propaganda (if not before) casting Spaniards as cruel, conniving Papists eager to enslave Protestant England. Maritime heroes of the Elizabethan era, such as Raleigh and Drake, were celebrated for their exploits against the Spanish Armada. And as recent cultural historians have demonstrated, the justification for British colonial expansion (particularly in the Americas) was frequently articulated by means of comparative claims for the rapacious cruelty of the Spaniards' colonial project.



So, with these things in mind, let's take a little closer look at "Latinos." In the upper right hand corner of the bag (and repeated on the back as we will see momentarily), we find a half-length depiction of a costumed female dancer, her outfit reminiscent of the garb worn at the pre-Lenten Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro. Although the photograph above is fairly poor quality, the image on the bag is no gem itself; the image is so heavily saturated with a kind of fuchsia film that we can scarcely make out the details of the dancer's tiara and impressive feather headdress. Pity!



In any case, on the back we find the following remarkable caption. The claim that these are a "new" kind of chip was intriguing to Old Ken. They will hardly surprise anyone who has had this brand of chips previously; same shape and texture. And where were these "fantastic flavors"? The chips I sampled taste something like a cross between barbeque and "cool ranch." Whose fantasy is that? Well, Old Ken isn't sure exactly how illuminating this little meditation on a bag of chips has been; but once again one senses that there is something to be learned in everything, as long as we are willing to look in the right way.