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

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      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 like them, “[salads] are not really a part of our diet. Thus, they 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' СКАЧАТЬ