Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
in the central highlands, the port of Veracruz, and the peninsula of Yucatán (Chardon 1949; Hinckley 1963; Palmer 1932; Shaw 1943; Simpson 1962; Sluiter 1948). Nonetheless, looking at a recent publication on the food culture of the Caribbean (Hudson 2005), we find that the author has chosen a restrictive focus on the food of the Spanish-speaking regions, singling out the islands of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Examining the food of the Caribbean, any reader who is knowledgeable of Yucatecan cooking can easily find foodstuff and recipes that, give or take an ingredient, are also found within the Yucatán culinary field. Among them are the preference for fowl and pork; the limited use of milk and its derivates; the use of citrus fruits to marinate meat; the prevalence of achiote (annatto) seeds and paste in spice blends; numerous recipes for ajiaco and other similar stews; variations on Edam stuffed cheese; the use of Middle Eastern and Asian spices (black pepper, cumin, coriander seeds, cinnamon, cloves); and the use of banana leaves to wrap foods during cooking. There are, of course, important differences. Since the number of Afro-Caribbean inhabitants was minimal in the Yucatán peninsula (Fernández Repetto and Negroe Sierra 1995; Restall 2009), African spices, roots, plants, and procedures that are common in other Caribbean nations are not found (or their use is negligible) in Yucatán.
In my travels to Puerto Rico and Miami, I have found dishes (e.g., baked piglet) that resemble those found in Yucatán. In both places, as in Yucatán, pork is marinated in the juice of Seville oranges with salt, allspice, and garlic. In each place, with some spices more or less noticeable, the dish tastes about the same. Although I have found reference to stuffed cheese in a Puerto Rican cookbook, I have not found it in restaurants I visited in San Juan. However, my friend and fellow anthropologist, Vilma Santiago-Irizarry, has told me that when she grew up on the island, she was familiar with a version of the dish stuffed with pigeon meat, while in Yucatán the preferred ingredient is minced or ground pork. Stuffed cheese has become one of the iconic dishes of Yucatán, although Venezuelans also claim the dish as representative of their national cuisine.21 In Yucatán, despite this dish being recalled by people now in their eighties, who told me that they ate it on special occasions during their childhood, some cookbook authors claim that it was a Yucatecan creation to honor the Dutch royalty during their visit to the state in the 1950s (Carrillo Lara 1994). Also, a recipe for a rice timbale stuffed with ground pork and spices, called sopa rochuna, is attributed to the Rocha family, who relocated to Yucatán from the Dominican Republic during the first decades of the twentieth century (Arjona de Castro and Castro Arjona n.d., ca. 2000). However, thus far I have not met anyone who remembers ever eating this dish.
Yucatecan cuisine developed in a context that favors its differentiation from Mexican cuisine. Instead of adopting the blueprint of the latter, Yucatecans sought to articulate their passion for the local along with their cosmopolitan aspirations, a relation that evolved with the Caribbean trade routes. Hence, domestic and professional Yucatecan cooks produced and instituted a culinary tradition that is currently perceived as iconic of Yucatecan society and culture. As with its society and culture, Yucatecan cuisine is a hybrid that combines local tastes and appetencies with those of France, Spain, Italy, and the Caribbean region. Although central Mexican chefs and cooks, as well as cookbook writers, seek to appropriate regional gastronomies and recodify them as variations on the national theme, Yucatecan producers and consumers root their tastes in the conviction that their food is the product of the essence of their region and, therefore, that it is in their ‘nature'.
In the following section I discuss the relationship between food and national identity, analyzing the historical processes of the formation of the modern nation-state, taking into account the practice of cultural homogenization and the mechanisms of surveillance and governance of the national territory. I also examine the contrary movement, arising from the general cultural and political context, that enables local-regional groups of people to affirm identities that differ from the national project. I look at the intricacies of the historically difficult relations between Yucatán and Mexico, and, finally, discuss the application of what Irvine and Gal (2000) refer to as ‘fractal recursivity', that is, the ways in which the general discourse on national identity is disseminated and repeated in the construction of regional identities, silencing regional difference.
