Bellaire Street, the primary road running through Houston's Asiatown, is as familiar to me as the memory of the Corolla my grandfather drove to run our weekly errands. The ink of every Sunday's Chinese newspapers staining my fingertips, the weight of Hong Kong Food Market grocery bags, the taste of custard- filled Taiwanese pastries; such visceral memories of my childhood are starting places for me to map the aesthetics and food cultures of the racialized geography that makes up Asiatown. From the first strip mall built in the 1980s to the gentrification pioneered by international restaurant chains today, the transformation of Bellaire Street is reliant on the evolution of traditional Asian aesthetics and food/ ie cultures to sustain commercial (re)development.

An ethnic enclave with a decades- long history and rapidly growing residential/ retail opportunities, Asiatown exemplifies how Houston came to be one of the most diverse cities in the US (CultureMap, 2021). This narrative of multiculturalism has simultaneously justified the displacement of long- time Asian/ Asian- American, Latinx, and Black working- class residents in the south- west corridor of Houston. Since 2004, Houston's Asian- American Business Council estimates that land values along the Bellaire strip have increased between 25 and 50 per cent (Gray, 2008) as developers invite over 2 million square feet of construction of high- end residential and retail opportunities under the guise of expanding Asiatown's diversity (Gray, 2008).

This chapter utilizes the lens of radical food geographies (RFG) praxis to examine how restaurants, particularly those within an ethnic enclave, are critical places in which gentrification unfolds while also challenging scholars and activists to consider the visual, cultural, and culinary indicators and consequences of displacement. I ask the research questions: what does gentrification look, taste, and feel like in the spatial imaginary of Houston's Asiatown? The evolution of Asian aesthetics, food trends, and consumer cultures that make up the social representations of Asiatown as a place and space are shaped by those impacted by gentrification and those who influence gentrification alike. Enactors of Asiatown's gentrification, mainly public-private partnerships, ethnic entrepreneurs/ developers, global restaurant franchises, and upper- / middle- class consumers, economically and socially benefit from Asiatown's redevelopment, while Black, Latinx, and Asian/ Asian- American long- time residents face rising poverty levels and expensive housing markets.

As a concept and practice, radical food geographies (RFG) praxis brings together attention to power, knowledge, and resistance to the inequities that shape food systems around the world in diverse ways. RFG draws key elements from radical geographies and critical food systems scholarship towards making food systems more just and sustainable. Critical to the RFG approach is a praxis that pushes food systems scholars and activists to pursue work that is simultaneously grounded in theorizing, action, and reflection related to the intersections of place and spatiality. Praxis refers to the dynamic interconnections between theory and practice, critical reflection, and the resulting actions (for example, see Freire, 1970; Gramsci, 1971; hooks, 1994). We conceive of RFG praxis as having three interconnected elements: (1) theoretical engagement with power and structures of oppression both inside and outside the academy; (2) action through academic, social movement, and civil society collaborations; and (3) analysis through a broadly defined geographic lens (see Figure 1.1). In this chapter, we provide an overview of the scholarly foundations of RFG praxis.

Radical geographies foundations

Radical geographies have integrated and built upon different geographical contexts, theories, and activities worldwide. They identify, explain, and impact relations of power, oppression, and capitalist exploitation in particular places and across space. In North America, what has been formally referred to as radical geography (a subdiscipline in the academic field of geography) traces its roots to a rejection of the US status quo in the 1960s (contemporaneous with the US Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Chicano Movement, the American Indian Movement, second- wave feminism, and opposition to the Vietnam War). The group of self- described ‘radical geographers’, grounded in Marxist and anarchist thinking, sought a restructuring of society. They were also challenging their discipline, one that was rooted in positivist and quantitative approaches that they insisted were unresponsive to societal crises and reproduced oppressive structures (Fuller and Kitchin, 2004).

The overarching position of these primarily anglophone and minority world- based individuals was that the field of geography needed to account for its complicity and contributions to the accumulation of power and capital.

Josué de Castro was a Brazilian geographer, physician, diplomat, and activist, whose writing on hunger, geography, and politics were forerunners to the concept of geopolitics and critical development studies. His book Geografía da Fome (1946) identified hunger as a consequence of social, rather than natural, structures. His most influential book Geopolitica da Fome (1951) set forth an understanding of hunger as a global political- economic phenomenon. Key themes in these works were a strident and explicit anti- Malthusianism. de Castro pinned the origins of hunger, neither to the deficits of ‘poor’ people worldwide nor to the quantitative limits of global food production, but to the expansion of the global capitalist economy. Prior to the establishment of critical development studies (for example, see Escobar, 2011), de Castro argued that ‘underdevelopment’ and hunger as a corporeal reality – rather than a disembodied one – was a result of colonialism, racism, and Western-dominated geopolitics (de Castro, 1952).

While these perspectives are fairly common today in most critical scholarship and activism, de Castro's righteous naming of geopolitical, colonial, and racist structures in the 1940s and 1950s as the underlying causes of hunger was a rare and courageous analytical pursuit, particularly writing from the context of the majority world. Importantly, de Castro was not only a theoretician, despite the scholarly nature of his research and writing. Ferretti (2021) notes that de Castro's analysis was rooted in knowledge born of both scholarly pursuits and his upbringing in Recife, the focus area of his Geografía da Fome (1946) and 1970 novel Of Men and Crabs. Recife is a region in north- eastern Brazil where predominantly Indigenous and African- Brazilian people lived at that time, and often in economic poverty. de Castro was of mixed Indigenous and European descent and was clear in his analyses that racism was among the driving factors of social inequity (Monbeig, 1948; Chappell, 2018; Ferretti, 2021). de Castro influenced and was influenced by French scholars, and was involved in international policy, eventually serving as the head of the United Nations’ (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization from 1952 to 1956 and as Brazil's Ambassador to the UN from 1963 to 1964 (New York Times, 1973; Ferretti, 2022).