Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz

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СКАЧАТЬ of a regional culinary code, one that is morally and politically grounded and stands in opposition to the homogenizing/hegemonic code of Mexican national cuisine. Yucatecan cuisine has thus been invented in the course of the combined efforts of domestic and professional cooks to create a distinct culinary practice that, in the same move, draws the boundaries of the regional gastronomic field.

      Multiple and heterogeneous meanings are attributed to food in contemporary society. Food can be a vehicle for ambivalent and paradoxical social practices. Individuals may attach a nostalgic meaning to food, relating it to a sense that a community has been lost as a result of global pressures to become ‘modern'. Some observers regret that the consumption of food in late modernity has been turned into an individualistic endeavor that nurtures personal idiosyncrasies and values over communal bonds (Falk 1994; Fischler [1990] 1995). Individuals may eat with different rhythms (once, twice, thrice, or multiple times a day) and different types of food (following carnivorous, vegetarian, vegan, or raw food diets). They choose their food on the basis of their different territorial and/or cultural reference (local, national, or imported) and value it because it is ‘natural', organic, convenient, preserved, or industrialized. Individuals can also consume their meals in many different places—at the office, in the car, in the garden, in the house, at restaurants, or at fast-food stands). In present-day society, there has been, as well, an explosion in the global-local markets of foods and cuisines that permits a subjective, individual development of taste and distaste for foods, while being unaware of the cultural, but naturalized, understandings of what is edible or inedible, palatable or unpalatable (Long 2004a). Fischler ([1990] 1995) refers to this (post)modern condition as gastro-anomie.

      At the same time, in post-colonial, post-national multicultural societies, food has been made into an important marker of group identities. Hence, communities, in seeking to affirm their moral and cultural values, turn food into an iconic representation of their common identity. For example, in contemporary global society, vegetarianism carries moral and symbolic connotations that sustain the imagination of a specific community lifestyle. Challenging the fast tempo of postmodern societies, the transnational Slow Food organization, founded 1989 in northern Italy by Carlo Petrini, seeks to reform society's interaction with food.² Similarly, new movements that advocate organically grown food and farmers' markets have sprung up, stressing the consumption of local foods as opposed to those produced and marketed by transnational corporations (Charles 2001; Nabhan 2001; Petrini 2003; Spencer 2000; Trubek 2008). Revealing the fractures of post-national society, regional food cultures are now being revived as part of a reclamation of regional identities within Mexico, the US, Europe, and other parts of the world. Food is thus being resignified as a site of resistance to the homogenizing cultural strategies inscribed in the imagination of ‘national communities' (Cusak 2000; Fôret 1989; Ohnuki-Tierney 1995).

      In Mérida, food has been fashioned into both an instrument for the articulation of meanings affirming a regional identity and a vehicle that can be strategically driven to establish boundaries between those who belong and those who are excluded from Yucatecan culture and society. Consequently, it is important to look at the tension and ambivalence inscribed in processes of identity construction and the politics of food. Yucatán and the Yucatecans stand in a difficult, ambivalent, and ambiguous relationship with Mexico and the Mexicans. This ambivalence sometimes conceals and sometimes reveals the structure of cultural colonization and domination and engenders practical and discursive forms of cultural mimicry and hybridity. The latter, as Bhabha (1994) has suggested, result from the articulation and production of new cultural forms that emerge from the post-colonial opening of interstitial spaces. While different understandings of cultural hybridity co-exist and compete (see, e.g., Pieterse 2001; Puri 2004), during the generation of translocal post-colonial conditions, hybrid culture has become a privileged site for the expression and negotiation of ambivalent practices and discourses.

      Despite the record of historically shifting relationships between the colonial province of Yucatán and New Spain, the experience of three Yucatecan attempts to separate from Mexico during the nineteenth century, and the strong regionalism maintained throughout the twentieth century, Mexicans often dismiss Yucatecans' regionalist identity and regularly refer to the state, anachronistically, either as Mexico's ‘province' or its ‘sister republic of Yucatán'. During the formation of the modern Mexican nation-state, Yucatán and Yucatecans have been subject to policies of internal colonialism that seek to veil regional differences. The subordination of the regional to the national is also manifested in the limited inclusion of regional dishes in the national cookbook. This inclination is illustrated by Long-Solís and Vargas (2005), whose treatment of the food cultures of Mexico reduce all regional culinary practices to variations of a national (indigenous) cuisine. As they express it, “Mexico has many cuisines, some dishes so different from others that one finds it hard to believe that they all stem from the same cultural tradition” (ibid.: 97; emphasis added). They recognize the existence of six regional areas in Mexico, based on “gastronomic rather than political boundaries” (ibid.: 98). These areas are northern Mexico (extending from Baja California to Tamaulipas, including the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo León); the Pacific Coast; western Mexico; central Mexico (including Morelos, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Hidalgo, and Mexico City); the isthmus of Tehuantepec (including Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Tabasco); and the “Maya area” (which includes the three states of the peninsula of Yucatán) (ibid.: 97-121). Their description of Yucatecan food (which, in their view, includes the food of the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán, thus maintaining the colonial memory of the province of Yucatán) is rather brief—one page, compared to two pages for Mexico City alone, and somewhat less than two pages for the whole Maya region, in contrast to over eight pages dedicated to the center of Mexico. The authors highlight foods in which corn, beans, achiote, and chili peppers dominate, these being the paradigmatic ingredients of ‘indigenous' cooking (ibid.: 119-121). In this sense, their text reflects a central Mexican bias that perceives Yucatecan food in terms of indigenous Maya food. Yet, as I show throughout this volume, Yucatecan cuisine has been constructed around its cosmopolitism, with the result that the contributions of Maya cooking have been marginalized. The reductive characterization of Yucatecan cuisine to the food of the Maya is neither recent nor exclusive to these authors, as I discuss below (see also López Morales 2009). In fact, as I argue in this chapter, this characterization emerges from a long history of national cultural homogenization in which the culture and values of central Mexican elites have been turned into the representation of Mexican culture.

      There is a second source of ambivalence and tension in the constitution of the contemporary post-colonial culinary order. At the same time that the invention/creation of a Yucatecan regional cuisine can be understood as a means to affirm a regional identity against the cultural colonial force of central Mexican culture, it can also be seen as an instrument for the internal cultural colonization and domination of subordinate groups within the region itself. In confirming the distinctiveness of Yucatecan gastronomy, one variant of Yucatecan identity is locally affirmed, replicating the power structure established among different food cultures. While Yucatecan cuisine may be viewed as the blend of several cultural culinary traditions, the roots of those different cuisines are obscured. In the following section, I discuss the historical and socio-cultural transformations that have contributed to the construction of these divergent cultural paths.

       Yucatán and Mexico: Stories of a Difficult Relationship

      When I first saw, in 1998, a gigantic Mexican flag planted in the hotel zone of Cancún, my first thought was that since tourists encountered few Mexican nationals at this resort (other than as chambermaids or hotel employees), the Mexican government saw fit to remind them that they were in Mexican territory. Soon afterwards, in May 1999, along with all Meridans, I found another monumental Mexican flag, this time erected in the parking lot of a central Mexican department store (today with an appended shopping mall), on Mérida's exit to the port of Progreso. This time, it could be read as an overt political act, since the candidates running for governor of the state had aligned with opposing sides in the Yucatecan divide. The National Action Party (entrepreneurial and right-wing Catholic) sided with the Mexican nation, holding the position that Yucatecans are first and foremost Mexicans. СКАЧАТЬ