Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn 9780857453341

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Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in Yucatán

Cedla Latin America Studies (CLAS) General Editor Michiel Baud, Cedla Series Editorial Board Anthony Bebbington, Clark University Edward F. Fischer, Vanderbilt University Anthony L. Hall, London School of Economics and Political Science Barbara Hogenboom, Cedla Barbara Potthast, University of Cologne Rachel Sieder, University of London Eduardo Silva, Tulane University Patricio Silva, Leiden University Cedla Centro de Estudios y Documentación Latinoamericanos Centro de Estudos e Documentação Latino-Americanos Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation Cedla conducts social science and history research, offers university courses, and has a specialized library for the study of the region. The Centre also publishes monographs and a journal on Latin America. Keizersgracht 395–397 1016 EK Amsterdam The Netherlands/Países Bajos http://www.cedla.uva.nl For information on previous volumes published in this series, please contact Cedla at the above address. Volume 98 Latin America Facing China: South-South Relations beyond the Washington Consensus Edited by Alex E. Fernández Jilberto and Barbara Hogenboom Volume 99 Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in Yucatán Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz

Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in Yucatán

Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2012 Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ayora-Diaz, Steffan Igor. Foodscapes, foodfields, and identities in Yucatán / Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Latin America studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-220-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-85745-334-1 (ebook) 1. Food habits—Mexico—Yucatán (State) 2. Food preferences—Mexico —Yucatán (State) 3. Cooking, Mexican—Mexico—Yucatán (State) 4. Yucatán (Mexico : State)—Social life and customs. I. Title. GT2853.M6A96 2011 394.1250972’65—dc23

2011037632

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

Contents

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Food and the Post-colonial Politics of Identity

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Chapter 1 The Story of Two Peoples: Mexican and Yucatecan Peoplehood

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Chapter 2 Mérida and the Contemporary Foodscape

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Chapter 3 The Yucatecan Culinary Field and the Naturalization of Taste

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Chapter 4 Cookbooks and the Gastronomic Field: From Minor to Major Codes (and Back)

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Chapter 5 The Gastronomic Field: Restaurants and the Institutionalization of Yucatecan Gastronomy

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Conclusion: Food and Identities in Post-national Times

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Notes

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Glossary of Recipes

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Cookbook References

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References

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Index

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Illustrations

Figures I.1 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 3.1 5.1 5.2

Cod Biscayne-style, final stages of cooking Palace Cantón at the Paseo Montejo Monument to Jacinto Canek, Canek Avenue, Mérida Supermarket in Mérida Street vendor of cochinita pibil and baked piglet, Mérida Family Christmas Eve supper table set in buffet style Restaurant patio in downtown Mérida The author facing panuchos and salbutes in a downtown restaurant

19 41 51 90 97 138 213 215

Tables 2.1 2.2 2.3 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2

The urban foodscape—eating out for breakfast The urban foodscape—eating out for almuerzo The urban foodscape—eating out for supper Proportion of Yucatecan recipes in relation to the total of recipes included in the cookbook Cocina Yucateca Recipes from the gastronomic field included in recent Yucatecan cookbooks Entradas (first dishes) in restaurants of Yucatecan food Main courses in restaurants of Yucatecan food

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95 101 109 155 187 224 228

Acknowledgments

It is impossible to carry out an anthropological project without the participation of innumerable colleagues, friends, institutions, and the many individuals who, during and after participating in my research, became friends. Following established conventions, I sign this book with my proper name, but I could not have written it without the multitude involved in its completion. Moreover, although anthropological fieldwork is most often a lonely task, I had the incomparable advantage of always counting on my wife and fellow anthropologist, Gabriela Vargas Cetina, to discuss my findings and to challenge my interpretations. Writing the research project on which this book is based was made possible thanks to the institutional support of Francisco Fernández Repetto, former director of the Faculty of Anthropological Sciences at the Autonomous University of Yucatán (UADY), and Raúl Godoy Montañez, former rector of this university. Since 2007, when I returned from a one-year residency at Cornell University, Genny Negroe Sierra, current director of the Faculty of Anthropological Sciences, has been very supportive, and I cannot thank her enough for relieving me from many administrative obligations. During the years 2000–2006, I conducted research in Mérida and benefited from intellectual and gastronomic exchanges with Diana Arizaga, Andrea Cucina, Francisco Fernández Repetto, Lilia Fernández Souza, Arehmi Mendiburu Carrillo, Genny Negroe Sierra, Vera Tiesler, and Pilar Zabala. At an early stage in the project, Guadalupe Cámara Gutiérrez, Roger Aguilar, Oscar Arango, and Celia Rosado Avilés kindly helped me to locate references, cookbooks, and cooks willing to talk to me. Also, at the Social Sciences Library of the UADY, Edgar Santiago Pacheco and Flor López Bates often helped me to locate rare cookbooks and other reference works. The UADY’s Review Board judged my application positively for a sabbatical leave. Without this opportunity, which I took during the academic year 2006–2007, it would have been difficult to accomplish the writing of this book. I was fortunate to have the extraordinary opportunity to spend my sabbatical leave at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. A fellowship from – vii –

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the Society gave me the opportunity to think, write, rethink, and rewrite in a context of respectful interdisciplinary discussion. This inspiring environment was made possible thanks to the generosity and friendship of the director of the Society, Brett DeBary, and, during her leave, the acting director, Timothy Conway Murray. The fellows of the Society throughout this period always engaged in a respectful exchange of ideas. I am grateful for the questions and challenges posed, in particular, by Sarah Evans, Jenny Mann, Natalie Melas, Stanka Radovik, Micol Seigel, Suman Seth, and Noa Vaisman. Fuyuki Kurasawa joined the Society’s weekly conversations and lunch, and I appreciated the opportunity to converse about my argument with him. Also, while at Cornell, I enjoyed academic and gastronomic exchanges with Frederic Gleach, Vilma Santiago-Irizarry, Jane Fajans, Terry Turner, Natalie Melas, and Rames Elias, all of whom made conviviality a high point of my stay in Ithaca. The library services at Cornell were always efficient and prompt in locating cookbooks and other reference works. For their kind support, I extend thanks to the Society’s staff: Mary Ahl, Linda Allen, and Lisa Patty. Some of the ideas developed here were presented in a somewhat inchoate fashion at different forums. Tracey Heatherington and Bernard C. Perley invited me to discuss the themes in chapter 4 at the University of Milwaukee’s weekly anthropology colloquium. I also presented portions of chapter 3 at the University of Toronto’s Canadian Anthropology Conference and, by kind invitation of Ramona Perez, at the weekly seminar in the Department of Latin American Studies at the State University of San Diego. I wish to highlight my appreciation for their comments to Vered Amit, Sally Anderson, Deborah Reed-Danahay, Noel Dyck, and Valentina Napolitano at the University of Toronto and to Ramona Perez in San Diego. Also, Carmen Bueno Caste­ llanos invited me to present portions of chapter 5 in the seminar on globalization that she coordinates at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Thinking about gastronomy would be impossible without a general framework of reference. I have been very fortunate to have the friendship of great gourmands in different parts of the world: Marie-France Labrecque and Francine Saillant in Quebec City; Catherine Lussier and Igor Boudnikov in Montreal; Allan and Josephine Smart, the late Herman Konrad, Candy Arceo, Cathy Work, and Brian Ronaghan in Calgary; Tracey Heatherington and Bernie C. Perley in Canada and Milwaukee; Ramona Perez in San Diego and at American Anthropological Association conferences; and Maya Radicconcini in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Rome. I have also enjoyed friendships with other connoisseurs of good food: Teresa Carbó, the late Victor Franco Pellotier, and Teresa Rojas Rabiela in Mexico City; Pablo Farías Campero, Patricia Velásco, Walda Barrios, and Antonio Mosquera in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the late David Halperin in Comitán de las Flores, Chiapas; Teodora Zamudio in Buenos Aires; Gabriella da Re, Alessandra Guigoni,

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Gianetta Murru-Corriga, and Franco Corriga in Cagliari; the Giaccu family in Nuoro and Villagrande Strisaili; the Loi families in Talana, Cagliari, and Rome; Anna Paini in Felino, Parma, and Verona; and Adriana Destro and Mauro Pesce in Bologna. In Rome, Lazio, and Tuscany, we have been taken to the most incredible trattorie and restaurants by Franco Sircana, Laura Radicconcini, Gianna Radiconcini, Ginno Satta, and Laura Iamurri. In Mérida, Genny Negroe Sierra, Andrea Cucina, Vera Tiesler, Francisco Fernández Repetto, Diana Arizaga, and Pilar Zabala have been constant gastronomic interlocutors. My family and that of my wife have always been most generous with their conversations over and about food. Special thanks go to Manuela Diaz Carbajal viuda de Ayora, who taught me the basics of Yucatecan cooking, to the late Aurora Diaz Carbajal, to Gloria Vargas Vargas, to Rosa del Alba Cetina Quiñones, and to the late Eduardo Vargas Vargas. For all of them, in different ways, food has always been (or always was) an important part of life. Gisselle Vargas Cetina and Roxana Chavarria Caro made it their duty to concoct as many reasons as possible to separate us from our computers, cooking gargantuan meals for us to savor. Gabriela Vargas Cetina, with whom I have shared 30 years of my life, has become a great gourmand and food interlocutor over the years. The improvements in my cooking are in large part due to her increasingly demanding palate. I would also like to thank the generosity and courtesy of the restaurateurs, chefs, waiters, restaurant cooks, and home cooks in Yucatán, who showed a pleasant disposition toward my research and were always patient with my questions. I cannot thank enough the many friends who introduced me to their relatives so that I could converse with them about food and cooking in Yucatán. Food is very much an everyday topic of conversation in Yucatán, and it is to the advantage of a researcher that all locals are experts in Yucatecan gastronomy and are always inclined to discuss food. Many thanks are also extended to Kathleen Willingham, Michel Baud, and the Cedla editorial board for their kind comments and support in getting this book published. I also wish to thank Cedla’s two anonymous reviewers for their comments; their suggestions have been important in bringing more clarity to my argument. Again, my wife, friend, colleague, and fellow at the Society for the Humanities, Gabriela Vargas Cetina, has lent me two and a half decades of support, as well as challenging intellectual conversations, and has always been generous with her time to read, proof, and comment on my manuscripts despite the load of her own intellectual, administrative, and artistic commitments. This project received financial support from PROMEP (Programa de Mejoramiento de la Planta de Profesores) in the form of two grants, which allowed for the acquisition of books related to my research for the anthropology library collection and for the purchase of computer and video equipment. Support

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was also provided by PIFI (Programa Integral de Fortalecimiento Institucional) during the writing of the final version. Thanks go to the Anthropology Department and the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine, for welcoming us as visiting professors during the summer of 2010. It was in their offices and library that I undertook the final revisions of this volume. Many thanks are extended also to Robert Garfias, Patricia Seed, and Frank Cancian for their friendship and gastronomic hospitality, and especially to George E. Marcus for everything, including inquisitive discussions on my argument.

Map of the peninsula of Yucatán, showing the state divisions and the main cities and roads. Elaborated for this book by Rodolfo Canto Carrillo.



Introduction



Food and the Post-colonial Politics of Identity

Cut off from Mexico by sea, great distance, and harsh terrain, the peninsula has been a virtual ‘island’ during most of its history. This isolation has given the people a sense of cultural and psychological separatism. They consider their land to be un otro mundo—a world apart. — E. H. Moseley and E. D. Terry, Yucatan: A World Apart

During the late 1990s, after spending eight years away, my wife and I often stayed at an apartment near Mérida’s bullfighting ring (plaza de toros) and spent our vacations visiting friends and relatives in a couple of cities in the peninsula of Yucatán. After an initial charting of places to have breakfast, one morning we decided to visit the local franchise of a restaurant specializing in ‘Mexican food’. This restaurant is located in the Paseo Montejo, one of the elegant and expensive areas of the city. Intrigued by the listing in the menu of only one Yucatecan dish, my wife, Gabriela Vargas Cetina, ordered tacos stuffed with cochinita pibil (pork marinated in Seville oranges, annatto paste, and spices, wrapped in banana leaves and baked).1 We were surprised when she was handed a plate with three tacos accompanied by refried black beans, sprinkled with shredded fresh cheese. We felt that the ingredients combined on the plate ran against the local logic of Yucatecan preparation and the aesthetics of the dish. From experience, we know that when Meridanos and Yucatecans consume this dish in food stands and markets across the city and in any town in the state, they expect to be served finely minced pickled red onions and a choice of ground red chili pepper or, in some instances, minced habanero chili pepper to garnish their tacos, but no beans and no cheese. We did not know what to think about this situation. Was it a change that had taken place in the consumption of the dish during our eight-year absence from Yucatán? When we told friends and relatives of our experience, they questioned our common sense: “Why would you would even think of ordering cochinita pibil in such a restaurant? You had it coming!” We pursued our exploration of local views and found some contrasting opinions about the presence of beans. Some – 1 –

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people were absolutely reluctant to consider it a suitable accompaniment to cochinita, while others accepted that in some cases (e.g., as an adjustment to personal taste) they could be eaten together. But cheese? Definitely not. No Yucatecan friend or relative found the presence of any type of cheese acceptable in cochinita. To everyone, this was a travesty of Yucatecan cooking that is characteristic of Chilango restaurants.2 With this introductory anecdote, I wish to underline some of the themes that I will develop throughout this book. The first is that there is a prevailing and complex opposition between a territorializing, national Mexican cuisine and a deterritorializing, regional Yucatecan cuisine.3 Second, the Yucatecan gastronomic field springs from the regional culinary field as a cultural construction that is both a response to and an effect of the cultural stereotyping performed by the perceived Mexican drive to colonize regional culture. Third, through textual and culinary practices, Yucatecans establish and routinize a set of differences that characterize and define distinctive regional culinary and gastronomic fields, yet at the same time these fields reciprocally influence each other. Professional cooks borrow recipes from the culinary field and make them iconic of regional gastronomic culture. However, once instituted, these sanctioned recipes, presentation of dishes, and appropriate culinary techniques and technologies become normative of the practices that define the regional culinary field. Fourth, while the culinary field is, to a large extent, more open and inclusive than the gastronomic field, both are restrictive as to the techniques, ingredients, recipes, aesthetic forms of presentation, and eating etiquette that are considered to be properly Yucatecan. Hence, along with the institution of the gastronomic field, there is a process of ‘naturalization’ whereby embodied historical and cultural practices are politically turned into the ‘essence’ of Yucatecan identity and Yucatecan food. After decades of analyzing the social and cultural dimensions of food, contemporary studies have begun to explore the political nature of this taken-forgranted aspect of everyday life (Döring, Heide, and Mühleisen 2003; Douglas [1975] 1997, 1984; Falk 1994; Fischler [1990] 1995; Murcott 1983). More recently, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have directed their attention to the relationship between national identities and culinary cultures in different parts of the globe (Appadurai 1988; Belasco and Scranton 2002; Camporesi 1970; Capatti and Montanari 1999; Cwiertka 2006; Ferguson 2004; Mennell 1985; Pilcher 1998; Wilk 2006). Although it is widely accepted that the emergence of a national cuisine is neither a necessary condition for nor a necessary consequence of the emergence of modern nation-states, most research has focused on examining the intricacies of this relationship. In this book, I look at the importance of food from a largely neglected angle: the emergence of regional cuisines as a strategy to defend heterogeneity against the homogenizing power of nationalist ideologies. I propose that we reckon global

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post-national and post-colonial transformations as the inescapable context for understanding the location of food in the contemporary construction, affirmation, and defense of regional identities, especially in circumstances in which local people perceive threats coming from the homogenizing/hegemonizing cultural power of the colonial nation-state. These regional identities are the outcome of a productive system of differences that, I will argue, are marked by discourses and grounded on practices conceptualized under the terms of hybridity and colonial mimicry (Bhabha 1994). Throughout, I pay attention to the ways in which regional gastronomy and the forms of sociality coupled with food (such as hospitality) are marked by ambivalent cultural negotiations and are embedded in the unequal structure of national-regional-local power. Describing the shifting politics of the relationship between Yucatecan and Mexican food cultures will help to illustrate this post-colonial and postnational transformation. Consequently, in order to understand the opposition between Yucatecan regional food and Mexican national food, I find it necessary to examine the historical processes whereby nations and subordinate regions were shaped in this part of the world.

