Consuming at the Kaufhalle: Migrant Laborers, Food, and the Creation of Home in East Germany

Paige Newhouse, University of Michigan

After Kim Thanh arrived in East Germany in March 1987, she quickly realized that she would have to adapt to the produce and other foodstuffs available to her in East German grocery stores. She found “turnips, cauliflower, and cabbages. Potatoes as well. Sugar, milk, noodles…and rice, but very strange rice.” Like other Vietnamese women working in East German factories, she shopped in groups of two or three, purchasing food for her coworkers who were at their shifts and could not make it to the Kaufhalle that day. The communal purchasing habits of Vietnamese laborers irritated East German shoppers, who increasingly accused their Vietnamese comrades of buying all the produce and leaving none for them. This paper examines how migrant laborers such as Kim Thanh recreated a sense of home and community for themselves in East Germany through their purchasing and consumption habits, despite not having access to the fruits, vegetables, and rice they ate in Vietnam. At the same time, supermarkets became spaces of conflict, where Germans developed lasting racist tropes and prejudices against their foreign comrades. This research builds on work from Sara Pugach, who has written about the tension between the antiracist projects adopted by the East German state and the everyday xenophobic and racist encounters experienced by African students. It also engages with scholarship by Encarnación Rodríguez Guitiérrez and Pinar Tuzcu, and Peggy Piesche, who have centered migrants’ intersectional identities as people of color, women, and members of the LGBTQA+ community in narrating the history of German division. How did migrant laborers such as Kimh Thanh push back against and resist stereotypes that Germans were developing about them at supermarkets?

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 28. Diasporic Identities