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Restaurants and their attendant practices are high-profile sites at which regional and national cuisines are experienced, experimented with, and negotiated. In particular, they are important settings for the consumption and production of national identity—a crucial space through which to understand the coalescing of the material and representational. This article focuses specifically on the production side of the pairing through an examination of restaurants that are part of a prominent culinary movement (alta cocina mexicana) in the Mexican border town of Tijuana. The central argument of the paper is that Tijuana's culinary scene is indicative of the reassertion of boundaries between Mexico and the USA through the intentional rejection of northern stereotypes of Mexican food. The emphasis on traditional Mexican cuisine, rather than an internationally hybrid cosmopolitan approach, suggests that chefs are adhering to a set of rules that reflect Mexicanness. Restaurants propagating alta cocina mexicana work to differentiate the border and act as social devices which both complicate conventional understandings of Mexican food and disrupt hegemonic discourses of the border as productive of hybridity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the spatiotemporal patterns of school segregation between blacks and whites in Jefferson County and its affiliated Louisville metropolitan area. The classical dissimilarity index and the GIS-oriented spatial segregation measure – S index are used to estimate school segregation based on public school enrollment data (1987–2008). Findings call for the significance of measuring school segregation from a metropolitan-wide perspective rather than focusing on the urban school district alone. Also, results indicate that between-district segregation represents the majority of overall segregation in the entire Louisville metropolitan area. Most importantly, the GIS-based S Index enriches segregation studies by mapping the dynamic patterns of racial disparities while permitting a statistical estimate of segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The production of culture in urban image-making has received much attention within geography. This paper intervenes in the culture-economy debates in a slightly different way - namely, through the lens of an understudied city of the global South. It examines the structure and discourses embedded in the Tijuana (Mexico) Municipal Plan 2005-07 to interrogate the work that culture performs with an eye to the impacts (both material and discursive) of official strategies across time and space. In so doing, two propositions are suggested. First, post-colonial spaces offer important sites from which to critique the conflation of cultural practice and policy. Secondly, the complex imbrication of culture and economy can be further distilled in grounding examples in ordinary cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]