Food and Imagi/nation
From the perspective of the inhabitants of the central highlands of Mexico, Mexican food is the food created in Mexico City. At the very least, it is the ideal model that all other regional (and therefore popular) cuisines should aspire to emulate.22 In their incursions into ‘Mexican gastronomy', two of the most lauded writers of the mid-twentieth century concurred in their devotion to the food of Mexico City, weaving it into the narration of their experiences with the great cuisines that they found in their travels abroad. They did not make reference to regional cuisines as gastronomic traditions in their own right, dismissing them instead as forms of cocina del pueblo (popular cookery) (Novo [1967] 1997; Reyes [1953] 2000).
Despite attempts to create a homogeneous national gastronomy discursively, Mexican cuisine has never been a culinary culture that correlates with the political territory of the nation-state. In Yucatán, food was, first and foremost, Yucatecan (and not Mexican) during most of the twentieth century. I was born in the second half of the 1950s and have had the opportunity to experience the gastronomic and culinary changes that have taken place in Yucatán since the 1970s.23 Having been born in Yucatán, a state of the federal republic of Mexico, I always took for granted that I was Mexican. Before the 1970s, I used to spend my vacations with relatives in Mérida, and I was always served what today I recognize as Yucatecan food. It was only in 1971, when I moved from Valladolid to Mérida, that I encountered restaurants selling ‘Mexican' food. This cuisine was unfamiliar enough that a number of establishments, then as now, advertised themselves as specializing in Mexican food. It was in these restaurants that I realized that Mexican food is unlike Yucatecan food. Pozole, a spicy hot stew with large white corn grains, was an alien experience. The difference between Yucatecan and Mexican food was accentuated after my initiation into tacos al pastor—a beef shawarma marinated in a mixture of different peppers and served with slices of pineapple. Although inspired by Middle Eastern roasts, this dish was not introduced by the local Syrian-Lebanese population; instead, it was imported from central Mexico (although it is attributed to the Syrians and Lebanese of the northern state of Nuevo León). The restaurants that popularized tacos al pastor in Mérida were also responsible for the introduction of fríjoles charros (cowboy beans). Although limited in number, these dishes were the harbingers of Mexican food in Yucatán. In time, along with many other dishes, they attained local popularity in Mérida during the 1970s. In 1984, I moved to work for two years in Chetumal, the capital city of the state of Quintana Roo, located near the border with Belize. As a border city, Chetumal's transient population was markedly multi-ethnic, including indigenous, peasant, and urban people who came there from different parts of Mexico and Central America. Many migrants had moved to the state of Quintana Roo to occupy agricultural lands that had been made available through the federal government's agrarian reform, while others took jobs in the federal or state administration of public services. There, amid people from different Mexican regions, I tasted new dishes, for example, pambazo, a white bread sandwich soaked in the fat of fried chorizo from Toluca and filled with fried sausage and potato chunks. Vendors on the streets sold tacos of fried shredded meat and onion in central Mexican fashion. Also, I tasted, once again, Mexican sopes, a finger food that I had first eaten as a child in 1969, when my parents took me on a road trip to Mexico City. These dishes, which were exotic to me, as they were for many Yucatecans who had not lived outside the peninsula of Yucatán, clearly did not belong in Yucatecan cooking traditions.24
In 1986, I moved to Alberta, Canada. There, my newly acquired friends asked me about Mexican food. For the first time in my life, I began telling people that although I was Mexican, I was in fact from Yucatán, a Mexican state where the food is different from what they had learned to recognize as Mexican in fast-food franchises: hard-shell tacos filled with ground meat, topped with sour cream and melted cheese; chili con carne; and fajitas (I believe that my first encounter with fajitas was in Canada). For my first potluck at the University in Calgary, I was asked to bring a dish that was representative of my ‘culture'. I contributed relleno negro (black stuffing), made of black-dyed ground pork mixed