Nations and Regions in Latin America The European expansion into the American continent, from the end of the fifteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, was conducted primarily by the Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French and resulted in an array of diverse institutional, religious, commercial, political, and military assemblages. It was an expansion that also resulted in the transformation of food and food habits across the world (Sokolov 1991). The American War of Independence and the French Revolution inspired independence claims in some of the Caribbean islands and continental mainlands. Recognizing the differences that resulted from different forms of colonial-imperial domination, Rodríguez O. (1996) has examined the movements for independence in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. In general terms, he locates the origins of Creole discontent as arising from three different sources: first, a colonial structure that prioritized the appointment of newly arrived Europeans into positions of authority over the rights of those born of European parents on American soil; second, the Bourbon Reforms, which created a system of intendancies that, while improving tax collection, encouraged the emergence of regional interests and regionalism; and third, the French invasion of Spain, which made the Creoles unsure about who in Spain (i.e., the Iberian authorities or the French) was actually in charge of the American territories. Regionalism emerged within the different colonized regions of the continent that were governed as autonomous (and sometimes rival) administrative

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entities. In this sense, Cuba, New Spain, Peru, Yucatán, and Argentina, for example, constituted different recognizable regions wherein local elites consolidated positions of power and developed different political and economic interests that were often at odds with those of the elites in other regions. In declaring their autonomy from Spain, at least some of the leaders were acting strategically, swearing allegiance to the king, on the one hand, while affirming their autonomy during the French occupation of Spain, on the other. By the early nineteenth century, affirmations of autonomy had transformed into declarations of independence. In 1810, Argentina, Colombia, and New Spain began their struggles to obtain independence. Chile did so in 1818, and Peru delayed until 1821 its declaration of independence from Spain. Yucatán never requested independence. The short-lived republic of Gran Colombia at that time included Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador (portions of which are still in dispute between Ecuador and Peru), while Argentina then encompassed what are today Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. New Spain included much of today’s Mexico, plus the present-day US states of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Yucatán, in turn, included the entire peninsula plus, at different times, parts of today’s Guatemala and Belize, as well as portions of today’s states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Eventually, following internecine wars, those territories succeeded in separating from the emerging countries to which they were administratively subordinated, and in each case the governing elites devised different strategies to construct distinctive nations (Acree and González Espitia 2009; Castro-Klarén and Chasteen 2003; Radcliffe and Westwood 1996; Rodríguez O. 1996). In contrast to these new emerging nations, regional Yucatecan elites were comfortable with the Constitution of Cadiz (1812) and the fiscal privileges that they gained from it, as it encompassed the main trade ports (Campeche and Sisal) located between Havana in the Caribbean Sea and the port of Veracruz, where most goods were imported into New Spain (Reid 1979). During the construction of new independent nations, regionally dominant groups—and the intelligentsia that supported them—disregarded the fact that the territories they claimed as nation-states encompassed multiple ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious groups that provided other regional groups with the certitude that they possessed meaningful cultural differences that distinguished them from the dominant groups located in the new seats of power (Gómez-Moriana and Durán-Cogan 2001). As several authors have argued (following, and sometimes diverging from, Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’), in each new nation, the print media and the discussions that they encouraged in the public sphere contributed to the creation of a consciousness of belonging to distinct nations. They also disseminated the conviction that each nation was made up of only one distinct culture. As Chasteen (2003: xvii) suggests, the different Latin American

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nations invested lots of energy in creating nativist images in fiction, history, music, dance, and poetry and also originated ‘typical dishes’ in support of their distinctiveness. In many cases, such as those mentioned above, different regions managed to separate themselves from the encompassing administrative units into which Spain had placed them. In contrast to this experience, despite initial hints of support from the Republic of Texas and the US Congress, in the end the Yucatecan government failed to garner the necessary international support and recognition in order to become an independent nation (Williams 1929). There are diverging interpretations regarding the meaning of regional identities at the time of independence. Some suggest that they responded to specific local economic interests and were not yet ‘national’ identities (e.g., Guerra 2003: 7). That is, in New Spain, the newly independent elites sought to protect their central highland regional, political, and economic interests, but they had not yet developed the common consciousness of a nation. From its origin as an independent state, Mexico was ruled by competing elites from the center and northern states, each seeking to privilege the interests of the regional group of which they were constituents. Arguably, this tendency continued after the twentieth-century Mexican Revolution (Drake 1970). The same can be said of Yucatecan elites in the territory of post-independence Yucatán, where, in the cities of Campeche, Mérida, and Valladolid, they were vying for the domination of the region’s resources, commerce, and political power. In this historical context, alternative regional affiliations and interests permitted ex-centric groups to defy the power and authority of central Mexican elites. This tug-of-war happened in several Latin American countries: in Mexico, as the examples of Texans and Yucatecans illustrate (Careaga Viliesid 2000); in Argentina, where regional provincial elites challenged the authority of the Buenos Aires elite (Donghi 2003: 38), leading to the independence of some regions; and in Brazil, where Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro elites diverged on the grounds of their pro- or anti-slavery positions (Needell 1987). The need to establish homogeneous nation-states also explains the regional and national efforts to conceal from the memory of the nation the part played by indigenous or African groups in the independence struggles in places such as today’s Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Argentina (González-Stephan 2009; Huner 2009; Needell 1987; Radcliffe and Westwood 1996; Verdesio 2003).4 This strong tie between the economic, political, religious, or military interests of different regions has generated different explanatory frameworks for the existence of regions and for the need to theorize about them. These explanations range from essentialist positions that tie the identity of a people to the geography and ecology of the place in a foundational fashion (Fabregas Puig 1992)—so that it becomes possible to write about Mexico as if it existed

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5,000 years ago (which it did not—not even as an idea; e.g., see LongSolís and Vargas 2005)—to explanations that reduce the region to economic or political networks and connections (Liverman and Cravey 1992; C. Smith 1976a, 1976b). There have been, however, attempts to introduce the cultural dimension into the analysis of regionalism as a phenomenon. For example, Van Young (1992: 2) distinguishes between ‘regionality’, or the condition of being a region, and ‘regionalism’, “the self-conscious identification—cultural, political, and sentimental—that large groups of people develop over time within certain geographical spaces.” For him, there is a close relationship between regional and class systems that share attributes, underscoring the multi-dimensionality of regionalism: first, both of these systems show internal differentiation among the different groups encompassed by a region; second, they reveal a hierarchical structure of power among these groups; and, third, they show articulation in the form of an organized relation among the elements constitutive of the system (ibid.: 4–5). Nonetheless, during the development of the modern nation, regionalist feelings have often been dismissed as archaic remains that pre-date the nation (ibid.: 9) or as pre-modern inclinations that obstruct the formation of the modern nation-state (Drake 1970). Within this cultural perspective, Lomnitz (1992) privileges the relationship between region and hegemony as an inherent association—that is, he is not worried about unpacking the relationship between nation and hegemony. Instead, he suggests that when looking into the constitution of regionalism, we need to analyze the elements that are constitutive of the phenomenon: the political economy of a regional culture (who generates signs and how are they distributed) and the relationship between space and ideology (ibid.: 63). In fact, although Lomnitz recognizes that within a region different interest groups may exist and that hegemony is created regionally, taking national hegemony as the general ground of reference, he defines regional feelings as “localist ideologies” that are useful in easing the tensions between “intimate culture” and nationalist interests (ibid.: 78). In any event, for the purposes of the present argument, what these cultural approaches emphasize is, first, the existence of a set of symbols, values, and meanings that, even though they may be generated by elite interest groups, are mobilized and circulated via the instruments of different social institutions, and, second, that they are shared to a greater or lesser extent by the different groups that constitute the social, political, and economic regional structure. Some regional identities have, in time, transformed into national identities, and some social institutions tied to the state (e.g., the educational system, the church, demographers, surveyors, cartographers, newspapers) have engaged in the spread of instruments to promote the imagination of the nation. As I argue below, this was the case for both Yucatán and Mexico, although in the

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end Yucatecan nationalism remained reduced to the common consciousness of a shared peoplehood that is subordinated to Mexican nationalist discourses and national identity. In the following section, I examine some of the mechanisms and instruments that have allowed the spread of the nation-form.

Dissemination: National and Regional Cuisines It is within this framework that I have chosen to further unpack Bhabha’s (1994) take on ‘dissemiNation’. He borrowed and expanded Derrida’s concept of ‘dissemination’ to discuss the post-colonial implications of replicating the European blueprint during the creation of new nation-states elsewhere. I believe that highlighting the complex set of meaning associations inscribed in this term can be useful in understanding how Yucatecan gastronomy and identities have emerged amid cultural negotiations that respond to both the goal of defending the interests of regional elites—disseminating their values and views among other social groups—and the desire to define and establish regional culture as one marked by cosmopolitan inclinations. Hence, in addition to Bhabha’s usage, ‘dis/semi/nation’ uncovers three different processes that are usually collapsed into one single term. First, as ‘dissemination’ it privileges, since the end of the eighteenth century, the spread of nationalist ideologies as a universal blueprint to legitimize any state’s claim to ‘modernity’. Second, as ‘dis-semination’ it emphasizes the differences inscribed in the local appropriation of ideas about the nation inspired by European philosophy and political thought. As I show in chapter 1, this process, which unfolded among central Mexican and Yucatecan elites alike and in parallel, informed the Yucatecan tendency to affirm its distinctiveness from Mexico throughout most of the nineteenth century. Third, as ‘dissemi-nation’ it places the emphasis on the consequences of the displacement of independence claims in favor of the emergence, since the early twentieth century, of a strong sense of regional identity. This identity is rooted in an awareness of peoplehood that, without giving rise to separatist desires, sustains the regional certitude that Yucatecan culture is different from Mexican culture. Yucatecans do not fully participate in Mexican cultural values and institutions, nor do they fully constitute a nation; rather, they can be seen as embodying a semi-nation in an ambivalent, difficult (dis-) relation with the nation. As I will be showing throughout this volume, these concepts find expression in the political construction of the Yucatecan foodscape and in the regional culinary and gastronomic fields.5 The following arguments are well-known today, so I will not examine them here. However, it is important to point out that various scholars have analyzed the relationship between the forging of modern nations and the

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invention of national cuisines. Since Appadurai’s (1988) seminal discussion about the part that cookbooks played in the invention of Indian cuisine, several studies have documented how culinary institutions became tied to other social and cultural forces, erasing regional differences and homogenizing national taste. This process had been largely neglected, although Camporesi (1970) had already argued that, following the political unification of Italy, Pelegrino Artusi’s cookbook, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well), first published in 1891, had profited from the new political context and the growth of industrial food processing and packaging to bring Italian regional culinary practices together into a national cuisine. In turn, Ferguson (2004), Mennell (1985), and Trubek (2000) have examined the part played by cookbooks, the press, restaurants, and chefs in the institution and universalization of French cuisine. Also, Cwiertka (2005) has described the interaction between national and European culinary values in the process of the modernization of Japanese cuisine and the ensuing invention of a national gastronomic form that silenced regional differences. As the analysis of national cuisines progressed, other scholars highlighted that, despite attempts to homogenize national cuisines, there is a deterritorializing internal heterogeneity of cuisines within single modern nation-states. Thus, Capatti and Montanari (1999) insist in the locality and strong regional identity of Italian cuisines,6 putting the accent on diversity where previous descriptions emphasized homogenization. Banerji (2007), for her part, executes the same exercise for India, describing the regional specialties that mark each Indian region as distinct from the others. While dealing indirectly with the nation, other studies have privileged the study of regional foods where previously we found narrations of a single national cuisine. Hence, Long (2009) describes the existence of regional culinary traditions derived from the diverse ecological contexts and ethnic demography of US regions. In turn, Gutierrez (1992) and Bienvenu, Brasseaux, and Brasseaux (2005) look at the modern creation of Cajun food, and Swislocki (2008) describes the distinct cuisine of Shanghai, dispelling the illusion (if it still existed) that there is a Chinese national cuisine (see also Wu 2002; Wu and Cheung 2002). While in Latin America there are, in the popular imagination, widespread associations between nations and particular dishes, there are no studies available that examine the formation of national cuisines in South American countries. Not even publications such as Lovera (2005), McDonald (2009), and Natella (2008) help to identify national cuisines in South and Central America. Lovera’s and McDonald’s books recognize the interaction between the environment and humans and between Europeans, Africans, Asians, and natives in the creation of culinary habits in different regions. However, they privilege the identification of commonalities across regions and the

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distinctiveness of regions’ cooking styles as arising from the ethnic/racial composition without a reference to national cultures, or, as in Pazos Barrera (2010), privilege the discussion of local culinary ingredients, technologies, and techniques in the multiple environments of the Andean region. In a different vein, Natella (2008), seeking to dispel simplistic stereotypes in the US about food in Latin America, lists some dishes that are seen as ‘typical’ in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and ‘the Caribbean’, but he does not get into a discussion as to whether any of these countries has developed a national cuisine (much less any regional traditions). Thus, in the popular imagination, beef dishes and roasts often bring to mind Argentinean, Uruguayan, and Brazilian meals, while the stew feijoada evokes Brazilian taste, but the heterogeneity that characterizes each of these nation-states seems to prevent either the invention or the writing of national cuisines. Consequently, regional dishes become frequently tied to race or ethnicity (African American or indigenous groups) or to social class (Drinot 2005; Fajans 2008; Folch 2008; Walmsley 2005). There is still a lack of studies examining the relationship between regionalism and food in Latin America, and this is understandable, given the scarcity of studies on nationalist cuisines (exceptions being Pilcher 1998 and Wilk 2006).7 This book seeks to make a contribution in bridging this gap and to encourage discussion about the ways in which regional culinary cultures negotiate their significance and meaning in a context (commercial, political) that favors the identification of national rather than regional cuisines.

Mexican National and Yucatecan Regional Cuisines The birth of Mexican national cuisine, as both Pilcher and Juárez López have shown, was contemporaneous with the production of a variety of textual strategies deployed during the invention of an imagined Mexican national community. Juárez López (2000) examines the strategies whereby the Creole elite, before independence, sought the foundations of New Spain’s cuisine in the natural environment of the continent and in the contributions of indigenous cooks and ingredients in the constitution of culinary practices that differed from those of Spain. In turn, Pilcher (1998) analyzes the creation of a nationalist cuisine and the cultural negotiations of the elite between enlightened/rational scientific ideals, on the one hand, and political nationalism, on the other. The end result has been the creation of a national cuisine that, at least rhetorically, is anchored in indigenous culinary practices, values, and taste preferences. During the construction of a national cuisine, regional cuisines were either co-opted or silenced by central Mexican institutions and media. ‘Yucatecan’ 8 cuisine was placed in an ambivalent position: located at

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the margins of the Mexican nation, its existence was silenced by the political power of nationalist discourse. At the same time, as I will be arguing, it was locally conceived and born as the cosmopolitan offspring of Caribbean and European intercourses and exchanges in which members of the Yucatecan elites were engaged.9 Distant from and going against the Mexican culinary blueprint, Yucatecan cooks favored recipes and ingredients that were available in the peninsular lowlands and semi-tropical environment and appropriated and reformed European, Caribbean, and South American recipes, creating a culinary tradition that diverged from that of central Mexico. If central Mexican nationalist intellectuals chose ideologically and rhetorically to accentuate the roots of national cuisine in the indigenous past, Yucatecan’s intelligentsia stressed the cosmopolitan connections of their regional food. Some authors have made all-sweeping generalizations about a rather homogeneous ‘Mexican’ cooking tradition. For instance, Adapon (2008: 2) states: “Living in different Mexican households, I realized that … [v]ariations of chilaquiles were normal everyday fare.” She adds: “Mexican cuisine is 90 per cent indigenous and 10 per cent other influences” (ibid.: 10). However, in Yucatecan gastronomy one finds, instead of fajitas, moles, enchiladas, and chilaquiles, dishes such as papadzules (minced hard egg tacos in a sauce of roasted and ground squash seeds and epazote, covered with roasted tomato sauce); queso relleno (Dutch Edam cheese stuffed with ground pork mixed with capers, almonds, raisins, onion, and spices); cochinita pibil (pork marinated in Seville orange juice, annatto seeds, allspice, and other spices, wrapped in banana leaves and baked in a pit-hole); or escabeche de pavo (turkey stewed with onion, cumin, oregano, garlic, allspice, bay leaves, and vinegar). In contrast to Mexican cooking, and despite incorporating some indigenous recipes and ingredients, Yucatecan cuisine stresses a cosmopolitan approach rather than indigenous connections in its regionally hegemonic contemporary representation. The collection of food recipes that I find encompassed under the term ‘Yucatecan gastronomy’ is not an eclectic assortment of recipes drawn from different culinary traditions, but recipes that sprang from the co-existence, intersection, and blending of diverse culinary cultures in response to the food preferences of local people. At an early stage, domestic Yucatecan cooks and their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cookbooks displayed an all-embracing openness to international influences and included recipes from North American, European, Caribbean, and even Mexican cuisines. In their homes, cooks (primarily the female members of households) sought to appropriate dishes, ingredients, and recipes that confirmed them, their families, and their immediate circle of friends as cosmopolitan in orientation and intent. The display of culinary inclusiveness enhanced regional self-esteem, publicly showcasing the economic power and cultural cosmopolitanism, the

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sophistication and worldliness of the regional elites. However, their culinary practices did not yet amount to a regional gastronomic tradition in the contemporary sense of the term. Yucatecan ‘sophistication’ was deployed against other regional cuisines. In Yucatán, as I show below, some dishes created by local cooks were chosen, gradually, to represent the cultural uniqueness of the region. Later on, during the twentieth century, they were gathered into a canonical collection of recipes, techniques, technology, ingredients, and eating etiquette that provided the ground for the invention and affirmation of a distinctive Yucatecan gastronomy. Many Yucatecans have progressively come to see the culinary field from which Yucatecan gastronomy emerged as the embodiment of regional culture and values and as fundamentally different from Mexican cuisine. The creation of an imagined national Mexican community involved attempts to silence regional differences throughout the territory of the Mexican state. Yucatecans (as well as the inhabitants of other Mexican regions) were particularly active in forging a regional identity that would counter the homogenizing cultural policies of central Mexican society. As I will elaborate in chapter 1, during the two-centuries-long period that began with the independence of New Spain and of the colonial province of Yucatán from Spanish domination in 1821, central Mexican intellectuals and politicians were involved in the design and invention of a ‘modern’ nation—Mexico. At the same time, Yucatecan intellectuals disputed whether Yucatán should join Mexico or remain a separate republic. Central Mexicans, in the meantime, launched the process of ideological homogenization of the country by imposing cultural icons that were primarily meaningful to the inhabitants of the central highlands over those favored by the inhabitants of the different regions (now states of a federal republic). Taking this historical context into account, I argue that, in practice, these symbolic impositions produced effects that translated into additional modes of subordination: the history of the region was politically converted into a minor episode in the grand narrative of the emergence of Mexico (Craib 2002; de Gortari Rabiela 1982; Florescano 2005; Gruzinski 2001; Tenorio Trillo 1998). Central Mexican institutions initiated maneuvers intended to ensure regional economic dependency on central institutions, and local powers were placed under the surveillance of the Mexican army (Campos García 2004). In consequence, regional cultural productions that differed from those established and promoted in central Mexico were dismissed as close-minded and parochial. However, during the period spanning from the second half of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, Yucatecan elites monopolized the production of henequen natural fiber, accumulating sufficient power to oppose central Mexican designs that they perceived as contrary to regional interests, while still maintaining political and economic negotiations with

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Porfirio Díaz’s progress-oriented regimes (Alisky 1980; Baklanoff 1980; G. Joseph 1986; Wells 1982). As Vargas Cetina argues (2010a, 2010b), Yucatecan elites had accumulated both money and power, allowing them to affirm and disseminate their own cultural preferences as characteristic of Yucatecan society at large. Literature, music, and food became important markers during the invention of a Yucatecan regional identity that stood (and still stands) in opposition to Mexican culture.

