Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
as stuffing for turkey. Everybody shied away from my dish until a woman from India dared to try it, after I had described the recipe, which she compared to curry, a dish meaningful to her. For my friends, this was unlike anything that they would recognize as Mexican food.25 Twenty years later, in Ithaca, New York, I visited a Mexican taquería (taco shop) with friends. There, as a blast from the past, I found a menu that listed chili con carne, nachos, guacamole, fajitas, burritos, and tacos. Once more I faced the old stereotype of Mexican food served to young stomachs in the city's college town—a culinary stereotype that I had thought to be obsolete in the new post-national order. An obvious question for an anthropologist is, then, how is it that some dishes are selected to be the enduring icons that stand for or represent a nation?
Throughout history, food has been firmly tied to the identity of cultural groups. In medieval Europe, Romans defined Germanic people as savages whose diet favored meat, while they, a ‘civilized' people, preferred vegetables, grains, and sea products (Montanari 1998, 1999a, 1999b). During the period of the growing divide among Mediterranean monotheistic religions, food was turned into a significant marker of identity. Muslims and Jews avoided pork, while Christians ate it. After the Castilians expelled the Moors and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, or forced them to convert to Christianity, the religious and political hierarchy encouraged the consumption of pork as a strategy to identify, through the smells emanating from kitchen hearths, any relapsing converts (Montanari 1999c). Over the centuries, the British and the French deepened the channel separating them by culinary means (Mennell 1985), and the geopolitical categories ‘East' and ‘West' have long been used to encapsulate radical, cultural differences that are also anchored in food (Goody 1999). Within national territories, food was also a marker of territorial and class origins, for example, Parisian haute cuisine avoided the smelly garlic favored by peasants (Mennell 1985). In Italy, northerners who ate polenta, millet, and wheat despised southerners who favored macaroni; the northerners' certainty of their cultural superiority was augmented by their inclination toward meat, as opposed to the southerners' preference for vegetables and grains (Capatti and Montanari 1999). Also, according to Dickie (2008), the Italian nobility despised the peasants' strong smell of onions (although, on occasion, the nobles ate onions, too). Food was thought to represent something about the people who consumed it (hence, the adage ‘you are what you eat’). In fact, when the time of the modern nation-state arrived, with the nation understood as being rooted in the spirit of a people or the fatherland (Herder [1795] 2004, [1796] 2004; Renan [1882] 1996), it was logical to presume that all national cultural productions derived from that particular spirit—and that the national cuisine was foremost among them.
The Nation and the National
There is among Yucatecans a sense of commonality and community that is often expressed by the term lo yucateco (the Yucatecan). Some similarities may be found in specific forms of group identity, for example, ethnic or national. However, I argue that it makes more sense to speak of a more diffuse sense of peoplehood in which other, more concrete categories of identity become blurred and less distinct. Often, there is in nationalist ideologies an axiological center that can be located in a people, sometimes in their language, culture, religion, or territory (A. Smith 1983, 1999). However, as Lie (2004) argues, language, religion, and culture (ethnicity) cannot support the common moral consciousness shared by a people. The contemporary sense of Yucatecan peoplehood, in contrast to other foundational modes of identification, is that it has ties to the Catholic faith (although this a somewhat superficial and unstable connection does not exclude other Christian and non-Christian denominations); to the blend of Castilian Spanish and peninsular Maya; to the mestizaje between Spaniards, Mayas, and other European groups; and to a sentimental attachment to the land. These are decentered attachments tied to changing articulations in the social structure that make Yucatecan identity a rhizomatic construct. Food is but one of the multiple points of entry into an understanding of the construction of Yucatecan regionalism, and it is a changing one, depending on the different realms of meaning to which it gets attached.
To understand Yucatecan identity, we need to rethink the concept of the ‘nation'. This is particularly true since, during the second half of the nineteenth century, throughout the twentieth century, and into this twenty-first century, Yucatán and Yucatecans have been the targets of policies deployed by the Mexican nation-state to assimilate regional culture into mainstream national society. The invention of a single Mexican national identity relied on the design and implementation of a politics of internal cultural colonialism and of policies that enabled and supported it. However, this form of cultural colonization involved a long process of political negotiation between central Mexican and regional Yucatecan elites in an effort to establish the boundaries between national and regional cultures. Therefore, a vigorous affirmation of local cultural difference co-existed (and continues to do so) with nationalist efforts to homogenize the nation. In this situation, a process of national territorialization occurs simultaneously with a regional tendency to deterritorialize and with counter-efforts to reterritorialize the nation-state. In response to the affirmation of Yucatecan identities, central Mexican cultural institutions and bureaucracies direct their efforts to redefine regional cultures as a collection of quaint folk idiosyncrasies. It is in this context that we can understand Yucatecan regionalism as a form of peoplehood, rather than as a nationalist construct waged against Mexican cultural dis/semi/nation.
From different perspectives, Gellner (1983), Hobsbawm (1990), Llobera (2004), A. Smith (1996a, 1996b), and many others have argued that the nation is a European cultural invention proper to a specific time in history that has been disembedded and reembedded in other territories. Hence, for Bhabha (1994), dissemiNation stresses the movement of the nation-form from one to many other locations. Additionally, as I have pointed out, there is also a process of dis-semination, a laborious undertaking in which the nation is reinvented in each new place that it is created—sometimes willingly, sometimes as a form forced upon the local and regional populations. Hence, the term stresses the violence implied in the adoption of nationalist ideologies and practices. In adapting this concept, I seek to emphasize the hardships involved in creating a strong regional sense of peoplehood (almost, but not quite, a national identity), forged by the same anvil with which national identities were created. Nineteenth-century Yucatecan nationalism has changed into a less passionate form of regional identity that counters and relativizes Mexican nationalist ideologies. In this sense, Yucatecan peoplehood is a quasi-national form that emerged during the nineteenth century's push to create nations wherever self-contained cultural formations were found.
Yucatecans have built a deep-seated sense of regional identity that grounds the certitude of an essential cultural difference vis-à-vis Mexicans. Yucatecans understand their identity as arising not from a mono-ethnic group but rather from a multicultural society in which people of Spanish and other European ancestry and those of Maya, Lebanese, Syrian, Korean, and Chinese origins have built a unique and common ethos, culture, and community. There are parallels between the regional understanding of Yucatecan identity and standard understandings of nationalism; however, since the end of the nineteenth century, Yucatecan peoplehood has not been translated into political movements seeking secession or special status within the Mexican state, in contrast, for example, to Quebec and Catalonia (see Handler 1988; Llobera 2004). Here dis-semi-nation helps to explain the transformations of a universalized category (the nation), mediated by local understandings, appropriations, and adaptations of the concept of the nation. This is similar to what Bhabha (1996: 202) has called “vernacular cosmopolitanism”: “'[V]ernacular' shares an etymological root with the ‘domestic' but adds to it…the process and indeed the performance of translation, the desire to make a dialect; to vernacularize is to ‘dialectize' as a process; it is not simply to be in a dialogical relation with the native or the domestic, but it is to be in the border, in between, introducing the global-cosmopolitan ‘action at a distance' into the very grounds—now displaced—of the domestic.” It is this process that has historically shaped Yucatecan consciousness of a peculiar moral disposition that is part of the Yucatecan people's nature and can be recognized as Yucatecan culture that produces specific Yucatecan values and the certainty, as well, that this cultural heritage needs to be defended against the encroachment of (central) Mexican cultural, social, political, and economic structures.26
Within modern nation-states, we come across forms of affiliation that