Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
should not be on the menu of a Yucatecan restaurant.” Although salads and soups are rare in Yucatecan eating traditions, they are not totally absent in the culinary field. I understood that the restaurateur was attempting both to keep the ingredients within the regional logic and attempting to respond to demands from customers that regional restaurants normally fail to address, that is, lighter foods and vegetarian meals, both of which are difficult to find in Yucatán, where meats are the main staple.
These examples are meant to illustrate the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which alien consumers impose (or are perceived as imposing) the taste preferences, food values, gastronomic criteria, and culture of central Mexico over local forms. Although not universally agreed upon, there is some general consensus in anthropology that modern forms of the nation-state, as socio-political and cultural organizational blueprints, originated in the North Atlantic, where they became universalized and were then exported worldwide (B. Anderson 1983; Badie 2000; Geertz 2000b; Hobsbawm 1990). The modernity of this form was supplemented by the progressive global dissemination of the creed of modernization, especially in its acultural form (Gaonkar 1999; Taylor 1999).31
Modernity and the nation-state have proved to be pervasive forms of political self-fashioning and action. To affirm their peoplehood and legitimize their own identity claims, some minority groups borrow strategies from the nation-state. In this sense, I concur with Judith Irvine and Susan Gal's (2000) analysis of the ways in which language ideologies serve to construct meaningful identities and differences. Irvine and Gal identify ‘linguistic ideologies' as conceptual schemes that are “suffused with the political and moral issues pervading the particular sociolinguistic field and…subject to the interests of their bearers' social position” (ibid.: 35). To them, linguistic ideologies are important in at least three different processes: the construction and validation of forms of difference and language change among groups; the academic objectification of language; and the legitimation of social actions (and their political implications), based on the perception of difference (ibid.: 36). I see these three different processes interacting during the establishment of new forms of colonialism, including that of forging national identities. During the construction of the modern Mexican nation-state, there has been a process whereby Mexico was represented as being different from other nation-states—primarily, Spain, the former dominant colonial power, and, secondly, the United States, the imperial power that Mexicans have had to confront from the nineteenth century onward. But also Mexico was to be defined as a more or less homogeneous nation rooted in a single indigenous culture. Those who wrote and helped to institute this centralized, hegemonic discourse also produced disciplinary knowledge that was used to construct difference and to legitimize practices that enforced the subordination of regional cultures.
Irvine and Gal (2000) propose three different concepts that I find useful in examining the processes whereby national and regional cuisines are invented. They refer to ‘iconization' as “the sign relationship between linguistic features (or varieties) and the social images with which they are linked” (ibid.: 37). This practice is closely tied to strategic forms of cultural essentializing. Irvine and Gal identify ‘fractal recursivity' as “the projection of an opposition, salient at some level of relationship, onto some other level” (ibid.: 38). This practice allows the creation of categories and subcategories within a social group that are based on structural oppositions such as the ones used in Mexican discourse—that is, uncivilized/modern, primitive/traditional, urban/rural, cosmopolitan/parochial, Mestizo/indigenous. Finally, these authors name ‘erasure' as “the process whereby ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible” (ibid.).
In what follows I describe some of the ways in which the tension between regional and national identities is played out. To provide a context for these performances of identity, I first describe the transformations evident in contemporary Mérida. As these examples show, in some instances it is more or less evident that some negotiation of meanings is taking place during the performance of difference. In other cases, the radicalization of the regionalnational divide makes negotiation or dialogue seem difficult (if not outright impossible) to achieve.
“We Should Fence the State”: Alien Invasions and Gastropolitics in Yucatán
When we returned to Mexico in 1993 and established our residence in the state of Chiapas, my wife and I began traveling twice a year to the Yucatán peninsula to spend vacations with friends and relatives. It did not take us long to realize that many things had changed since we had moved to Canada in 1986. In those seven years, the city of Mérida had grown beyond recognition. There were many new residential neighborhoods, and the service sector had expanded dramatically. Our friends took us to see the new shopping malls, department stores, and hypermarkets. New cooking ingredients were available for the local connoisseur: French, US, and Mexican markets multiplied the supply and variety of foodstuffs and drinks imported from Asia, Europe, North and South America, and different regions of Mexico. Mérida looked, especially in contrast to highland Chiapas, like a consumer's paradise. Our friends informed us that the city had become the destination for large numbers of central Mexicans who were demanding different sorts of goods and that, during the previous decade or so, the overall level of urban income had risen, leading to the expansion of the regional market for international foods and drinks. During the same period, a number of transnational and national fast-food franchises had opened in the city, and in some neighborhoods the demographic dominance of non-Yucatecans was turning local food into a rare commodity, in contrast to the increased availability of Mexican foodstuffs. Yucatecans in those neighborhoods lamented that at night they found it easier to come across vendors of sopes, huaraches,32 and Mexican tamales than the traditional Yucatecan food stands selling panuchos, salbutes, Yucatecan tamales, and turkey tortas.
Even more upsetting, some friends told us that they were finding a gradual transformation with regard to the ingredients and preparation of local foods. In particular, they found it aggravating that many recipes had been changed and that dishes were being prepared with cream, cheese, and hot chili peppers, all of which are foreign to Yucatecan gastronomy. At that time, when some restaurateurs were attempting to please their clients by adding non-traditional ingredients to Yucatecan dishes, and even if they were trying not to modify the recipes radically, many Yucatecans suggested that it was disrespectful to cook local foods in ways different from the established ‘tradition'.33 Also, in contrast to the soft manners of Yucatecans, the demands of incoming Mexicans were (and are) often perceived as aggressive and inconsiderate, and I often heard complaints about the way in which, on account of the Mexicans, ‘good' Yucatecan food was disappearing from the city. There was a growing sentiment among Meridans that their own city was becoming alien to them, especially when something so quotidian as the preparation and availability of food had been changed to suit the taste of newcomers from other Mexican regions. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this resentment, born not only from the experience of changes in the urban foodscape but also from the perception of changes in other spheres of public life as well, was one of the reasons behind the proliferation of regionalist icons, such as Yucatecan flags and shirts printed with the legends “Republic of Yucatán” and “Proudly Yucatecan.” The inflow of migrants from different Mexican regions, but chiefly from the central Mexican highlands, revived in Yucatecans a sense of social and cultural distinctiveness that, they believed, set them apart from Mexicans in general. The migrants were perceived as threatening the integrity of regional Yucatecan society, culture, and identity, and very often this perception has led to forms of antagonism directed against immigrants from other Mexican regions, who have been characterized as the source of all current evils in peninsular life.
In 2006, Mérida had, according to some unofficial estimates, close to one million inhabitants—a rapid growth from 250,000 in the 1980s. The economic boom on the peninsula, which had been furthered by the development of the Cancún tourism resort during the second half of the 1970s, contributed to Yucatán's demographic growth, attracting immigrants from different parts of the Mexican republic who spilled over from Cancún into other large peninsular cities, particularly Mérida. The latest official census puts the total inhabitants in the state of Yucatán at 1,818,948, with 781,146 (42.9 percent) residing in Mérida. According to this census, during the first five years of this century, the state received 37,000 immigrants