The Regional Foodscape: Post-national and Post-colonial Configurations Throughout this book, I examine how the historical and political divide between Yucatecan and Mexican culture is often played out in the cultural arena. Within this framework, food occupies a prominent position. As its identity (and difference) from other culinary forms is emphasized, it becomes a powerful marker in the recognition, inclusion, and exclusion of im/possible interlocutors in everyday forms of conviviality and commensality (Ayora-Diaz 2009). Yucatecans are particularly proud of local virtues, and hospitality is paramount among them. However, regionally, hospitality practices are often redefined and restructured in order to deal with unwanted guests. In chapters 1 and 3, drawing from Derrida (2000), I discuss how power relations pre-date and inscribe moral and political ambivalence into practices of hospitality in post-colonial society. In Yucatán, understandings of hospitality are continuously negotiated and revised to make comprehensible the shifting forms of Yucatecan-outsider interaction. It is in the context of a regional politics of identity grounded in the historical resistance to central Mexican society (and in the negotiation of local-national relations) that different codes of hospitality clash, are negotiated, and must be continuously revised and resignified. Since 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

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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

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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

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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.

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The Culinary and Gastronomic Fields and the 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. It is now common knowledge that Yucatecan food typically does not include many milk products; that chili peppers are used to garnish meals, but foods are not cooked spicy hot; that pork and fowl are preferred over beef; that banana leaves are the element of choice to wrap foods before baking them in pit-holes; that Seville orange juice and lime juice are the standard marinating liquids; and that many of the spices and ingredients regularly used come from the Middle East via the Caribbean region. Also, very few Yucatecan recipes make use of tomato sauce to stew meats or vegetables (although fried or roasted tomato sauces can be used to garnish roasted, grilled, or baked meats), nor is sour cream used to cook meals. The combinations of ingredients peculiar to Yucatecan cooking allow regional dishes to be recognized by their aspect, aroma, texture, and distinctive flavors. There is also, in Yucatán, an established rhythm of food consumption, ingrained as part of the regional food culture, that contributes to the naturalization of taste. Yucatecans have adopted a weekly cycle of foods that integrates, repeats, and inscribes the preference for the use of certain ingredients and cooking

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techniques in local taste. Either domestic cooks or ‘economic kitchens’14 have assumed responsibility for reproducing this cycle of meals, making it almost ‘unnatural’ to eat, for example, pork and beans on a day other than Monday, or puchero (stew) on any other day but Sunday. Restaurants often partake in this custom, making some dishes available as ‘specials’ on the days of the week that Yucatecans expect to eat them. However, it is also important to recognize that, whether one looks into the private or the public sphere, it is possible to find two interrelated and recognizable but distinguishable forms of Yucatecan cuisine. In this book I develop a distinction between what I call the culinary and the gastronomic fields. Since the nineteenth century, Yucatecans have appropriated culinary techniques, procedures, ingredients, and recipes originating in Europe and the Grand Caribbean region (encompassing the islands of the Caribbean Sea and its coastal areas, from Louisiana to the shores of Venezuela). Also, in their homes, domestic cooks appropriated and modified recipes from central Mexico and other Mexican regions to match local tastes. This variety of recipes was integrated into early cookbooks and in the domestic cooking of urban families, providing Yucatecans with a sense of cosmopolitanism. Hence, I conceptualize the culinary field as an open, inclusive field where recipes, ingredients, and cooking techniques and technologies from different cultural sources find acceptance, and where individuals find room for selfexpression, creativity, and innovation in adapting those dishes to local taste. The analysis of the emergence and development of this field requires attention to processes of cultural exchange and hybridization, to global/local and minor translocal articulations, and to a variety of local understandings of the ‘modern’. The culinary field firmly establishes the Yucatecans’ perception of themselves as cosmopolitan, progressive, and open to external influences. At the time when Yucatecan domestic cooks were inventing the regional culinary field, some commercial cooks were given the opportunity to create and promote new foods, appropriating dishes from the Maya and peasant populations of the region, finding inspiration in recipes from other areas of the world, blending and adapting them to the locally available ingredients and to the taste of the region’s middle and upper classes, and making them unique and specific to Yucatecan culture. Progressively, restaurateurs, with their customers’ concurrence, have selected a number of dishes that have been turned into canonic and iconic representatives of Yucatecan cuisine, giving birth to what I conceptualize as the gastronomic field. Hence, in this book, I define the term ‘gastronomic field’ as a socio-cultural arena in which individuals have developed explicit rules, norms, recipes, ingredients, techniques, and procedures for cooking (producing), and consuming food. My contention is that the Yucatecan gastronomic field is instituted through textual constructions, as promoted in cookbooks recognized as authoritative on Yucatecan gastronomy,

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and through the culinary practices performed in restaurants, where menus are seen as exemplary, pedagogical, and paradigmatic representations of Yucatecan gastronomy. Over time, Yucatecans have devised a quasi-formal set of rules that define which ingredients may or may not be allowed into the field, what combinations of ingredients or dishes in a meal are possible, the aesthetics of their presentation, and the etiquette for their consumption.15 These rules have been established through repetition and standardization, both in the content of cookbooks and in the lists of dishes presented in restaurant menus. As I understand them, the culinary and gastronomic fields are intersecting spheres where individuals and groups engage in the textual and practical production and consumption of food. These fields are found in an immanent relation to each other. While arising from the Yucatecan culinary field, the gastronomic field is one that is restrictive, exclusive, and governed by explicit rules. It is one where writers, cooks, and consumers engage in a process of negotiation and purification whereby some elements are defined as proper or alien to Yucatecan ‘cultural traditions’ and, consequently, are included or excluded from recipe collections and restaurant menus. In this context, while operating within the culinary field, agents stress their creativity and inventiveness in appropriating and devising new dishes. For them, their own creativity is based on their knowledge of diverse culinary sources. However, when performing within the gastronomic field, they declare it to be closed to external influences and affirm the exclusivity of its roots in the cultural values of Yucatecan society. It is here that we need to see that the constitution, institution, bifurcation, and relations between these fields are intersected by the post-national and post-colonial constructions of a regional identity that is opposed to central Mexican domination. The gastronomic field disseminates its effects into the private domain. In the latter, domestic cooks see themselves (at times of heightened localism) as resisting the forces of Mexican or foreign cultural colonization and refuse to change their recipes. They assert a local gastronomic logic, claiming the authority to establish what can or cannot be admitted into—or recognized as belonging to—Yucatecan cuisine. The gastronomic field is found in a paradoxical situation: although it tends to solidify over time, it simultaneously rests upon a social imaginary that places the emphasis on local/regional ingenuity, creativity, and innovation and on the artistic freedom of expression of locally rooted but cosmopolitan cooks.

Cod Biscayne-Style: Between the Yucatecan Culinary and Gastronomic Fields With the following account, I seek to illustrate how the culinary and gastronomic fields contribute to the naturalization of taste. While living in San

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Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, we were once invited to stay at a friend’s house a few days before the Christmas holiday. For this social gathering, our host announced that she had cooked a dish of cod Biscayne-style. In a paella pan she had fried a mixture of shredded cod with onions, tomato slices, almonds, olives, and spices. It was a flavorful, fried meal, with scant sauce. Cod Biscayne-style is one of the several ‘traditional’ dishes that families choose to consume during the Christmas season all over the Mexican territory. In response to this custom, supermarkets import massive amounts of salted Norwegian cod. Although the flavors of my friend’s dish were enjoyable, I could not recognize the dish that I grew used to in the state of Yucatán (see figure I.1). In 2000, when I moved back to Yucatán, I watched how friends’ families and relatives all fell into a shopping and cooking frenzy during the winter holidays in anticipation of the Christmas Eve celebration. In different families, each member who was proud of his or her cooking abilities strove to contribute his or her best dish to the meal. Thus, for Christmas supper, families’ tables could end up with two soups, one or two salads, at least one pasta dish, one or two fruit salads, baked ham, Figure I.1. Cod Biscayne-style, final stages of cooking

Dish elaborated by the author following the recipe of Gloria Vargas y Vargas. Photograph courtesy of G. Vargas Cetina, 2005.

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baked turkey, refried black beans, lobster or shrimp—and, of course, cod Biscayne-style. During supper, relatives and friends eased their food down with national or imported red, white, or sparkling wines; after the meal, they were served brandy, vodka, whiskey, or cognac.16 Within my wife’s family, one aunt has long been recognized as owning the ‘best’ recipe for cod Biscayne-style. After a sustained monopoly (lasting longer than the 25 years that I have been related to her family), she selected me to inherit her ‘secret’ recipe. She told me that she had developed her own recipe, taking her mother’s dish as a starting point, but later including a different technique and adding an ingredient that she had learned about from a friend. Although not all regional versions are identical, her rendition of the dish fits the widespread Yucatecan understanding of the recipe, and most Yucatecans would probably recognize it as a variation on a commonly accepted culinary theme. Thus, in order to satisfy our longing for the dish during that season of the year, especially during the weeks that precede Christmas Eve (when we would share our own Christmas dinner with relatives and friends), a party made up of myself, my wife, and some friends visited Yucatecan seafood restaurants and Mexican restaurants located in Mérida that annually list the dish in their menus, along with other central Mexican Christmas dishes, such as romeritos (see the glossary). In general, we found that the cod dish was in some places saltier, while in others the sauce was thicker. In some restaurants, the dish was spicy hot, while in others it was too bland for our taste. Overall, the different versions of the dish available in Yucatán looked alike, but they were unlike what my friend had cooked in Chiapas. In its different Yucatecan presentations, the cod had been coarsely shredded or cut into pieces and simmered in a tomato sauce with olives, with or without capers, with or without slices of pimiento (which some cooks blend into the sauce), and with or without croutons (or golden-fried slices of French bread). In addition, it was sometimes accompanied by refried black beans and sometimes not. Flavors and aromas varied according to the quality of the cod, the type of olive oil used, and whether the tomato sauce was freshly made or employed processed tomatoes.17 In a contrasting experience, sometime during the winter of 2001–2002, after learning of my research topic, a friend invited me to watch her mother cook cod Biscayne-style. She let me know that her mother’s recipe was acclaimed as excellent by relatives and had been passed down in her family from one generation to the next. Her own sisters followed the same recipe for Christmas Eve dinner. In contrast to the willingness of my friend’s mother to allow me to watch and film her while she cooked, my wife’s aunt never allowed anybody to be present when she cooked the dish, even though help was offered when she began complaining about the heavy work that the dish demands of a person her age. She would tell us, every year, that her

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recipe was extremely elaborate and time-consuming. The preparation of the meal takes three days of work: soaking and washing the salt off the cod, boning and shredding it, frying in olive oil the different ingredients separately, mixing them in a specific order, and slowly simmering the whole before Christmas Eve supper. In contrast to her accounts, when I arrived at my friend’s house, her mother had already prepped the cod—desalting, boning, and shredding it all in one morning—and she was about to start cooking. It took her less than two hours to have the dish simmering in a pot in a generous amount of Spanish olive oil.18 Somewhat surprised, I asked her whether the recipe she followed that day was a fast version that differed from what she did for Christmas Eve. She responded that it was her only version, the one that she and her sisters learned from her mother and that they all follow, including her daughters (adjusting this or that ingredient to satisfy each husband’s or child’s taste). When she finished the dish, the cod was bathed in Spanish olive oil, mixed with slices of tomato, sweet red pepper, olives, and fried garlic. I had witnessed the preparation of a version that was very different from those that I had previously encountered in Yucatán (at other friends’ homes and at local restaurants) and from what I had been served at my friend’s house in Chiapas.19 The different elaborations of the same dish—within Yucatán in particular and Mexico in general—illustrate the heterogeneity of the culinary field and its ties to the gastronomic field. On the one hand, within the Yucatecan region itself, one can find different versions of the same home-cooked dish that not only are considered acceptable for family members and friends but also are turned into the standard for judging other versions of the same dish. In this respect, the Yucatecan culinary field allows for the intersection of Yucatecan recipes with recipes from other regional Mexican and international culinary ‘traditions’. On the other hand, we find that the inscription of the dish in Yucatecan cookbooks and restaurant menus imposes a paradigmatic structure on the recipe that allows only minimal differences. Hence, although it is a seasonal dish from the regional culinary field, restaurant chefs and cooks have, to some degree, ‘fixed’ the recipe, making one version more acceptable to regional consumers, with their aesthetic-based perception of the dish. Among other things, it must use a particular brand of olive oil, it must have been cooked with epazote leaves, and the ingredients have to be fried separately before being stewed together. The combination of ingredients and cooking techniques results in recognizable and desirable flavors, aromas, textures, and colors that set a standard to be met. A friend once cooked the same dish, but, seeking to save on olive oil, he did not fry all of the ingredients. Some guests who had eaten the food complained to me later that they found its texture to be odd, a result that they attributed to the failure to fry the ingredients.

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There are, in addition, other arenas where the tension, and sometimes conflict, between Yucatecan and Mexican cultures is evident. In the contemporary post-national, post-colonial order, population flows force groups to enter into contact and to engage in negotiations over their different worldviews and value systems (Kaplan 1996). The post-colonial is a complex sphere of interaction in which the experience of central Mexicans migrating into different Mexican regions cannot be compared conceptually to the forms of cultural subordination experienced, for example, by Mexican immigrants (from the center or elsewhere) in the United States. Sometimes central Mexicans who move into different regions feel entitled, as carriers of the cultural and colonial values embodied in national cultural icons and institutions, to preferential treatment in all domains of public interaction. In the contemporary multicultural environment that characterizes Mérida and Yucatán, local people sometimes describe ‘Mexicans’ as a people who demand to be treated as guests, but on their own terms, rather than adapting to the local code. Since this situation is lived as a form of cultural violence, the relationship between immigrants and local people is charged with tension, constituting a hostile context for intercultural negotiation.

