Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
at the consequences, for Yucatecan food, of the immigration of people from different cultures into the territory of the peninsula and state of Yucatán, but also to the effects on Yucatecan gastronomy of the migration of Yucatecans to other parts of the world. Hence, I pay close attention to the transformations in the Yucatecan foodscape and gastronomic field, locally and globally. On the other hand, and supplementing Habermas's viewpoint, I coincide with Bhabha (1994) and Sparke (2005) on the need to take into account the internal tensions and fractures that occur within the nation-state. The post-national condition thus created is one that arises from the inability of the nation-state to keep its parts together. Accordingly, I will be examining the practices, discourses, and textual strategies deployed by Yucatecans to invent a regional gastronomy that requires ‘protection' and ‘defense' from what is perceived as external attacks, coming from both Mexican and foreign cultures. In this sense, the part that food plays in the construction of a Yucatecan identity can be understood as a process that contributes to the fracturing of the national whole and supplements the disrupting effects of transnational and supra-national events that weaken the authority of the nation-state.11
These post-national and post-colonial conditions are reflected in the urban foodscape of Mérida. I understand this foodscape as an arena where food values are deployed to affirm similarities and differences between local and foreign culinary traditions. This urban foodscape expands and contracts in response to the interactions between, and the transformations in, regional and global markets, as well as in food discourses. Both local-global and lateral connections have played an important part in fashioning the Yucatecan foodscape and gastronomy. For example, some Yucatecan preparations have found inspiration in recipes from the haute cuisine of France, Italy, and Spain that have been introduced in the region since the nineteenth century. At the same time, the regional foodscape is connected to other subordinate regions, so that the food culture of Yucatán includes adaptations of dishes from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and also from European provinces and communities, such as Asturias, Galicia, Valencia, Malaga, Andalusia, and Provence. The emergence in Yucatán of restaurants specializing in the foods of these regions—subordinate either to foreign colonial powers or to the cultural colonialism of central elites within the nation-states where these foods are included—marks them as belonging to gastronomic configurations similar to the Yucatecan one. Hence, the expanding foodscape and its everyday navigation can, at the same time, support the self-image of Yucatecan cosmopolitanism and affirm the privileged position that Yucatecan food occupies in regional culinary preferences.
The transformation of the urban foodscape is the product of a long insertion in the global market that has fostered, within the peninsula of Yucatán, the introduction and appropriation of culinary ingredients from diverse parts of the world (Miranda Ojeda and Negroe Sierra 2007). Consequently, throughout the book I understand the foodscape as the shifting, changing, and dynamic arena where cultural sources of food, ingredients, recipes, cookbooks, cookware, cooking technologies, ingredients, and prepared meals within the city and its surroundings become meaningful culinary markers for the consumers. This foodscape is constituted by department stores, markets, supermarkets, and delicatessens; by specialized stores that supply local, regional, national, and imported foodstuffs, wines, and liquors; and by the ever-changing availability of ‘exotic' foods served in restaurants specializing in different national and regional cuisines. Transformations in the foodscape produce effects on the cultural understanding that local people have of their own culinary and gastronomic ‘tradition', sometimes subordinating it to imported foods, sometimes favoring it above any other food.
To be sure, following Appadurai's (1996) characterization of different landscapes, the perception and navigation of the foodscape changes according to the location where the subject enters it. That is, individuals with different levels of disposable income and with different ethnic, gender, religious, or educational backgrounds enter the foodscape through different gateways; they then follow different itineraries and experience the food available in the urban space in different ways. For example, someone who has no knowledge of Spanish culture (or interest in it), someone who has read about Spain, someone who has read about Spanish gastronomy, someone who has traveled as a tourist to Spain, someone who has lived in Spain, and a Spaniard living in Mérida—all of these people have a different depth of knowledge about the food of that country and the rules and etiquette for its consumption that translate into differential expectations and access to Spanish restaurants and inform, in different ways, their experience of Spanish foods available in Mérida. Hence, the regional foodscape is one that includes a variety of cuisines identified with exotic, foreign cultures and intersects with what Dolphijn (2004) has described as the global foodscape, that is, the internationalization of different foods along the lines of distribution determined by food corporations and the erosion of national boundaries.
When we take the global context into account, we can understand how the urban foodscape, in a city like Mérida, can expand and diversify, helping to shape the regional culinary field. Visitors and immigrants to Yucatán may seek the replication of adaptations that Yucatecan food underwent during its exportation to other parts of the world, where cooks faced a limited availability of the goods necessary to reproduce an ‘authentic' regional cuisine. Also, Mexican restaurants have included their own versions of Yucatecan dishes, which in some cases depart radically from local versions. Finally, the introduction of nouvelle cuisine may inspire adventurers to experiment with local foods, changing them to suit their tastes in different ways.12 It is during the expansion of the foodscape that both the position and the composition of Yucatecan food become altered in the eyes of local and non-local consumers.
The Yucatecan regional foodscape is going through a series of transformations that resemble those of other societies in the global arena (Dolphijn 2004; Kamp 2006). Some of these transformations lead to deterritorializing and reterritorializing strategies that shape both the culinary and gastronomic fields. In this contemporary foodscape, cookbooks that specialize in Yucatecan cuisine have been resignified and transformed to adapt to new market and cultural conditions. During the emergence and invention of Yucatecan gastronomy, Yucatecan cooks had developed the minor genre of inclusive, cosmopolitan-oriented cookbooks. Yet as the twentieth century moved forward, authors began to purge their cookbooks of recipes perceived to be alien to Yucatecan culinary forms. Yucatecan cookbook writers gradually abandoned recipes that were clearly attributable to Spanish, French, Italian, and other cultures, focusing instead on dishes that were, in due time, turned into iconic representatives of the regional gastronomic canon. This textual strategy promoted the identification of contemporary Yucatecan cuisine as different from other Mexican cuisines. The refinement of culinary practices eventually coalesced into a recognizable Yucatecan gastronomy.
The Culinary and Gastronomic Fields andthe Naturalization of Taste
What then is Yucatecan food? If it is what Yucatecans eat, what do Yucatecans eat? In general, most Yucatecans believe that anyone can easily distinguish between Yucatecan and other cuisines. Yucatecan cuisine embodies a recognizable aesthetic configuration of flavors, aromas, colors, and textures that are imagined to correspond to the cultural values shared by most people within the Yucatecan territory. Throughout the volume I will be discussing the part played by different elements in the ‘naturalization' of taste—that is, the institution of a predilection for the use of certain ingredients, combinations of ingredients (recipes), cooking techniques, and modes of food consumption that bracket their historical formation and allow Yucatecan people to recognize their preferences as a ‘natural' inclination for certain recipes and consumption techniques that set Yucatecan cuisine apart from other cuisines. Restaurants and cookbooks have been important vehicles in the dissemination of this aesthetic configuration and have contributed to the territorialization of Yucatecan taste.13 Cookbooks and restaurants combine their effects with those derived from (1) the oral transmission of recipes and kitchen secrets; (2) the historical expansion of the regional foodscape, a consequence of Yucatán's insertion in the global market; and (3) the practice of urban families to hire domestic cooks from rural villages (some of whom might be Maya speakers, while others could be impoverished peasants of diverse ethnic origins). Consequently, recipes, ingredients, and cooking techniques have traveled back and forth from cities to rural villages, creating the conditions for a regionally widespread appreciation of and inclination for the taste of Yucatecan foods.
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