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

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СКАЧАТЬ the second half of the twentieth century, societies have witnessed different forms of articulation between the post-national and the post-colonial global conditions. The term ‘post-colonial' is loaded with ambiguity and has been criticized with regard to the temporal connotations of the prefix ‘post-' (McClintock 1992; Mignolo 1993; Shohat 1992). Here, following Young (2001), I understand post-colonial as a condition, not as the point in time of the demise of colonialism. That is, I see it as a stage for global transformations into new structures of economic imperialism and domination, as well as for the spawning of new forms of cultural colonialism that displace and replace direct forms of intervention and domination. In this sense, post-colonial critique seeks to deconstruct and denaturalize the subordinate location of regional and local cultures vis-à-vis the modern nation-state. It attempts to extricate the conceptual dichotomies that, on the one hand, harden and legitimize cultural colonial power and, on the other, limit our understanding of contemporary cultural hybridity and post-coloniality (Bhabha 1994; Patke 2006; Prakash 1992; Radhakrishnan 1993).

      I am thus concerned with the ways in which the formation of the Mexican nation-state has relied on the design and deployment of pedagogic measures that sought and still seek to homogenize a highly culturally diverse territory, while concealing the persisting (and new) performative fractures that undermine the modern project of state formation.¹⁰ Thus, although I pay attention to the cultural colonialism implicit in the expansion of US fast-food franchises into the Yucatecan culinary field, along with other universalizing strategies of cultural homogenization and domination (such as the dissemination of French standards required for the recognition of haute cuisine), I privilege the analysis of the ways in which the invention of a national cuisine is interlocked with both voluntary and involuntary attempts to erase the culinary diversity within the Mexican nation-state.

      In critiquing this form of cultural domination, I contend that it is necessary to take into account two overlapping dimensions that constitute the post-national order. On the one hand, we need to focus on what Habermas (2001) has identified as the ‘postnational constellation', that is, the supranational processes—such as NAFTA, the EU, and others that are more diffuse (being tied to the unimpeded power of corporations)—that have eroded the power of the nation-state. For example, I look 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 СКАЧАТЬ