Food and Identity In 2003, a disquieting note appeared in a regional newspaper. It was revealed that a Japanese company had obtained legal, proprietary rights over the name cochinita pibil. Cochinita pibil is one of the iconic dishes by which Yucatecan gastronomy is recognized, not only within the Mexican territory, but also abroad (Ayora-Diaz 2010a). How could this have happened? What would the consequences be? Were Yucatecans to be forced to use a different denomination to name, sell, and purchase their own food—a food that they had created? Xenophobic invectives flew during conversations among friends. The commotion slowly turned into a subdued irritability when, in later days, follow-up articles modified the original information: the company was not Japanese, but a Mexican firm owned by a Mexican entrepreneur of Japanese origin. Another note relayed that the name that was legally protected was not cochinita pibil, but rather La Cochinita. Moreover, it was a restaurant chain specializing in pork recipes from different Mexican regions, and its menu included the Yucatecan cochinita pibil.20 Some people never saw the follow-up shorter notes that corrected the original misinformation, and years later people would still complain about the ‘Asian invasion’ or the Mexican will to appropriate dishes that are tied to Yucatecan regional culture. This widespread moral panic highlights the affective attachment that Yucatecans display regarding regional culinary productions. Cochinita pibil,

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along with other regional dishes, is locally taken to be representative of a particular Yucatecan sensibility. For Yucatecans, it is undoubtedly a Yucatecan dish derived from a Yucatecan ‘tradition’.21 It is so much a part of their Yucatecan-ness that Yucatecans believe they are justified in being upset at the appropriations and transformations that the dish has suffered at the hands of Mexicans and other non-Yucatecans. In everyday life, the terms ‘Yucatecans’ and ‘Mexicans’ are often used as if they possess an objective content, that is, as if they reveal some ‘thing’ about the identity (the nature, the essence) of a person, a group of people, a culture, or the food of a people. Many models and explanations of identity have been formulated in the social sciences and the humanities (Hall and du Gay 1996; Rajchman 1995; Ricoeur 1992). In anthropology, Geertz’s (1973) discussion of the cognate concept of the ‘person’ challenged the universality of its North Atlantic understanding, but continued to treat its different forms as the product of bounded cultures. Other anthropologists have also contributed to the relativization of ‘identity’ and ‘person’ (see, among others, Strathern 1991; Wagner 1991). Although it is a problematic term, social actors frequently use ‘identity’ and identity-related concepts to define themselves, their social forms, and their cultural productions (as well as those of others with whom they engage). Identity politics imposes on the subjects the dichotomous logic of sameness/otherness. This logic, Lash (1999) has argued, commits difference to the margins. Hence, in contemporary identity rhetoric we find, on the one hand, that even if Mexico and Yucatán are both highly heterogeneous societies that encompass a diversity of cultures and social groups, they are often subsumed under a single identity term (‘Mexico’, ‘Mexicans’) that silences cultural, economic, gender, political, religious, and other differences. On the other hand, when differences are recognized, they are reduced to ‘otherness’ and are placed in a subordinate position to the identity of the group in power. In actual everyday practice, the boundaries among groups are more imprecise than these categories allow for, and those encompassed by a name, rather than a cohesive and harmonious collectivity, are frequently engaged in performative practices that challenge the legitimacy of homogeneous/hegemonic identities and subtly erode the groups from within (Ayora-Diaz 2003). Throughout this book, I often make reference to Yucatecan identity as something that individuals purposefully oppose to a national identity, although not necessarily in an instrumental way (many Yucatecans are convinced that a Yucatecan identity ‘truly’ exists). I understand identities as socially and culturally constructed attributes or qualities that can have external and/or internal currency in the characterization of any individual or group. As Bhabha (1994) has argued, colonial and colonized groups of people engage in a process of subjectification whereby they appropriate attributes

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and characteristics to represent themselves, often fixing their own identity into cultural stereotypes. These stereotypes obscure the fact that the chosen identity-defining attributes are dynamic, context-dependent, and constantly changing. My analysis expands the anthropological critical understanding of local identities that began with Evans-Pritchard (1940) and was followed by Barth ([1969] 1998) and Herzfeld (1997), that is, that identities, despite their apparent fixity, need to be understood as situated and as changing according to the relationship of forces among different groups and in the context of their strategies of inclusion and exclusion (Appiah 2006; Bilgrami 2006). In the contemporary stage of cultural globalization, the identity of a person in modern societies has been thought of, and sometimes experienced, as one that has reached a high degree of structural coherence and temporal consistency (Giddens 1990, 1991; Ricoeur 1992). Since the advent of the post-Fordist mode of production and of postmodern consumption, identities have come to be lived and described as fragmentary, superficial, and fleeting—as simulacra of a ‘self ’ embedded in a world of goods, information, and consumption (Gergen 1991; Jameson 1991). The linkage between consumption practices and the fashioning of transient individual and group identities has informed the argument that identities are as fleeting and superficial as the life of commodities in the market. In contrast, ethnic or national identities are understood and lived as being fixed and, at least in part, embedded in the goods that these individuals or groups produce and consume (Halter 2000; Mathews 2000). In the latter case, specific marked commodities anchor the identity of a group of people. From another point of view, group identities are understood as having been forged in the anvil of the market, be that of material goods, religions, or other forms of individual expression (Featherstone 1991; Friedman 1994; Hetherington 1998). From still another perspective, identities have come to be seen as politically imposed, giving grounds to the emergence of different identities and new social movements, including those positing regionalist and nationalist demands (Castells 1997; Escobar and Álvarez 1992; Foweraker 1995; Larraín Ibañez 2001). Despite their differences, I find that, in general, these various theoretical standpoints seem to accept that the affirmation of local identities is imbued with a high degree of instrumentality. Some authors have described ethnic and nationalist movements either as forms of instrumental identity formation (Esman 1994; Gellner 1983) or as pre-modern political forms that prefigure contemporary political movements (Hobsbawm 1990). Nonetheless, as anthropologists who understand that identities are fashioned and not given essences, we cannot ignore that individuals develop an affective attachment toward other people whom they see as sharing the same or a similar religion, language, skin color, territory,

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and political and social organization, and that they develop mechanisms to exclude individuals perceived as different from themselves. Privileging this experience, some have focused on what are called primordial attachments, naturalizing and producing understandings of ethnic, regional, and national identities as an essential attribute of a group of people (A. Smith 1983, 1999). I find that these models depend too much on the territoriality of a group to explain the foundation of different national quests. In the current historical moment of decolonization, cultural globalization, economic and military imperialism, post-national disintegration, and post-colonial developments, we can no longer base our understanding on localized cultures. Instead, I argue that we need to look at the processes of cultural exchange (more often, unequal) and the ways in which flows of people affect the societies that they leave behind and those where they arrive (Ayora-Diaz 2007a). The post-colonial order imposes on individuals the need to produce new forms of subjectivity, which they, in turn, derive from changed social, political, and cultural configurations. As M. Joseph (1999) suggests, displaced groups of people must negotiate and may be granted different degrees of formal rights within the societies that they move into. In this context, both colonizing and colonized groups forge forms of identification that are characterized by blurred boundaries, practices, and values. Hence, individuals are motivated to perform their identity by declaring and demonstrating their attachment to cultural products that root them into a culture, for example, by expressing their love for or attachment to the music, food, and forms of social conviviality that are identified as proper to the people of a territory. The more a foreigner performs as a local, the more likely it is that she or he will be accepted by the host society.22 Hybrid identities and cultural practices are now commonplace terms to describe emerging cultural products and the identity of those who find them meaningful in crafting their selves. This hybridity, as Bhabha (1994) argues, generates forms of ambivalence that can lead to unstable, changing forms of identification, including what he has called ‘colonial mimicry’. In Yucatán I found that the latter often translates into the actions and discourses of Yucatecans who accept unquestionably the authority of central Mexican or other foreign viewpoints and criticize local practices as parochial or ‘uncouth’. The economic, political, and religious institutions linked to the nation-state continuously support central Mexican culture, leading to the local perception that the presence of central Mexicans and the enforcement of their cultural views constitute an act of aggression and place a burden on the local society. The relationship between Yucatecans and outsiders, however, varies according to the groups involved. Immigrants from regions other than the central Mexican highlands have gained greater acceptance, and resentment against them seldom (although not rarely) surfaces.

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At the beginning of this twenty-first century, the population of Mérida is undeniably multicultural. Correspondingly, the market for non-local cuisines has also grown over the last three decades. From an unmarked consumption of food, Yucatecans have come to appreciate cuisines (including a variety of Mexican regional cuisines) that could be considered somewhat exotic for local taste. Yucatecan and Mexican cuisines are noticeably different: Yucatecan cuisine has developed by avoiding the blueprint of a national Mexican cuisine, finding greater affinity with European and Caribbean traditions. Yucatecans have grown to perceive themselves as different from the rest of Mexico—socially, culturally, and morally.23 In the performance of identity politics, regional cuisine is understood locally to reflect the values of the Yucatecan population at large, which are, in the same move, affirmed as different from Mexican values (Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2005a). While some differences between regional and national culinary traditions are often explained by environmental and ecological differences, we need to revise this explanation, drawing from the history of the difficult relationship between these regions (described in more detail in chapter 1). In short, there are accounts that suggest that Yucatán developed in practical isolation from the rest of Mexico, as a world apart, as suggested by the epigraph (from Moseley and Terry 1980b: 1) at the beginning of this introduction.24 However, this was not the case. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Yucatecans perceived Mexico as an interventionist, colonialist power that sought to undermine the economic autonomy of the state and to remove regional elites from positions of authority, putting in their place either individuals and families from Mexico or Yucatecans who were sympathetic to the centralist project of the national government. In the context of this antagonistic relationship, the Yucatecan elites expanded their commercial and cultural ties with Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean, in particular with Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Venezuela. The peninsular market with Europe, mediated by Cuba and Belize, fostered the inclusion of European ingredients into the regional cuisine. While the culinary field spread all over the state, it was in cities where the wealthy lived that the inchoate gastronomic field began to emerge. The dishes that today are iconic of the Yucatecan gastronomic field developed, gradually, in Mérida, Motul, Ticul, and Valladolid, the main cities of the state of Yucatán.25 Hence, Yucatecan identity and gastronomy need to be seen as a two-pronged construction: on the one hand, they underline the specificities of local culture and society and local-cosmopolitan relations; on the other, they affirm the Yucatecans’ opposition and resistance to central Mexican culture and power structures. In this historical context, food in Yucatán, as elsewhere, plays an important part in drawing the boundaries of Yucatecan culture and in shaping the cultural politics that defines who belongs to that culture and who is excluded from it (Ayora-Diaz 2009).

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The Performance of Research in Yucatán Traditionally, ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted in distant places, within cultures that are typically different from the anthropologist’s home society and culture. For many years anthropologists have been inclined to deploy rhetoric and practical strategies to make fieldwork at home acceptable, masquerading the familiar as exotic. This enterprise was considered necessary so long as anthropology was understood to be a discipline concerned with the ‘Other’ (di Leonardo 1998). The reflexive critique of anthropological and other cultural texts, which began in the late 1970s, made it possible to question and refashion the definition of anthropology’s task (Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1983; Marcus and Cushman 1982; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Said 1978). No longer concerned with classifying and ordering otherness, some anthropologists, from one wing of the anthropological spectrum, sought to redefine the discipline as an interpretive task (Geertz 1973; Rabinow and Sullivan [1979] 1987). To reach an understanding of local culture, it is necessary for the anthropologist to engage in intersubjective, dialogic negotiations of meaning (Clifford 1988; Tedlock and Mannheim 1995). We anthropologists must grasp the native’s understanding of the world in order to represent it (Geertz 1983). Although this ambition has been both strongly criticized and forcefully defended (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1990; Marcus and Fischer 1986), there is some consensus on the need for anthropologists to get as close as possible to the native’s perspective. At the same time, in the name of the ‘science’ of anthropology, some anthropologists defend the contention that a sense of distance has to be preserved to allow for critical reflection and analysis. The directive to preserve the geographical distance between the observer and the society that he or she observes has complicated the ambition to grasp the local point of view. To find their ‘Other’, anthropologists are forced to travel geographically and to displace themselves in time. For a long period, it was not deemed acceptable to look closer to home, as the early reception to Campbell’s (1964) and Friedl’s (1962) work illustrates. Both were criticized for studying Greek rural society, which was not exotic enough for the rigidities of the anthropology of their time. This proscription survives today, as often anthropologists who study their own society (which could be any so-called Western/ized society) are accused of seeking comfortable places. A segment of the academic status quo tends to dismiss studies that focus on shopping malls, kitchens, urban homes, restaurants, musical productions, and many strands of consumption-related issues. National or regional identity has become a regular topic to study somewhere else, but it is still largely proscribed ‘at home’—unless the research is being conducted among marginal or ethnic groups (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Passaro 1997).

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I find, however, that there are advantages in approaching my ‘own’ culture. I have partaken of the general embodiment and naturalization of taste, as have most Yucatecans. I grew up in an environment in which Yucatecan meals were the norm and the ‘proper’ taste and texture were always expected. However, after living 14 years abroad and in another Mexican region (Chiapas), and, moreover, after becoming an anthropologist, I was able to slip between my local knowledge of food culture and moral values and my ‘expert’ knowledge as an anthropologist who cannot bracket historical and political contexts and conditions that are critical in establishing cultural ‘necessities’. Hence, given that my main concern in this book is to explore the relationship between a form of cultural production and consumption (Yucatecan gastronomy) and the ways in which it intersects with the local politics of identity, I have sought to unpack the local structures of the social field, to trace its transformations, and to explore the strategies that seek to establish the boundaries of what locally they/we construct and understand as ‘regional culture’ and local cultural productions. To describe the gastronomic field, I have had to deal with at least five levels of ethnographic engagement, which often blurred into each other during everyday forms of interaction. I observed and discussed (1) the recipes and ingredients that domestic cooks and consumers of food consider to be Yucatecan in the private domain; (2) the recipes and culinary elements that restaurant managers and chefs consider to be Yucatecan in a public sphere ruled by the catering industry; (3) the dishes that the print media, radio, and television (local, national, and international) promote as part of the regional culinary tradition; (4) the recipes, ingredients, and techniques that cookbook writers represent as being Yucatecan in a traditional and authentic sense; and (5) the components of the gastronomic field that the bureaucratic and cultural institutions of the nation-state and the state of Yucatán recognize as such. These five levels are present in my analysis of the foodscape and the culinary and gastronomic fields. Although there is an abundance of layers of meaning in the constitution of the gastronomic field, in this volume I pay specific attention to the part played by cookbooks and restaurants. A greater emphasis on the ways in which Yucatecan gastronomy is constructed in different media (e.g., on television and radio shows and in newspaper columns written by cultural brokers who have been authorized by the local government to speak as appointed ‘chroniclers’ of Mérida) was beyond the scope of this project and will be left for future research. However, from the examples presented in this volume, I would suggest that the importance of the media is to contribute to the cultural constructs instituted primarily by cookbooks and restaurateurs. In Yucatán, as in many other places, people love to talk about food. It is treated not simply as a source of nourishment but as a pleasurable activity to be shared with relatives and/or friends in different contexts and, often, to be

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remembered (Sutton 2001). For example, on one’s return from travels to other places, friends will ask about how pleasurable the trip was. Food is usually viewed as an important dimension of the experience of travel, and it is not uncommon to hear a narration that describes what the traveler ate each day of the week and the dishes that she or he missed while away from home. As I noted above, many families have members who are recognized as ‘experts’ in the preparation of a certain dish or a number of dishes. These experts find gratification in this recognition and strive to maintain their privileged position within the family, so that they will always be needed on special days. Some are called upon for specific days of the week, while birthdays and special days of the year are occasions when these members of the family are counted on to perform their culinary art for the pleasure of relatives and friends (e.g., during the celebration of Independence Day, invitations from those who have mastered central Mexican recipes, such as pozole or chiles en nogada, are much appreciated). On these special days, friends anticipate an invitation to eat this or that Mexican or Yucatecan dish that they lack either the know-how or the patience to prepare. Also, in anticipation of the Day of the Dead and All Saints’ Day, relatives put pressure on the women or men who know how to cook mucbil pollos (a special chicken tamale) so that the dish can be enjoyed at that time of the year. These experts enjoy talking about their cooking abilities and are always passionate when referring to the family tradition that they inherited and that allows them to cook such a special dish. Nonetheless, I have found that when they speak of the recipe itself, they often describe it in general terms and ‘forget’ to mention what they consider either key ingredients or steps, so that relatives and friends always fail to replicate the recipe at their homes. An important part of the gastronomic performance is to serve the food properly, to consume it willingly, and to openly display one’s satisfaction with the high quality of the meal by consuming more than one serving of each dish, later requesting leftovers to take home or, in some instances, asking permission to return the following day to procure an additional share of the dish’s leftovers. In this food-centered context, as an anthropologist, I gained access not only due to my curiosity or the authority of my ‘science’. I found an advantage in displaying culinary abilities of my own, which were on a par with those of domestic cooks, and in showing an ample appreciation for food in general—and for Yucatecan food in particular. Because the nature of my social interaction was mediated by food, I avoid referring to the people who spoke, cooked, and ate with me as ‘informants’. Food was a social binder that allowed me to see everybody as subjects and not as information-giving objects. The approach of talking about food, cooking a meal, and sharing it with others requires a negotiation of aesthetic, ethical, political, and culinary values that the objectification of individuals as informants usually leaves unexamined. During the years that I lived outside Yucatán, I appropriated

