Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
the staple of civilizations, these intellectuals and politicians resignified corn as the food that prevented Mexicans from becoming modern (Pilcher 1998). However, in Mexico, as in France and Italy (Camporesi 1970; Capatti and Montanari 1999), the post-colonial governments of the nineteenth century and the post-revolutionary governments of the twentieth century sought to create a national cuisine that invoked the indigenous past. In Mexico, this was accomplished by resorting to Creole ingenuity and severing the country's culinary dependence on the European metropolis. The Mexican cuisine thus invented was tied rhetorically to an ancestral indigenous tradition that privileged ingredients, techniques, and components (such as moles, chili peppers, beans, squash, tomatoes, and corn) as the defining elements of the Mexican culinary tradition.
That this model is still hegemonic can be attested by developments surrounding the creation of the Mundo Maya (Maya World) Tourism Fair, a transnational tourism project. For example, tourism entrepreneurs and state bureaucrats produced a manual for tourism operators that describes the foods of the different regions included in the project (the states of Yucatán, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Chiapas in Mexico and Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras) as being based primarily on beans, corn, squash, and chili peppers, disregarding the important differences that characterize actual Maya culinary traditions. Mexican cookbooks have also promoted this understanding of Mexican cuisine, seeking to legitimize their claims to authenticity by locating their roots in indigenous cultures. Thus, in these books, it is the cuisine of central Mexican regions and sometimes the moles from the state of Oaxaca that receive more attention and space, as the local gastronomy in these places is usually represented as being dominated by indigenous recipes and ingredients.
In contrast, Yucatecans imagine a Yucatecan identity that is built upon a common consciousness derived from a common local history, a common language (Castilian Spanish with Maya inflections), a common religion (Catholicism), and common cultural productions (music, poetry, literature, theatre, food), but with the understanding that these commonalities are the creative blend of many different cultural traditions. Food plays here an important part, as Yucatecan food has been fashioned by culinary influences that are divorced from Mexican cuisine and tied to peninsular Caribbean connections. Historically, food has thus been turned into a significant marker of the differences between Yucatecan and Mexican cultures.
Nationalism and Internal Cultural Colonialism
Any Yucatecan can recognize so-called Mexican food whenever she or he sees it. As it is everywhere else, cultural difference is grounded in affect-laden stereotypes (Geertz 2000a; Herzfeld 1997; Pilcher 2004). It is not a matter of whether or not Yucatecans have been exposed to Mexican foods. Yucatecan elites have traveled abroad to acquire education, to enlighten themselves through ‘grand tours', or to secure and maintain commercial ties, but they have also traveled to other Mexican regions. Also, peasants and laborers have lived in other Mexican regions as part of a migratory workforce. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, despite the existence since the 1920s of a regional university in Mérida (and since the 1990s of several private universities), many Yucatecans still relocate to Mexico City to follow licenciatura (professional degree) and graduate studies. In addition, Yucatecan intellectuals and writers who aspire to achieve recognition beyond the region have moved to Mexico City to profit from the centralization of publishing resources (Rodríguez-Hernández 2007; Shrimpton Masson 2006, 2010) or to get involved in national politics. Thus, when these Yucatecans return home, they bring along newly acquired tastes and recipes, and sometimes, during private parties, they cook Mexican dishes such as pozole, sopes, chilorio, or mole. Some returnees, having acquired a metropolitan cosmopolitanism, ridicule the attachment of local people to regional foods, dismissing it as unsophisticated culinary quaintness.
