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

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      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 do not necessarily rest on claims of a long-established unity rooted in a common ethnicity or an ancestral territory, nor are they based on only one religion. Rather, they are constituted within a public sphere that articulates contemporary notions of citizenship and a mode of peoplehood that invokes common icons or symbols. These communities are imagined on the grounds of shared historical experiences, religious instruction, educational programs, exposure to different media, and active policies deployed by a state that aims to produce, through its institutions, a controllable population (B. Anderson 1983; Habermas [1962] 1989). With its shifting national boundary, several coexisting Christian religions (the number of Muslims is slowly growing), and more than 30 indigenous languages challenging Castilian Spanish's hegemony, the Mexican nation can hardly claim a strong primordial connection binding ethnicity, the nation, and the state.

      The social sciences and the humanities provide multiple entry points into the questions of the nation and nationalism. In an early introduction to the sociological problem of ‘nationalism', A. Smith (1983) identified three different approaches seeking to overcome its theoretical neglect: the developmental approach (in two varieties, modernization and uneven development), the communitarian approach, and the conflict approach, represented, respectively, by scholars who were influenced by Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. According to Smith, the previous neglect could be understood due to the development and hegemony of strong modern nation-states during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the fragmentation of nation-states that ensued following the implosion of the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century led to the growing preoccupation with the question as to whether nationalist movements were resurging or obsolete (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; A. Smith 1996a).

      As scholars recognized that nationalism was not a vanishing ideological form, they were forced to produce different theories to explain its contemporary endurance. A. Smith (1999) grouped the new lines of study on the basis of the foundation each had in differing explanations of nationalism. The models he identified were based on (1) primordial alliances, (2) perennial self-understandings, (3) a close tie to the modern condition (including the modernity of the form of the nation-state), and (4) ethno-symbolic constructions and sentiments. The first two models explain national identity as foundational cultural essences and racialized differences; the third views nationalism as a product of the modern relationship among nation, state, territory, and sovereignty; and the fourth grounds the new force of nationalism in ethnicity. A common premise of the primordial, perennial, and ethno-symbolic approaches is that there exists a line of continuity (sometimes despite fractures and recurrences) between enduring, historically based ethnic identities and the contemporary nationalist claims that different groups advance (Llobera 2004; A. Smith 1996b, 1999). In some cases (see, e.g., A. Smith 1999), the emergence of the modern state is understood as an effect of nationalist movements. However, some studies suggest that the transformation of old, pre-modern forms of political, religious, commercial, and bureaucratic organization into modern states makes use of nationalist feelings to legitimate the enforcement of boundaries, the imposition of taxes, trade protectionism, and the expansion of political and military control over other territories (Armstrong 1982; Hobsbawm 1990; Llobera 1994; Wallerstein 1987). As Hobsbawm (1990: 10) put it: “[N]ationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.”

      It was during the invention of the modern state that cultural, political, and commercial elites engaged in the process of inventing the nation by promoting a common language and religion and by adopting forms of territorial administration that sought to erase, or at least silence, difference (Pease 1992). The modern nation-state emerged from a process of domination, assimilation, and subordination of its internal others. These practices were instituted in today's France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium before the model of the modern nation-state was exported to the world (Badie 2000; Duggan 1994; Llobera СКАЧАТЬ