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the skills to cook a few Indian, Thai, and Italian dishes for my friends. I also cooked Yucatecan dishes for Yucatecan and non-Yucatecan friends abroad, thus gaining acceptance as a culinary interlocutor who could ask questions and, every so often, even obtain a ‘secret’ ingredient or be taught a secret procedure for special dishes (as I could also share some learned secrets of my own). When cooking and eating in company, whether I was seen as the group’s resident anthropologist or simply as another friend, family members and friends, motivated by the meal, spent a long time talking about their favorite dishes, the ingredients they like best, the ones they would omit in their cooking, their favorite cooks for different meals, their favorite restaurants and food places, and their own skills in cooking. Thus, performing anthropological work at these family reunions and at gatherings of friends was, and continues to be, an enjoyable task. The fact that Yucatecans live in a multicultural society also fosters the exchange of information. As an anthropologist, I hosted and was hosted by people from different cultural traditions who were often willing to share their knowledge, informing others about their culinary techniques, about where to find fine ingredients or cooking appliances, and about their experiences seeking good restaurants in different neighborhoods of the city. Friends would sit and long for the meals that they used to have in the past or in their places of origin. It is also in these contexts that people become more explicit about the boundaries of their own culinary fields. People would make remarks in confidence, such as “in Yucatán we do not use —” or “in Oaxaca they add — whereas here we —” or “in Indian cooking they heavily douse their food with —.” In these contexts, people do not mind having an anthropologist at the table. The anthropologist cooks every so often and eats food with the others as well. During my research, restaurateurs proved to be a different matter. In speaking with restaurant managers and chefs, I found them to be more secretive about the cooking techniques and ingredients used in their establishments. Public health concerns, tax issues, and trade secrets were looked on as requiring circumspection or protection, and these concerns constituted barriers to gaining access to restaurant kitchens. Some restaurateurs claim that a particular dish was created in their own kitchen. Thus, they treat their recipe as a trade secret to ensure their economic success. They were willing to speak with me at the table, sharing a special dish or drinking a coffee, and they were often generous when narrating the trajectory of their restaurants, their importance, or their awards. However, they turned silent and reserved when the conversation shifted to issues related to the cooks, their kitchen staff, and the source of the ingredients they use. Restaurant managers were not impressed by my cooking abilities and knowledge. Their main concern was that no publication should impair the public image and thus the economic success of their restaurants. In contrast, there were some instances during

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conversations when some chefs were willing to tell me their secret for preparing a dish, often only after I had revealed my own secret for another recipe. For this volume I interviewed restaurant managers and chefs, as well as domestic cooks, mainly in Mérida but also in Valladolid and some former haciendas around the city of Mérida. The descriptions that illustrate this book are all based on my participation, as both host and guest, in numerous meals among acquaintances, friends, and relatives, as well as in larger celebrations that involved different degrees of commensality. Many conversations on food were informal and unstructured, and some were triggered spontaneously by the experiences being shared. I was invited to see other friends (or their relatives) cook, and three of my licenciatura students (Guadalupe Cruz Flores, Ashanti Rosado Novelo, and María José Quintal Ávila) at the Autonomous University of Yucatán fulfilled their social service obligations by conducting a short survey on economic kitchens in a neighborhood located in the north of Mérida. Because some informants asked me not to reveal their names or the names of their businesses, I use pseudonyms in some instances (which I note in the text), while in other instances I keep the actual name of public persons and restaurants that are also public by nature. In my travels to Mexico City, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, and Argentina and to different cities in Canada, the US, and Italy, I have sought to explore the local knowledge on Mexican food and the food of Mexican regions, particularly that of Yucatán—when and wherever it is known. These different experiences have allowed me to become aware of certain global-local connections and the different ways in which Mexican national cuisine is understood by both Mexicans and foreigners.

The Structure of the Book The chapters of this book are structured to facilitate the understanding of Yucatecan gastronomy as a political and cultural construct that has become important in the fashioning of Yucatecan identities vis-à-vis nationalist, homogenizing cultural colonialism. In chapter 1, I examine the historical narrative that has founded an oppositional regional identity that is performed against Mexican culture but, at the same time, is open to cosmopolitan influences. This context has allowed the creation of a culinary and gastronomic tradition that is both different from Mexican cuisine and also connected to the world at large. In chapter 2, I discuss the constitution of the urban foodscape and its explosion in Mérida. This rapid expansion connects the local to the global transformation of the marketing of foods and forces Yucatecan restaurateurs to establish, as clearly as possible, the boundaries of Yucatecan gastronomy

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that must, perforce, secure its own niche in both the local and global markets of ‘ethnic’ foods. In chapter 3, I propose that there is in place a social and cultural process of naturalization of taste that supports the territorialization of Yucatecan culinary culture. That is, despite some intra-regional variations and differences, there are mechanisms for the repetition, standardization, and routinization of culinary practices and ingredients that make the preference for certain flavors, aromas, colors, and textures an integral part of the values that define Yucatecan culture. These mechanisms favor the co-extension of a culinary culture with the territory occupied by Yucatecans and, by allowing experimentation, playfulness, and inventiveness, opens the culinary field to influences from other cuisines. In chapters 4 and 5, I analyze the constitution and institution of the gastronomic field. In chapter 4, I discuss the importance of cookbooks in the bifurcation of the culinary and gastronomic fields and show how their dynamism is related to their intersection with post-national and post-colonial power structures. Cookbooks, I argue, have become contributory minor texts that are both instruments and vehicles in the constitution of the gastronomic field. At the same time, because of their inscription in a post-national, post-colonial, multicultural society, they play an important part in deterritorializing both national and regional identities. More recent cookbooks have emerged that highlight the cultural diversity of Yucatecan culinary traditions and challenge the co-extensiveness of a single culinary tradition within the Yucatecan territory. In chapter 5, I examine the part played by restaurants, as public institutions, in delimiting the content of Yucatecan gastronomy. By listing and excluding dishes from their menus, restaurateurs display the social and cultural values that (in)form Yucatecan gastronomy. This field, which tends to become closed and relatively fixed, I suggest, slowly changes by adopting widely accepted (and demanded) dishes that correspond with the ‘natural’ aesthetics of Yucatecan food and, at the same time, marks and insinuates the direction of change for the regional culinary field. As is the case with cookbooks, the combined effects of tourism, immigration, and multiculturalism also challenge the meaning of restaurant foods and force restaurateurs to renegotiate the contents of their menus. In the conclusion, I argue that post-national and post-colonial formations and interventions are constantly changing the relationship between the culinary and gastronomic fields and the nature of the relationship between food and identity. In the end, Yucatecan food, like Yucatecan identity, is becoming pluralized and fragmented. Under new forms of fractalized cultural colonialism, both are becoming progressively heterogeneous.

1

The Story of Two Peoples



Mexican and Yucatecan Peoplehood

Yucatecan Creed I believe in my Yucatán as the center of the universe and in the sun and the stars that spin around it. … I believe in panuchos; in pork and beans, in cochinita pibil and papa­ dzules; in papaya sweets with Edam cheese and [squash] seed marzipan; in [sour] lima drinks, in horchata and xtabentún; and, above all, I believe in the mucbilpollo and [turkey in] black stuffing to be found at the altar dedicated to my soul when I return from Xibalbá during the sacred night of Hanal Pixán. Amen. — Javier Covo Torres, Pasaporte yucateco1

As this epigraph suggests, food always invokes much more than just eating. It reveals the beliefs that members of a culture have about the place in which they dwell in the cosmos. A growing literature in the social sciences and humanities has focused on the relationship between food and its cultural meaning—on the economic, social, and political aspects involved in its definition, availability, and forms of consumption (or avoidance) and thus on its power to define a group’s identity (see, e.g., P. Caplan 1997b; Counihan and Van Esterik 1997; Goody 1982). Anthropologists have long recognized the importance of food in generating social and moral bonds that constitute a sense of community. The people with whom we share food, the occasions when we do so, and the type of food that is shared are important for establishing, confirming, and reproducing a sense of belonging—or of exclusion. In contemporary urban societies, individuals seldom invite superficial acquaintances or people whom they barely know to their tables at home. Meals in the home are mostly reserved for family members, close kin, and, every so often, close friends (Douglas [1975] 1997,1984). In this sense, food has been and continues to be a form of social cement that validates the ‘natural’ membership of individuals in a group, helping to produce and recreate – 33 –

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the feeling of communitas (Falk 1994). At different levels of meaning, a shared meal allows people to create boundaries that exclude outsiders and, in addition, favors a hierarchical structure of relations at the table (P. Caplan 1997a; Stoller 1989). In this chapter, consequently, I discuss the historical narration that frames the perception and explains the defense of a Yucatecan regional identity that is opposed, very often actively, to a homogenizing Mexican identity. As I argue, it is the concept of ‘peoplehood’ that can aid our understanding of this particular form of identity politics, mediated by the opposition of gastronomic ‘traditions’. Appadurai (1981: 495) has defined ‘gastro-politics’ as a “conflict or competition over specific cultural or economic resources as it emerges in social transactions around food.” He restricted his focus to the food politics found in South India in familial and social-religious contexts. Here it is my purpose to further our understanding of food as a vehicle for the exercise of power manifest in the politics of internal cultural colonialism that in-formed the invention of the modern Mexican nation-state. In this neo-colonial context, in Yucatán, the practices and discourses that are involved in the packaging of food as a cultural product, specific to a group, can and are deployed as postcolonial and post-national strategies for the affirmation of regional identity. The creation of particular dishes and the appropriation of specific ingredients and culinary techniques are understood as defining attributes of Yucatecan regional cuisine that are evident in the construction 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,

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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

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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

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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. The Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (with a rural base) chose to emphasize the autonomy of the state against centralist intervention. For them, the determination of Yucatecan destiny should be in the hands of Yucatecans. The giant flag that had been planted by the federal government, ostensibly to remind Yucatecans that they are all Mexicans, was a thorn in some Yucatecans’ skin, confirming their belief that they have been subjected to Mexican interventionism and colonialism throughout their history.3 During those politically charged years, as a result of being mobilized by the polarization between regional and national sentiments, Yucatecans responded to the monumental flag and other nationalist measures with a proliferation of small Yucatecan flags (printed or stuck onto license plates or waving from car antennas) and larger flags (hung from balconies or at the entrances of businesses). Key chains and beer glasses were printed with the Yucatecan flag, as were T-shirts and baseball caps (along with the legends “Republic of Yucatán” and “Proudly Yucatecan”). At elementary schools and high schools, children chanted the Yucatecan anthem (sometimes instead of, sometimes before or following the Mexican anthem). Mexicans and those Yucatecans who had strong nationalist feelings were upset at this turn of events. Some

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wondered why Yucatecans were allowed to have their own flag and their own anthem. While Mexicans asked these questions, many Yucatecans waved their flags in the streets of Mérida.

Independence from Spain and the Conflict of the Elites During colonial times, Yucatán had a shifting location within the territories of the recently conquered continent.4 At times, it was subordinated to the administrative powers of New Spain, located in the city of Mexico. Sometimes it was granted autonomy, and, for other short periods, it was under the authority of the province of Guatemala or under the administration of Honduras. Throughout their colonial history, Yucatecans were mostly left alone and functioned under de facto autonomous rule (Alisky 1980; Campos García 2002). Theirs was a position of fiscal privilege. Characterized by widespread poverty and infertile soils (especially around Mérida), the region was inhabited by Maya groups who resisted (some up to the present time) the presence of the Spanish conquerors. In response to the grievances of Spanish residents in the peninsula, the Spanish Crown granted them fiscal and customs exemptions to compensate for these and other obstacles to their economic welfare (no good soils to grow grains, no minerals to mine, no ‘Old World’ products to market) (Moseley 1980). Positioned advantageously between the Caribbean basin and the Gulf of Mexico, Yucatecan ports slowly developed as trade posts. When groups of Creoles in New Spain and Yucatán (as well as in other regions of the American continent) began to discuss independence claims, the Spanish Crown promulgated the Constitution of Cadiz, seeking to ease trade and the administrative rule of the colonies and hence to deter the impetus toward independence. The Constitution of Cadiz preserved the Yucatecan privileges (Reid 1979). New Spain declared its independence in 1810 and engaged in a brutal war of separation from Spain. Hostilities also took place between rival factions to secure power in the new republic. Yucatecans, still enjoying their privileges and autonomy, kept themselves to the margins of the Mexican War of Independence. In 1821, Spain finally conceded independence to Mexico and, a few months later, although the Yucatecans had neither requested nor fought for it, to the province of Yucatán.5 Yucatán was granted independence as a new republic—the Republic of Yucatán (Campos García 2002). Correspondingly, during a short period, Mexico and Yucatán related to each other as foreign nations, and Mexico levied import taxes and set trade barriers on products coming from Yucatán (Reid 1979: 33). During the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Caribbean basin was beset by frequent commercial and military conflicts among different European powers. Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands were all vying for domination and commercial control of the region (Hinckley 1963;

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Sluiter 1948; Stern 1988). At an early stage, following its independence from Spain, Mexico promised to create a federation of republics, and when in 1821 Yucatán joined Mexico, it did so as the Republic of Yucatán, with autonomous power. However, elites in central Mexico fought with each other, and when the government adopted centralist measures subordinating the different regions, Yucatán declared its independence. Yucatán first remained independent from Mexico but then rejoined the Mexican Republic in 1823 without surrendering its autonomy. In 1841, when administrative policies shifted to enhance central powers, Yucatecans again declared their independence from Mexico, remaining independent until 1843, when the central government offered a new treaty of peace and reunion that, according to Williams (1929: 134; see also Alisky 1980), was dictated by Yucatecans and protected regional instead of Mexican interests. Since the Mexican government did not respect the terms of the treaty, Yucatecans voted again for their independence from Mexico in 1846. During this period of independence, a faction of the regional elites, overwhelmed by the so-called Caste War of Yucatán began flirting with the governments of Spain, England, and the United States, seeking annexation, while other factions sought outright independence. When their attempts failed, they were constrained to accept, in 1848, their reincorporation into Mexico, this time under central Mexican terms (Williams 1929: 143). This final incorporation marked the beginning of the decline of Yucatecans’ efforts at independence and the temporary silencing of their autonomous, regionalist identity. In 1862, the federal government of Mexico, recognizing the local power of factional elites located in both Mérida and the city of Campeche, first divided Yucatán into two different states, Campeche and Yucatán, the Campechanos having already declared unilaterally their autonomy from Yucatán in 1858 (see Wells and Joseph 1992: 182). Then, it granted portions of the Yucatecan territory to Guatemala and British Honduras and, as a strategy to deal with the Maya rebels of the peninsula, created in 1902 the federally administered territory of Quintana Roo, which became a full state in 1974 (Konrad 1991) at a time when the beach resort of Cancún was under construction. Since the time before independence, Yucatán was obligated to pay Mexico for military ‘protection’, creating a fiscal debt that would later translate into the economic dependence of the region and its subordination to the Mexican Republic (Campos García 2004). However, in contrast to other Mexican states, where central elites overpowered regional ones, Yucatecan elites continued to develop their own strategies to control the resources of the state of Yucatán. In a combination of global market forces that have been well-described and analyzed by different scholars (see, e.g., Brannon and Joseph 1991; Carstersen and Roazen 1992; G. Joseph 1986; Labrecque and Breton 1982; Moseley and Terry 1980b; Villanueva Mukul et al. 1990; Wells 1985; Wells and Joseph

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1996), the Yucatecan elite of the late nineteenth century gained control of henequen production in Yucatán and dominated the global market for these natural fibers from the end of the 1800s to the first decade of the twentieth century. Their domination was approved of and encouraged by the US company International Harvester, which controlled prices and the marketing of Yucatecan fibers (used for twine and paper pulp) in the US (Carstersen and Roazen 1992; Wells 1985). The boom economy that emerged from the cultivation of henequen, from the local production of its fibers, and from the international market was important in supporting regional elites. Viewed as an exemplar of Yucatecan civilization and progress, their success was put on display by central Mexican científicos seeking to promote an enlightened image of Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship (Wells 1996; Wells and Joseph 1992). During this period of economic expansion, Yucatecan elites sent their family members abroad, primarily to the United States, Cuba, and Europe, to obtain their education. The market with the Caribbean was enhanced, and when the central government had to deal with rebellions in the north, they sent Yaqui prisoners to work as indentured laborers in the henequen plantations. Similarly, when Yucatecans had to deal with the insurrection of Maya groups within the peninsula, they sold Maya prisoners as slaves to Cuban plantations (Rodríguez Piña 1990). To solve its labor shortage, the region attracted immigrants from Cuba, Germany, the Ottoman Empire (today Lebanon and Syria), Spain, and other Mexican regions. The arrival of these groups contributed importantly to the cultural mosaic that today characterizes Yucatecan society.6 The economic boom of the peninsula encouraged the import of commodities from Europe and the US. Some of the main ports in the Caribbean that were located in Cuba became a source of goods that the British, the Dutch, and the French had made available in the Antilles, and Yucatecans benefited from existing lines of commerce. Yucatecans hired French and Italian architects and imported Italian marble to build their palaces at the Paseo Montejo, the local interpretation of the Champs-Elysées. Rich plantation owners began to construct their mansions in 1888, and the luxurious residences and the large avenue were inaugurated in 1906 (Ovando Grajales 1995) (see fig. 1.1). The economic boom attracted overseas migrants. Some came to work in the haciendas as engineers and mechanics (Germans), while others took advantage of the growing market in commodities (Spaniards, Syrians, and Lebanese). Some were brought forcibly to perform the difficult job of harvesting the henequen and obtaining the fiber from it (southern Italians, Koreans, and Chinese), whereas others came seeking to advance their situations by working on the plantations until they had accumulated enough money to move into the city (Cubans, Spanish, and peasants from other Mexican regions) (Corona Baeza 2006; Padilla Ramos 2006; Peón Ancona 2006; Ramírez Carrillo 2006).