Every time I ask Yucatecans to describe Mexican cuisine, I am told that it is a food characterized by the repetitive use of tomato sauces, cream, cheese, and chili peppers. Some young people, whom one would expect to be more acquainted with diverse Mexican culinary traditions than their parents, often describe Mexican food in minimalistic terms, reducing it to tacos and stuffed chilies. Mexican food from the central highlands is often characterized, in both Mexico and abroad, as indigenous/peasant food (Denker 2003; Kamp 2006; Pilcher 1998). Yucatecans and foreigners have been led to see Mexican food as rooted in a single indigenous Mexican culture, concealing its foreign sources.28 Visiting Mexican restaurants located in the city of Mérida, one finds that, in most of them, the menus do not include Yucatecan dishes. Instead, they contain a canonic list of tacos with beefsteak, pork chops, carne al pastor, sausage (chorizo), fajitas, burritos, melted cheese, guacamole, and frijoles charros. The garnish for these dishes often consists of chili sauces, tomatillos (green tomatoes), onions, lime, and roasted chili peppers. In these restaurants, customers are given the choice as to whether or not to melt cheese over tacos stuffed with sausage or other meats.
It is evident that many Yucatecans will base their understanding of Mexican food on their experiences at these restaurants. However, Yucatecans also witness the efforts to homogenize the regions to match the taste preferences of central Mexicans. For example, once at a restaurant belonging to a central Mexican chain, I found that the menu included some ‘Yucatecan' dishes: cochinita pibil served in a cazuela or clay casserole (I have never seen it served as such in Yucatecan households or regional restaurants), northern Mexican burritos stuffed with cochinita pibil and covered with melted cheese, and eggs motuleños. Since the latter was the only dish with a description that read closer to Yucatecan cooking, I decided to try it. In contrast to the standard form of serving this meal in Yucatán (a layer of two slightly fried tortillas with a spread of refried black beans, two fried eggs garnished with a roasted tomato and garlic sauce, green peas, shredded ham, crumbs of fresh cheese, and fried plantain), I was given two fried tortillas side by side, with a spread of refried red beans, one fried egg on top of each tortilla, garnished with a refried tomato and chili pepper sauce, shredded ham, and a mixture of fresh and processed cheeses.29 Central Mexicans are more familiar now with black beans, but they found them, until recently, second to red beans, while Yucatecans prefer the flavor of black beans. This and other changes introduced over the last few decades in different regional dishes constitute everyday examples of the ways in which many Yucatecans perceive that the Mexican taste for food is threatening the integrity and authenticity of regional cuisine. In the local understanding, there are a number of ingredients that characterize traditional Yucatecan cuisine and others that are seen as foreign and uncharacteristic of local food. To use the latter for the preparation of Yucatecan dishes in public, that is, in restaurants, is experienced as an offense to Yucatecan sensibilities.
However, it has been only since the mid-1980s, with the influx of large numbers of central Mexicans into Yucatán, that Yucatecans have considered foreign food preferences to be a menace to local culture. In addition, the growing presence of tourists explains transformations that have led to the local perception of gastronomic decadence in the region. For instance, on one of my visits to a food stand where every so often I have a breakfast of tortas de lechón al horno (sandwiches of baguette-style bread stuffed with baked piglet), I found that there were no tables available. I asked a man sitting alone if I could join him, and he consented. After a brief exchange of courtesy phrases, we turned our conversation to the food we were consuming. He told me that he comes to this food stand every week to eat three sandwiches (tortas)30 of cochinita pibil since, he pointed out, it is cooks in these types of stands who prepare and have preserved Yucatecan food “the way it should be.” To him, cochinita pibil and lechón al horno are examples of good regional food, as opposed to the food that restaurants sell to tourists and Yucatecans alike in downtown Mérida. He added that, in his opinion, the meals in those restaurants are bastardized versions of regional cuisine that are not worth paying for.
The trends now evident in restaurants in the city feed Yucatecans' fear that the marketing of regional traditions to tourists is leading to radical changes in local culinary forms. For example, in one of my multiple visits with friends to a restaurant (located in a large hotel belonging to a transnational chain) that specializes in regional food, I found 31 dishes listed on the menu. Among them were three vegetable salads and one vegetable soup, all prepared with cheese. On that occasion, my dining companions objected to the inclusion of salads, voicing the opinion that, even if tourists