Photograph courtesy of G. Vargas Cetina, 2006.

Figure 1.1. Palace at the Paseo Montejo

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In this way, the local Yucatecan elites managed to accumulate regional power, and since their commercial arrangements bypassed the Mexican government, they developed a large degree of autonomy in their management of regional affairs. Unhappy with this situation, central Mexican elites devised strategies to undermine the power of the Yucatecan elites. The partitioning of Yucatán into three different states was a first step. Later, the central administration instituted different economic levies that drew resources from Yucatán in the form of contributions in support of different enterprises and wars in which central Mexicans were engaged. When Yucatecans refused to participate in the war against Texas (a chief commercial partner), the Mexican government imposed a commercial and military blockade on Yucatecan ships, affecting the henequen trade with the US (Evans 2007). Also, when the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, Yucatecans did not get involved in the upheaval. In fact, the last recognizable and feeble attempt to gain independence occurred in 1914, when Mexican authorities demanded that the garrisons stationed in Yucatán travel to central Mexico and support the revolutionary struggle. As G. Joseph (1979, 1982) and Paoli ([1984] 2001) have argued, the revolution did not happen, but was imported into Yucatán from outside. Facing the resistance of Yucatecan elites to get involved in central Mexican struggles, in March 1915, President Venustiano Carranza sent Salvador Alvarado into Yucatán to subdue the local hacendados (hacienda owners). With the participation of Yucatecans and the regional Socialist Party of the Southeast, Salvador Alvarado, first, and Felipe Carrillo Puerto, later, conducted the expropriation of some haciendas and distributed lands to local peasants in the form of ejidos or collective farms (G. Joseph 1982). This move delivered a powerful blow to regional elites, who were already suffering the decline of their economic self-sufficiency due to competition from other natural and synthetic fibers. Although these reforms and transformations eventually brought regional elites to their knees, they failed to provide peasants with sustainable resources. Henequen continued to drive the local economy for a long time, even if in a limited way, until central Mexico implemented a series of structural economic reforms, withdrawing subsidies from the countryside and delivering a final blow to the regional economy (Baños Ramírez 1996; Fallaw 2001; Villanueva Mukul et al. 1990). It is, therefore, in the history of these interventions that many Yucatecans trace the origins of the regional subordination to central Mexican elites and politicians, who are perceived as the source and cause of Yucatecan ills.

The Mexican Nation, Cultural Colonialism, and the Erasure of Difference The invention and institution of an imagined Mexico required the production and dissemination of narratives that sought to create a shared feeling of

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belonging and community among peoples—one that would, as B. Anderson (1983) suggests, transcend the ‘original’ community of blood and face-toface relationships. To be effective, the mechanics of nationalist discourse must steer individuals to recognize as their own the traits that signal and highlight what they all share. The erection of monumental flags added one more symbol to a long history of cultural colonization conducted by the center over the rest of Mexico. During the institution of the global post-colonial order, it was necessary to attain a solid cultural, economic, and politically consistent form in order to be recognized as a modern nation-state. One consequence of this demand was the veiling of regional differences, since, during the nineteenth century, multiculturalism was not seen as a virtue of the modern state. The operations performed on regional gastronomic traditions were similar to the procedures performed on other cultural practices involving regional differences, for example, religion, language, history, and ethnic identities. The affirmation of a nationalist ideology implicated a process of internal cultural colonization that, in turn, fractalized forms of imperial expansion and cultural colonization practiced by some nations over others during their history of imperial expansion and colonial domination. Although in the Mexican context the early use of the term ‘internal colonialism’ was restricted to the description of the relationship of domination and subordination between populations of European and indigenous origin (see González Casanova 1965; Stavenhagen 1965), I follow Hechter ([1975] 1998) and Colley (1992) in understanding internal colonialism as a process whereby regional differences are silenced in favor of national unity. In the case of Mexico, similarly to that of Great Britain, as described by Hechter and Colley, we find a dominant central power in possession of the means to disseminate nationalist ideology (print media, radio, television, the celebration of national holidays in the schools) and with the military means to suppress resistance to the power of the metropolis. Ideologically, nationalist discourse defined the cultural differences that characterized the populations of the different regions as parochial infantilism and political immaturity, using the power of different media and state institutions to inscribe this view into the self-perception of local people (for the case of Yucatán, see Campos García 2002). It was in the context of these political developments that the diet of the nation was distilled down to the basic pre-Columbian indigenous components: maize, beans, tomatoes, squash, and chili peppers. Reference to this diet authorized the reduction of Mexican cuisine to one and only one of the local codes; in effect, all regional cuisines were now viewed as dialectal variations of this same culinary code. Hence, the central Mexican narrative of the history of ‘Mexican food’ and the anthropological study of a national cuisine can erase—or gloss over—meaningful regional culinary differences, building instead upon the cuisine of the central Mexican highlands (see, e.g., Corcuera

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de Mancera [1979] 1990; Flores y Escalante 1994; Long-Solís and Vargas 2005). The construction of a homogeneous nation has deep roots in Mexican history, and at least two levels of discourse can be identified. On one level, central Mexicans have invented a history of the nation defined by a teleological view that sees the diverse indigenous cultures converging into a common history of the Mexican people, a convergence explained by the ontological inevitability of cultural/racial mixing or mestizaje (Basave Benítez 1992). On another level, central Mexican elites fashioned a story of the dissemination of icons and symbols of central Mexican culture, drawn from central Mexican society and culture (or appropriated by them), and sought to impose them as markers of a single, homogeneous national identity. From the nineteenth century onward, as Florescano ([2002] 2006) has shown, different accounts of Mexican national history were at odds over the interpretation of the relationship between European and indigenous culture. While some historians and politicians sought to erase the indigenous past in their narratives of the emergence of the Mexican nation,7 others attempted to incorporate indigenous people into the history of Mexico. At the end of the nineteenth century (1884–1889), a group of scholars dominated by central Mexican historians tied to the state, and led by Vicente Riva Palacio, forged an ideological narrative of the history of the nation that endorsed a common cultural identity. This story, titled México a través de los siglos (Mexico Throughout the Centuries), “had the virtue of bringing together past times in a discourse that joined the pre-Hispanic antiquity to the Viceroyalty and both of these to the War for Independence, the first years of the Republic, and the Reform movement” (Florescano [2002] 2006: 290).8 However, in the twentieth century, shortly before the Mexican Revolution, the story shifted, and rather than integrating indigenous groups as an evolutionary antecedent to the Mexican nation, the nationalist discourse emphasized the mestizaje of national culture. Neither indigenous nor European, Mexican society was conceived of as the blending of two different cultures. Against the prevailing negative views on miscegenation of that period,9 Mexican ideologues resignified mestizaje to convey the blending of proper virtues of indigenous and European societies and cultures (Basave Benítez 1992). Mestizaje was to become, during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, a dominant issue in the nationalist agenda. Post-revolutionary Mexico required a façade of unity to confront the threat posed by other nations (the US, England, Germany, France, and Spain) who sought to exercise control over Mexican natural resources and trade. The ideology of mestizaje proved to be an efficient instrument in the erasure of difference. Regionalism was seen as an obstacle by some of the most influential central Mexican thinkers involved in the invention of the nation, who identified local and regional fatherlands as a hindrance to the constitution of one single nation. In Los

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grandes problemas nacionales (Great National Problems), Molina Enríquez ([1909] 1978) pointed to the urgent need to unify the country into a single Mestizo nation. His analysis of the different problems facing the new nation found them to be rooted in existing conservative indigenous and Creole groups, whom he viewed as the enemies of national unity. Consequently, along with his diagnosis, he prescribed that the Mexican state had the duty to intervene and to ensure the unification of the nation by assimilating and/ or erasing the different (stories of) origin, religions, (racial) types, customs, and languages, in their diverse evolutionary stages, in order to bring together the common desires, purposes, and aspirations of the Mexican people (ibid.: 396–424). Once unification was achieved, he suggested, patriotism could be understood as people living “all as brothers in a family, free in their exercise of their faculty for action; but united in the fraternity of a common ideal, and constrained to virtue by that same fraternity, on the one hand, to distribute equally the enjoyment of the common heritage that feeds them and, on the other hand, to the mutual tolerance of the differences that this enjoyment spawns” (ibid.: 425). Manuel Gamio, one of the first Mexican anthropologists trained abroad (under Franz Boas), shared Molina Enríquez’s and other intellectuals’ beliefs of his time. In his volume Forjando Patria (Forging the Fatherland), Gamio ([1916] 1992) tells readers about his experience in Mérida, where he visited a bar. When he ordered a beer, the waiter gave him the choice between national and imported. He asked for imported beer and was served a XX, a beer brewed in the city of Orizaba (in the state of Veracruz in the Gulf of Mexico). He proceeded to question the waiter, who explained matter-offactly that ‘national’ (del país) means from Yucatán. From this anecdote, Gamio moved to argue that Yucatán was the only Mexican state where mes­ tizaje had reached an advanced stage, distinguishing the people of the state, who have a strong sense of cultural unity, from people in other Mexican regions. He concluded that, in order to achieve a national sense of harmony, the Mexican state had the duty to promote mestizaje in the totality of the national territory (ibid.: 12–14).10 The homogenization of the nation has been continuously promoted through different literary means. For example, in El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), Octavio Paz ([1950] 2004) presented a powerful and influential argument about the nature and character of the Mexican people.11 Although he stated early in his essay that he was in fact making reference to a small portion of the population—that is, those who recognize themselves as ‘Mexican’—his narrative often transposed what he took from this group of central Mexicans to the totality of the inhabitants of the nation at large. Very often, this piece has been read as an analysis of all of Mexican culture, forgetting that it subsumes the rest of Mexico under the values, culture, and

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worldviews of central Mexican society and disregards the differences among regional cultures, ethnic groups, and social classes. He argued that modern industrial societies have the task to create (quantitative) uniformity where (qualitative) diversity exists (ibid.: 219).12 The story of cultural conflation and rhetorical homogenization, obviously, did not end in 1950 with Paz’s Labyrinth. Other central Mexican intellectuals, for example, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz, have continued the tradition of describing Mexican culture in terms that represent it as a single homogeneous unity, based on the views, values, terms, and codes that are prevalent in central Mexican society. For example, Lomnitz (2001: 111–122) describes the term naco, used by upperclass inhabitants of Mexico City to denigrate lower, uncouth classes, as a term that encapsulates Mexican social relations. In his explanation, the term is derived from the word ‘Totonac’, the name of a central Mexican indigenous group, and applied metonymically to all indigenous people and to workingclass individuals. More recently, Lomnitz (2005) uses central Mexican views on death to describe the national character and culture. Needless to say, in Yucatán, where Totonacs are a distant and alien reference, the term naco does not have the same currency that it does in Mexico City. Comparing the local relationship to death in a society such as central Mexico, where murders are more frequent, to that of Yucatán, where there is a higher frequency of suicide, requires a more nuanced approach.13 While some central Mexican intellectuals have been busy inventing the teleology and seeking the cultural essence of the Mexican nation, others have been active in the invention and dissemination of icons of mexicanidad (Mexican identity). This long process began in the time of colonial New Spain, when Catholic Spaniards imposed foreign military rule; an alien form of secular administration over humans, commodities, and natural resources; and an array of local saints and different Madonnas (virgin saints) in villages, neighborhoods, and cities throughout the territory. Later, the stories of local saints became partially displaced by the story of apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe. This parochial central Mexican patroness has been turned into the main religious icon of Mexican (and, more recently, of Latin American) society, displacing local saints (Gruzinski 2001). In Yucatán, well into the end of the twentieth century, cities and towns had their own saints who were celebrated on specific dates and whose churches were important sites of regional pilgrimage (Fernández Repetto 1995; Negroe Sierra 2004). For example, Valladolid is the site of residence of the Madonna (virgin saint) of Candelaria (Quintal Avilés 1993); Izamal has its own Madonna, the Virgin Saint of Izamal (Fernández Repetto and Negroe Sierra 2006); Tizimín hosts the Three Magi (Rugeley 2001); and Mérida has, among different important saints, the Christ of Blisters (Negroe Sierra 2004). During the late twentieth century, under the influence of central Mexican television, the proselytizing

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of a centrally controlled church hierarchy, printed newspapers, and national television, the Virgin Saint of Guadalupe was elevated in Yucatán from her old role as the patron saint of local taxi drivers to her present role as the most revered Madonna of the Catholic pantheon, receiving the blessing of Pope John XXIII as the “Mother of the Americas,” and the emphatic endorsement of Pope John Paul II after his first visit to Mexico and Yucatán in 1979. The print media, cinema, radio, and television have also played an important part in the dis-semination of nationalist pedagogy and the subordination of regional and cultural differences. In this homogenizing endeavor, education through broadcast channels controlled by the Ministry of Education, the repetition and routinization of female images of the Patria (fatherland) in almanacs and on the covers of schoolbooks, the rendering of national maps, and the construction of highways contributed to bring Mexicans together into a single national community (Craib 2002, 2004; Florescano 2005; Hayes 2000, 2006; Lewis 2006; Vaughan and Lewis 2006; Waters 2006). Schoolbooks printed for elementary schools and high schools, provided gratuitously by the Ministry of Education, and state-designed broadcasts, such as The National Hour, which radio stations all over the country were required to transmit (all on the same day and at the same hour), promoted the consciousness of belonging to a common nation. Also, with the development of television and cinema, the proliferation of magazines, and the dominance of news agencies at the center of Mexico, selected icons became representative of the national character. Progressively, all Mexicans came to be represented by the macho tequila drinker, wearing a charro hat while singing, laughing, and crying to mariachi and ranchero music; by masked wrestlers; and by the pious weeping women of soap operas (Fein 2001; Greene 2001; Hernández and McAnany 2001; Hershfield 2006; Levi 2001; Noble 2005; Rubenstein 2001). Funded by the state, pictorial arts such as murals displayed images of the nation that conflated utopian visions of modernity and progress with the singularity and unity of the nation (Gallo 2005; López 2006; Rochfort 2006). Furthermore, the central government reinforced the pedagogic aspect of nationalism, erecting in all cities of the republic monuments to honor national heroes taken from the pantheon of central and northern Mexican luminaries (such as Venustiano Carranza, Emiliano Zapata, and Benito Juárez).14 The calendar of national festivities celebrates dates such as the independence of New Spain from Spain, but not the independence of Yucatán from Spain (nor any of its three independences from Mexico). It celebrates the Mexican Revolution of 1910 on 20 November, but does not celebrate the arrival of Mexican forces in Yucatán in 1915 to bring what G. Joseph (1982) has called the “revolution from without.” During these celebrations, Yucatecans engage in parades, sing the national anthem, attend artistic events, listen to patriotic discourses, eat nationalist dishes (chiles en nogada, pozole), and drink nationalist

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tequila—practices that are repeated all over the country, on the same day and at the same time, powering the pedagogic message of nationalist discourses. Those who do not actively participate in the parades can stay home, glued to their television sets, while watching central Mexican national broadcasts of the military parade in Mexico City. These annual events reinforce the consciousness of belonging to a single nation and, as with other forms of nationalist performance, override local and regional histories and sentiments (Costeloe 1997; Duncan 1998; Lorey 1997; Tenorio Trillo 1996).

The Invention of Yucatecan Peoplehood Despite efforts on the part of the central Mexican government and elites to create a homogeneous national culture, Yucatecans locate their roots in an alternative past, different from the unilinear model advanced by Mexican nationalism. Since Yucatán was conquered in a period different from that of the central highlands—the oldest cities, Campeche, Mérida, and Valladolid having been founded in 1540, 1542, and 1543, respectively, almost 50 years after the beginning of the conquest in central Mexico—and since the Spaniards and Creoles found continuous resistance to their encroachment on the peninsular territory until the beginning of the twentieth century (Sullivan 1989), Yucatecans have produced a historical narrative of Yucatán that is distinct from the history of Mexico. Diego de Landa, the Spanish bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yucatán, is considered to be the foremost colonial authority on pre-Hispanic indigenous culture and society in the Yucatán peninsula, rather than the central highlands figure of Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan friar. Hence, the story of pre-conquest Yucatán has been largely shaped by de Landa’s self-justifying memoirs (with regard to the suppression of the Maya civilization), which were written in Spain decades after he left Yucatán (see Clendinnen 1987). Later historians of regional matters incorporated de Landa’s views into the history of colonial and postindependence times. These colonial and nineteenth-century texts, which can be read as accounts of the trials and tribulations that Spaniards faced during the institution of Yucatecan society, refer to the Maya as one of the obstacles that Spaniards faced in their civilizing endeavors.15 Yucatecans possessed a historical awareness that they had emerged as a people shaped in a specific and well-defined territory, in the face of natural and human obstacles (including the intervention of authorities from New Spain). Until the second half of the twentieth century, history was mainly the preserve of educated, elite Yucatecans and not of professional historians (G. Joseph 1986). Regional intellectuals were members of elite families whose children studied abroad, mostly in Europe. In Mérida, religious groups founded educational institutions where Yucatecans learned the

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latest philosophical and political views originating in Europe (Moseley 1980; Urzaiz 1947). It was Yucatecans’ awareness that the peninsula of Yucatán possessed a different history that helped ground a sentiment of peoplehood, which, in turn, inspired Yucatecan attempts to regain independence from Mexico during the 1800s (Alisky 1980). Living away and apart from Mexico, Yucatecans developed their own cultural institutions, including regional literature, music, theatre, and food (Terry 1980; Vargas Cetina 2010b). During the long span of Porfirio Díaz’s 30-year dictatorship, the Yucatecan government created its own regional pedagogic strategies. For example, it was involved in the organization of regional fairs, which brought together Yucatecan producers from different towns and villages, and facilitated the recognition of shared interests among members of the elites of Mérida and of other cities and towns of Yucatán (Gobierno del Estado de Yucatán 1880). Under central Mexican instruction, and with the acquiescence of the Yucatecan government, geographers helped to establish the contours of Yucatán’s natural environment as they conducted professional surveys of the territory and its natural resources (García Cubas 1887; de Zayas Enríquez 1908). To enhance their economic control of the region, the wealthy families of Mérida and the northern area of Yucatán built one of the most dense railroad networks of its time (Wells 1985, 1992). Besides aiding in the transport of henequen, these lines facilitated the mobility of Yucatecans, who, traveling from one city or town to another, helped to make their culture co-extensive with that of the Yucatecan territory. The twentieth century witnessed ongoing efforts to construct all-embracing narratives in order to establish and reinforce Yucatecan identity. Under the auspices of the state government, regional intellectuals put their talents together into the composition of a Yucatecan encyclopedia (Enciclopedia Yucatanense). The resulting 12 volumes (9 being published between 1944 and 1947, and 3 between 1979 and 1981) reflect the efforts of Yucatecan people to forge a distinct society and culture (Echánove Trujillo 1944–1947; García Canul et al. 1979–1981).16 The content of the volumes includes descriptions of Yucatán’s geography and its wealth of natural resources (fauna and flora); the history of the peninsular indigenous people; the history of colonization, conquest, and independence from Spain and Mexico, including regional archaeology; the history of the development of an array of cultural institutions and arts (music, dance, opera, literature, handicrafts, food), which the authors proclaim to be Yucatecan in spirit; and the biographies of prominent Yucatecans. These volumes provide an account of Yucatecan people and history as developing in relative isolation from the rest of Mexico,17 while being connected to the US, the Caribbean, and Europe through trade. It was mostly to these other regions of the world that the members of the Yucatecan elite traveled in search of business opportunities, education,

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and culture. If, like Wells and Joseph (1992), we find coincidences between central Mexican and Yucatecan cultural inventions, these can probably be explained with reference to the Francophilia that characterized North American, Latin American, and Asian elites throughout the turn of the century (see Higonnet 2002; Levenstein 2000; Needell 1987). Yucatecans, therefore, developed their own tools to nourish the sense of peoplehood that gives shape to Yucatecan identity. In addition to the ‘dissemi-nation’ of narrative accounts of the history of the region, Yucatecans recreated—and continue to recreate—their own local cultural forms on a quotidian basis. In Mérida, for example, City Hall organizes weekly festivities in which local artists perform Yucatecan cultural productions: every Monday, Yucatecans and tourists can witness jarana dances in the main plaza of the city; every Tuesday, at Olimpo, a municipal theatre, musicians perform trova songs; and every Thursday, at Santa Lucia Park in downtown Mérida, there are dances, poetry readings, and musical performances. Monuments and statues of Yucatecan members of the regional pantheon invoke the past: a statue dedicated to the Maya rebel Jacinto Canek is located at the exit from Mérida to the port of Celestún (see fig. 1.2); a statue memorializing Justo Sierra O’Reilly is situated in the Paseo Montejo, which, at its northern end, features a Monument to the Fatherland (crafted by a Colombian sculptor) that blends Maya and Aztec elements.18 In a new, sprawling neighborhood named Francisco de Montejo (the name of the Spanish conqueror of Yucatán)—an area that Yucatecans perceive as being occupied primarily by central Mexicans (see Quintal Ávila 2006)—the statue of a woman, referred to locally as La Mestiza, crowns a large fountain. At elementary schools, children sing the Yucatecan anthem along with the Mexican one. The only regional holiday celebrated all over the state, but not in the rest of Mexico, is the birth of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the socialist governor of Yucatán who was murdered in 1924 by soldiers following the orders of local elites, in collusion with the central Mexican authorities. These pedagogical instruments point to both the performative aspects that challenge the homogeneity and dominance of Mexican nationalism and the icons that deepen the sense of fraternity among Yucatecans. In so doing, they promote a strong sense of cultural uniqueness and difference from Mexican society and culture.

Yucatán and the Caribbean Although today it is almost impossible to overlook the ties between Yucatán and other Caribbean societies (Shrimpton Masson 2006), this had not been the case for a long time. In general, the literature on the Caribbean tends to favor the study of societies in which the numbers of the Afro-Caribbean population dominate over those of the indigenous groups, who were massacred

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Figure 1.2. Monument to Jacinto Canek, Canek Avenue, Mérida

Photograph courtesy of G. Vargas Cetina, 2007.

by the Spanish conquerors or by Creole Spaniards and later by Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, and French colonial settlers (Mintz 1996; Puri 2004; Serbin 1994; Simpson 1962; Trouillot 1992). For example, Gaztambide-Géigel (1996) argues for a restrictive definition of the Caribbean to include only those societies with a strong African component, that is, former slave societies. He claims that to extend the term to other societies in Central and South America is an imperialist maneuver designed by US intellectuals. In turn, Torres-Saillant (2006) pays little attention to continental nations that claim to be part of the Caribbean, and he is somewhat intrigued by the fact that the government of the state of Quintana Roo, on the Caribbean side of the peninsula, organizes an annual competition on Caribbean literature (ibid.: 19–20).19 A notable exception is the study of Arciniegas ([1946] 2003) who took a longue durée approach to the study of the history of the Caribbean, prefiguring Braudel’s study on the Mediterranean.20 Arciniegas paid close

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attention to the centuries of Spanish domination and colonization of the islands and the societies in Central and South America that bordered the Caribbean Sea. His account also examines the imperialist actions of the British, French, and Dutch (and later of the US), who wrestled with the Spaniards for control of the trade routes (see also Gilbert 1977; Hinckley 1963; Marichal and Souto Mantecón 1994; Sluiter 1948). The displacement of people of Spanish origin from most of the Antilles allowed for their replacement by other European peoples, and African slaves (and later indentured Asian labor) took the place left vacant by the indigenous people, who could not withstand the military and bacteriological warfare launched by the Europeans. Although for a long time the domination of the Caribbean was a contested matter, the region was finally divided among different European powers and the United States. Smuggling became a common activity, competing with the formal trade in sugar, fruits, coffee, cacao, vanilla, and spices (Palmer 1932; Shaw 1943). While, in general terms, the literature tends to overlook the relationship of Yucatán with the Caribbean islands and surrounding lands, Yucatecans continued to trade with different islands (mainly Cuba) and with the US states of Louisiana, New York, and Texas. Yucatecans sold Mayas as slaves to Cuba, and in return Cuba sent migrants to take advantage of the henequen boom. British Honduras (today’s Belize) kept an open channel in order to smuggle weapons to the Maya rebels, but also to transport diverse commodities of British and Dutch origin to the states of Yucatán and Campeche (Sullivan 1989). Vargas Cetina (pers. comm.) has found that Yucatecan musicians traveled to Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, New Orleans, New York, and France, and that musicians from those regions often visited Yucatán. Since these paths are necessarily bi-directional, it can be safely assumed that when Yucatecans returned home, they came with new commodities, a reformed taste, and transformed forms of subjectivity. Edible commodities were part and parcel of the Caribbean trade for all involved—for the Americans, British, Dutch, French, Germans, and Spaniards, for the inhabitants of the Caribbean islands, and for the Mexicans in the central highlands, the port of Veracruz, and the peninsula of Yucatán (Chardon 1949; Hinckley 1963; Palmer 1932; Shaw 1943; Simpson 1962; Sluiter 1948). Nonetheless, looking at a recent publication on the food culture of the Caribbean (Hudson 2005), we find that the author has chosen a restrictive focus on the food of the Spanish-speaking regions, singling out the islands of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Examining the food of the Caribbean, any reader who is knowledgeable of Yucatecan cooking can easily find foodstuff and recipes that, give or take an ingredient, are also found within the Yucatán culinary field. Among them are the preference for fowl and pork; the limited use of milk and its derivates; the use of citrus

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fruits to marinate meat; the prevalence of achiote (annatto) seeds and paste in spice blends; numerous recipes for ajiaco and other similar stews; variations on Edam stuffed cheese; the use of Middle Eastern and Asian spices (black pepper, cumin, coriander seeds, cinnamon, cloves); and the use of banana leaves to wrap foods during cooking. There are, of course, important differences. Since the number of Afro-Caribbean inhabitants was minimal in the Yucatán peninsula (Fernández Repetto and Negroe Sierra 1995; Restall 2009), African spices, roots, plants, and procedures that are common in other Caribbean nations are not found (or their use is negligible) in Yucatán. In my travels to Puerto Rico and Miami, I have found dishes (e.g., baked piglet) that resemble those found in Yucatán. In both places, as in Yucatán, pork is marinated in the juice of Seville oranges with salt, allspice, and garlic. In each place, with some spices more or less noticeable, the dish tastes about the same. Although I have found reference to stuffed cheese in a Puerto Rican cookbook, I have not found it in restaurants I visited in San Juan. However, my friend and fellow anthropologist, Vilma Santiago-Irizarry, has told me that when she grew up on the island, she was familiar with a version of the dish stuffed with pigeon meat, while in Yucatán the preferred ingredient is minced or ground pork. Stuffed cheese has become one of the iconic dishes of Yucatán, although Venezuelans also claim the dish as representative of their national cuisine.21 In Yucatán, despite this dish being recalled by people now in their eighties, who told me that they ate it on special occasions during their childhood, some cookbook authors claim that it was a Yucatecan creation to honor the Dutch royalty during their visit to the state in the 1950s (Carrillo Lara 1994). Also, a recipe for a rice timbale stuffed with ground pork and spices, called sopa rochuna, is attributed to the Rocha family, who relocated to Yucatán from the Dominican Republic during the first decades of the twentieth century (Arjona de Castro and Castro Arjona n.d., ca. 2000). However, thus far I have not met anyone who remembers ever eating this dish. Yucatecan cuisine developed in a context that favors its differentiation from Mexican cuisine. Instead of adopting the blueprint of the latter, Yucatecans sought to articulate their passion for the local along with their cosmopolitan aspirations, a relation that evolved with the Caribbean trade routes. Hence, domestic and professional Yucatecan cooks produced and instituted a culinary tradition that is currently perceived as iconic of Yucatecan society and culture. As with its society and culture, Yucatecan cuisine is a hybrid that combines local tastes and appetencies with those of France, Spain, Italy, and the Caribbean region. Although central Mexican chefs and cooks, as well as cookbook writers, seek to appropriate regional gastronomies and recodify them as variations on the national theme, Yucatecan producers and consumers root their tastes in the conviction that their food is the product of the essence of their region and, therefore, that it is in their ‘nature’.

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In the following section I discuss the relationship between food and national identity, analyzing the historical processes of the formation of the modern nation-state, taking into account the practice of cultural homogenization and the mechanisms of surveillance and governance of the national territory. I also examine the contrary movement, arising from the general cultural and political context, that enables local-regional groups of people to affirm identities that differ from the national project. I look at the intricacies of the historically difficult relations between Yucatán and Mexico, and, finally, discuss the application of what Irvine and Gal (2000) refer to as ‘fractal recursivity’, that is, the ways in which the general discourse on national identity is disseminated and repeated in the construction of regional identities, silencing regional difference.

Food and Imagi/nation From the perspective of the inhabitants of the central highlands of Mexico, Mexican food is the food created in Mexico City. At the very least, it is the ideal model that all other regional (and therefore popular) cuisines should aspire to emulate.22 In their incursions into ‘Mexican gastronomy’, two of the most lauded writers of the mid-twentieth century concurred in their devotion to the food of Mexico City, weaving it into the narration of their experiences with the great cuisines that they found in their travels abroad. They did not make reference to regional cuisines as gastronomic traditions in their own right, dismissing them instead as forms of cocina del pueblo (popular cookery) (Novo [1967] 1997; Reyes [1953] 2000). Despite attempts to create a homogeneous national gastronomy discursively, Mexican cuisine has never been a culinary culture that correlates with the political territory of the nation-state. In Yucatán, food was, first and foremost, Yucatecan (and not Mexican) during most of the twentieth century. I was born in the second half of the 1950s and have had the opportunity to experience the gastronomic and culinary changes that have taken place in Yucatán since the 1970s.23 Having been born in Yucatán, a state of the federal republic of Mexico, I always took for granted that I was Mexican. Before the 1970s, I used to spend my vacations with relatives in Mérida, and I was always served what today I recognize as Yucatecan food. It was only in 1971, when I moved from Valladolid to Mérida, that I encountered restaurants selling ‘Mexican’ food. This cuisine was unfamiliar enough that a number of establishments, then as now, advertised themselves as specializing in Mexican food. It was in these restaurants that I realized that Mexican food is unlike Yucatecan food. Pozole, a spicy hot stew with large white corn grains, was an alien experience. The difference between Yucatecan and

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Mexican food was accentuated after my initiation into tacos al pastor—a beef shawarma marinated in a mixture of different peppers and served with slices of pineapple. Although inspired by Middle Eastern roasts, this dish was not introduced by the local Syrian-Lebanese population; instead, it was imported from central Mexico (although it is attributed to the Syrians and Lebanese of the northern state of Nuevo León). The restaurants that popularized tacos al pastor in Mérida were also responsible for the introduction of fríjoles charros (cowboy beans). Although limited in number, these dishes were the harbingers of Mexican food in Yucatán. In time, along with many other dishes, they attained local popularity in Mérida during the 1970s. In 1984, I moved to work for two years in Chetumal, the capital city of the state of Quintana Roo, located near the border with Belize. As a border city, Chetumal’s transient population was markedly multi-ethnic, including indigenous, peasant, and urban people who came there from different parts of Mexico and Central America. Many migrants had moved to the state of Quintana Roo to occupy agricultural lands that had been made available through the federal government’s agrarian reform, while others took jobs in the federal or state administration of public services. There, amid people from different Mexican regions, I tasted new dishes, for example, pambazo, a white bread sandwich soaked in the fat of fried chorizo from Toluca and filled with fried sausage and potato chunks. Vendors on the streets sold tacos of fried shredded meat and onion in central Mexican fashion. Also, I tasted, once again, Mexican sopes, a finger food that I had first eaten as a child in 1969, when my parents took me on a road trip to Mexico City. These dishes, which were exotic to me, as they were for many Yucatecans who had not lived outside the peninsula of Yucatán, clearly did not belong in Yucatecan cooking traditions.24 In 1986, I moved to Alberta, Canada. There, my newly acquired friends asked me about Mexican food. For the first time in my life, I began telling people that although I was Mexican, I was in fact from Yucatán, a Mexican state where the food is different from what they had learned to recognize as Mexican in fast-food franchises: hard-shell tacos filled with ground meat, topped with sour cream and melted cheese; chili con carne; and fajitas (I believe that my first encounter with fajitas was in Canada). For my first potluck at the University in Calgary, I was asked to bring a dish that was representative of my ‘culture’. I contributed relleno negro (black stuffing), made of blackdyed ground pork mixed with minced hard-boiled eggs, which is used as stuffing for turkey. Everybody shied away from my dish until a woman from India dared to try it, after I had described the recipe, which she compared to curry, a dish meaningful to her. For my friends, this was unlike anything that they would recognize as Mexican food.25 Twenty years later, in Ithaca, New York, I visited a Mexican taquería (taco shop) with friends. There, as a blast from the past, I found a menu that listed chili con carne, nachos, guacamole, fajitas,

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burritos, and tacos. Once more I faced the old stereotype of Mexican food served to young stomachs in the city’s college town—a culinary stereotype that I had thought to be obsolete in the new post-national order. An obvious question for an anthropologist is, then, how is it that some dishes are selected to be the enduring icons that stand for or represent a nation? Throughout history, food has been firmly tied to the identity of cultural groups. In medieval Europe, Romans defined Germanic people as savages whose diet favored meat, while they, a ‘civilized’ people, preferred vegetables, grains, and sea products (Montanari 1998, 1999a, 1999b). During the period of the growing divide among Mediterranean monotheistic religions, food was turned into a significant marker of identity. Muslims and Jews avoided pork, while Christians ate it. After the Castilians expelled the Moors and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, or forced them to convert to Christianity, the religious and political hierarchy encouraged the consumption of pork as a strategy to identify, through the smells emanating from kitchen hearths, any relapsing converts (Montanari 1999c). Over the centuries, the British and the French deepened the channel separating them by culinary means (Mennell 1985), and the geopolitical categories ‘East’ and ‘West’ have long been used to encapsulate radical, cultural differences that are also anchored in food (Goody 1999). Within national territories, food was also a marker of territorial and class origins, for example, Parisian haute cuisine avoided the smelly garlic favored by peasants (Mennell 1985). In Italy, northerners who ate polenta, millet, and wheat despised southerners who favored macaroni; the northerners’ certainty of their cultural superiority was augmented by their inclination toward meat, as opposed to the southerners’ preference for vegetables and grains (Capatti and Montanari 1999). Also, according to Dickie (2008), the Italian nobility despised the peasants’ strong smell of onions (although, on occasion, the nobles ate onions, too). Food was thought to represent something about the people who consumed it (hence, the adage ‘you are what you eat’). In fact, when the time of the modern nation-state arrived, with the nation understood as being rooted in the spirit of a people or the fatherland (Herder [1795] 2004, [1796] 2004; Renan [1882] 1996), it was logical to presume that all national cultural productions derived from that particular spirit—and that the national cuisine was foremost among them.

The Nation and the National There is among Yucatecans a sense of commonality and community that is often expressed by the term lo yucateco (the Yucatecan). Some similarities may be found in specific forms of group identity, for example, ethnic or national. However, I argue that it makes more sense to speak of a more diffuse sense of peoplehood in which other, more concrete categories of identity become

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blurred and less distinct. Often, there is in nationalist ideologies an axiological center that can be located in a people, sometimes in their language, culture, religion, or territory (A. Smith 1983, 1999). However, as Lie (2004) argues, language, religion, and culture (ethnicity) cannot support the common moral consciousness shared by a people. The contemporary sense of Yucatecan peoplehood, in contrast to other foundational modes of identification, is that it has ties to the Catholic faith (although this a somewhat superficial and unstable connection does not exclude other Christian and non-Christian denominations); to the blend of Castilian Spanish and peninsular Maya; to the mestizaje between Spaniards, Mayas, and other European groups; and to a sentimental attachment to the land. These are decentered attachments tied to changing articulations in the social structure that make Yucatecan identity a rhizomatic construct. Food is but one of the multiple points of entry into an understanding of the construction of Yucatecan regionalism, and it is a changing one, depending on the different realms of meaning to which it gets attached. 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

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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

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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

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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 2004; Weber 1976). Mexico was not to be an exception to this experience (Mallon 1995). As I have already shown, when central Mexican elites gained control of the state, they sought (and continue to seek) the construction of a homogeneous nation, whereby cultural affinities are emphasized and differences silenced (Alonso 1994). In consequence, Yucatán’s particular history of strong relations with the Caribbean, the US, and Europe has been politically and historically silenced. This process of subordination and cultural colonization is reflected in the construction of a national cuisine that analogously silences Yucatán’s regional specificities. I agree with Lie (2004) that modern society presents individuals with the possibility of creating multiple attachments and belonging to many strata. In this sense, modern peoplehood is “a floating signifier [that serves] to denote disparate conceptualizations about its principal predicates and substantive meanings” (ibid.: 269). This understanding allows for a broad definition of peoplehood that shares attributes with other forms of identity but which is none of them. Lie (ibid.: 1) writes: “By modern peoplehood I mean an inclusionary and involuntary group identity with a putatively shared history and distinct way of life. It is inclusionary because everyone in the group, regardless of status, gender, or moral worth, belongs. It is involuntary because one is born into an ascriptive category of peoplehood … It is not merely a population—an aggregate, an external attribution, an analytical category— but, rather, a people—a group, an internal conviction, a self-reflexive identity.” The basis of peoplehood is not found in religion, language, or territory, but in “common consciousness” (ibid.: 15). Restricted forms of peoplehood, what Lie calls “minority peoplehood,” can be traced to forms of “majority peoplehood,” from which minority groups fashion strategies affirming their own identity against that of the majority (ibid.: 251). As I have already suggested, the majority peoplehood that Yucatecans have taken as a prototype

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for their own peoplehood is not that of Mexico, but rather that of modern European nations, such as France and England. Lie’s definition of peoplehood both coincides with and supplements B. Anderson’s (1983) definition of the nation as an imagined community. A common consciousness can be created through different media and the constitution of a public sphere. It is by means of the latter, instituted as a national forum, that problems, issues, and solutions are conceptualized, instrumented, and legitimated. As R. Smith (2003) points out, the chosen narrative form is often that of history, which typically includes an account of the emergence of a group in ancestral times and of the perils and tribulations experienced during the foundation of its collective self-consciousness.27 At the same time, history endorses the construction of a national identity that, at least until the second half of the twentieth century, silenced minority forms of peoplehood, imposing consistency where it was found missing (see also Duara 1995). The political invention of modern nation-states has often relied on the assimilation of difference into the culture, social organization, values, and forms of administration and political control of a dominant center. Cuisine and food have often played an important part in the iconic representation of the values, essence, and soul of a particular society. Thus, a growing literature explores the different instances in which modern nation-states have reformed their food, constructing national cuisines in order to attain unity by reducing and subordinating the diversity of cultures within the territory of the state to the culture of the metropolis. Ferguson (2004), for example, has shown how the emergence and consolidation of French haute cuisine was tightly associated with the values and taste preferences of Parisian society. This was a society that enjoyed the benefits of a centralized structure that regulated national and colonial resources and facilitated the flow of foodstuffs from all regions of France into Paris. Even the United States, a nation built by immigrants from different regions of the world (some forced to immigrate, such as African slaves and Asian indentured laborers) and by indigenous groups, has attempted to reduce the culinary diversity within the territory of the nation-state to the taste preferences and values of urban, white, Protestant middle and upper classes. The latter, promoting the scientific nutritional, rational, economic, and moral value of bland diets and the convenience and safety of processed, industrially produced foodstuffs, sought to ‘educate’ the immigrant poor arriving from different European and American countries, encouraging them to abandon their ‘traditional’ diets in favor of the US diet (see, e.g., Levenstein 1988, 1993; Sack 2000; Shapiro 1986). At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, some intellectuals and politicians within the modernizing Mexican state, similarly motivated by positivist science and economic rationality, sought to promote changes in the diet of Mexican rural peasants and indigenous communities. Accepting

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that wheat was the staple of civilizations, these intellectuals and politicians resignified corn as the food that prevented Mexicans from becoming modern (Pilcher 1998). However, in Mexico, as in France and Italy (Camporesi 1970; Capatti and Montanari 1999), the post-colonial governments of the nineteenth century and the post-revolutionary governments of the twentieth century sought to create a national cuisine that invoked the indigenous past. In Mexico, this was accomplished by resorting to Creole ingenuity and severing the country’s culinary dependence on the European metropolis. The Mexican cuisine thus invented was tied rhetorically to an ancestral indigenous tradition that privileged ingredients, techniques, and components (such as moles, chili peppers, beans, squash, tomatoes, and corn) as the defining elements of the Mexican culinary tradition. That this model is still hegemonic can be attested by developments surrounding the creation of the Mundo Maya (Maya World) Tourism Fair, a transnational tourism project. For example, tourism entrepreneurs and state bureaucrats produced a manual for tourism operators that describes the foods of the different regions included in the project (the states of Yucatán, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Chiapas in Mexico and Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras) as being based primarily on beans, corn, squash, and chili peppers, disregarding the important differences that characterize actual Maya culinary traditions. Mexican cookbooks have also promoted this understanding of Mexican cuisine, seeking to legitimize their claims to authenticity by locating their roots in indigenous cultures. Thus, in these books, it is the cuisine of central Mexican regions and sometimes the moles from the state of Oaxaca that receive more attention and space, as the local gastronomy in these places is usually represented as being dominated by indigenous recipes and ingredients. In contrast, Yucatecans imagine a Yucatecan identity that is built upon a common consciousness derived from a common local history, a common language (Castilian Spanish with Maya inflections), a common religion (Catholicism), and common cultural productions (music, poetry, literature, theatre, food), but with the understanding that these commonalities are the creative blend of many different cultural traditions. Food plays here an important part, as Yucatecan food has been fashioned by culinary influences that are divorced from Mexican cuisine and tied to peninsular Caribbean connections. Historically, food has thus been turned into a significant marker of the differences between Yucatecan and Mexican cultures.

Nationalism and Internal Cultural Colonialism Any Yucatecan can recognize so-called Mexican food whenever she or he sees it. As it is everywhere else, cultural difference is grounded in affect-laden stereotypes (Geertz 2000a; Herzfeld 1997; Pilcher 2004). It is not a matter of

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whether or not Yucatecans have been exposed to Mexican foods. Yucatecan elites have traveled abroad to acquire education, to enlighten themselves through ‘grand tours’, or to secure and maintain commercial ties, but they have also traveled to other Mexican regions. Also, peasants and laborers have lived in other Mexican regions as part of a migratory workforce. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, despite the existence since the 1920s of a regional university in Mérida (and since the 1990s of several private universities), many Yucatecans still relocate to Mexico City to follow licenciatura (professional degree) and graduate studies. In addition, Yucatecan intellectuals and writers who aspire to achieve recognition beyond the region have moved to Mexico City to profit from the centralization of publishing resources (Rodríguez-Hernández 2007; Shrimpton Masson 2006, 2010) or to get involved in national politics. Thus, when these Yucatecans return home, they bring along newly acquired tastes and recipes, and sometimes, during private parties, they cook Mexican dishes such as pozole, sopes, chilorio, or mole. Some returnees, having acquired a metropolitan cosmopolitanism, ridicule the attachment of local people to regional foods, dismissing it as unsophisticated culinary quaintness. 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

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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

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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

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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’ as “the process whereby ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible” (ibid.). In what follows I describe some of the ways in which the tension between regional and national identities is played out. To provide a context for these performances of identity, I first describe the transformations evident in contemporary Mérida. As these examples show, in some instances it is more or less evident that some negotiation of meanings is taking place during the performance of difference. In other cases, the radicalization of the regionalnational divide makes negotiation or dialogue seem difficult (if not outright impossible) to achieve.

“We Should Fence the State”: Alien Invasions and Gastropolitics in Yucatán When we returned to Mexico in 1993 and established our residence in the state of Chiapas, my wife and I began traveling twice a year to the Yucatán peninsula to spend vacations with friends and relatives. It did not take us long to realize that many things had changed since we had moved to Canada in 1986. In those seven years, the city of Mérida had grown beyond recognition. There were many new residential neighborhoods, and the service sector had expanded dramatically. Our friends took us to see the new shopping malls, department stores, and hypermarkets. New cooking ingredients were available for the local connoisseur: French, US, and Mexican markets multiplied the supply and variety of foodstuffs and drinks imported from Asia, Europe, North and South America, and different regions of Mexico. Mérida looked, especially in contrast to highland Chiapas, like a consumer’s paradise.

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Our friends informed us that the city had become the destination for large numbers of central Mexicans who were demanding different sorts of goods and that, during the previous decade or so, the overall level of urban income had risen, leading to the expansion of the regional market for international foods and drinks. During the same period, a number of transnational and national fast-food franchises had opened in the city, and in some neighborhoods the demographic dominance of non-Yucatecans was turning local food into a rare commodity, in contrast to the increased availability of Mexican foodstuffs. Yucatecans in those neighborhoods lamented that at night they found it easier to come across vendors of sopes, huaraches,32 and Mexican tamales than the traditional Yucatecan food stands selling panuchos, salbutes, Yucatecan tamales, and turkey tortas. Even more upsetting, some friends told us that they were finding a gradual transformation with regard to the ingredients and preparation of local foods. In particular, they found it aggravating that many recipes had been changed and that dishes were being prepared with cream, cheese, and hot chili peppers, all of which are foreign to Yucatecan gastronomy. At that time, when some restaurateurs were attempting to please their clients by adding non-traditional ingredients to Yucatecan dishes, and even if they were trying not to modify the recipes radically, many Yucatecans suggested that it was disrespectful to cook local foods in ways different from the established ‘tradition’.33 Also, in contrast to the soft manners of Yucatecans, the demands of incoming Mexicans were (and are) often perceived as aggressive and inconsiderate, and I often heard complaints about the way in which, on account of the Mexicans, ‘good’ Yucatecan food was disappearing from the city. There was a growing sentiment among Meridans that their own city was becoming alien to them, especially when something so quotidian as the preparation and availability of food had been changed to suit the taste of newcomers from other Mexican regions. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this resentment, born not only from the experience of changes in the urban foodscape but also from the perception of changes in other spheres of public life as well, was one of the reasons behind the proliferation of regionalist icons, such as Yucatecan flags and shirts printed with the legends “Republic of Yucatán” and “Proudly Yucatecan.” The inflow of migrants from different Mexican regions, but chiefly from the central Mexican highlands, revived in Yucatecans a sense of social and cultural distinctiveness that, they believed, set them apart from Mexicans in general. The migrants were perceived as threatening the integrity of regional Yucatecan society, culture, and identity, and very often this perception has led to forms of antagonism directed against immigrants from other Mexican regions, who have been characterized as the source of all current evils in peninsular life. In 2006, Mérida had, according to some unofficial estimates, close to one million inhabitants—a rapid growth from 250,000 in the 1980s. The economic

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boom on the peninsula, which had been furthered by the development of the Cancún tourism resort during the second half of the 1970s, contributed to Yucatán’s demographic growth, attracting immigrants from different parts of the Mexican republic who spilled over from Cancún into other large peninsular cities, particularly Mérida. The latest official census puts the total inhabitants in the state of Yucatán at 1,818,948, with 781,146 (42.9 percent) residing in Mérida. According to this census, during the first five years of this century, the state received 37,000 immigrants from other Mexican states (INEGI 2006). Although the census does not detail the immigrants’ distribution within Yucatán or their place of origin, Meridans fear that their city is receiving the bulk of immigrants, mainly from the central Mexican highlands and Mexico City. The growth of tourism in the region has translated into increasing demands (both quantitative and qualitative) on service providers. Until recent times, the peninsula of Yucatán had been relatively isolated from tourism flows. It was only in 1961 that the Mérida airport began to receive international flights filled with US tourists, who were attracted by the state’s archaeological sites (Woodman 1966). During the late 1970s, the state government, seeking to profit from the success of Cancún, promoted the Yucatecan coast as an alternative to the overcrowded beaches of the state of Quintana Roo. By the end of the 1990s, the government of the state of Yucatán, forced to admit that the beaches on the Yucatecan north (the Gulf of Mexico waters) were not as attractive as those in the Maya Riviera tourism district, shifted the focus of its promotional campaigns. Instead of beaches, the emphasis was placed upon cultural resources. The multiple archaeological sites, several colonial towns, and existing hotel infrastructure were used to encourage cultural and academic tourism (Fernández Repetto 2010). Hotels in Mérida were promoted as sites to host international and national academic conferences, as well as political and economic meetings. At the beginning of this century, Yucatán was receiving about 1.5 million tourists annually, 31 percent of whom were foreign (SECTUR n.d.: 51). Other processes have contributed to the growth of population in Mérida. In 1985, shortly before we left the state of Yucatán, a massive earthquake had shocked Mexico City’s population. Terrified by the massive destruction, many central Mexicans began searching for alternative residence in other Mexican states. Certain that this was not the last of such events, and as a solution to the overcrowding of Mexico City, the Mexican government launched a decentralization campaign. Some industrial firms received tax incentives to relocate their plants to other Mexican regions, and bureaucrats were offered salary incentives to work in other Mexican states. Many Mexicans selected the city of Mérida in the north of the state of Yucatán as their new place of residence. A small city in the 1980s, it was the home of a population reputed

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for its hospitality and warmth. The city began to grow, partly as a result of this migratory movement triggered by geological phenomena and government policies, and partly as a result of rural-urban migration within the state of Yucatán, which was the outcome, in turn, of the application of new policies that discouraged agricultural work and ended the local production of henequen fibers. Rural Yucatecans began to migrate to Mérida, to Cancún, and abroad in search of work opportunities (Adler 2004; Re Cruz 1996). The growth in numbers of immigrants from other Mexican regions triggered local resentment, as many Yucatecans began to look on their presence as a threat to local culture and values. It was common to hear in conversations that it was imperative to restrict the immigration of Mexicans into the state of Yucatán. In their everyday experience, Yucatecans have to face immigrants from different parts of the country whom they perceive to behave differently from themselves. Some Yucatecans complain that Mexicans are terribly aggressive and arrogant, that they routinely despise local ways of doing things, and that they seek to impose their own customs and practices in an attempt to displace local ones. In an apparently restrained but insidious language usage, I have found that it is common for central Mexicans to refer to the states as ‘the provinces’, to see their inhabitants as ‘provincial’ (meaning ‘parochial’), and to presume an inherent superiority in their own social, cultural, political, and economic practices, which they view as ‘metropolitan’. For example, a central Mexican woman confessed somewhat embarrassedly that, only a short time before we met, her husband had started a business that failed all too soon. She explained that he had been exasperated by the way in which local cantinas and small restaurants catered to their patrons. He did not like the botanas34 served there and decided that he would open his own bar where he “would teach Yucatecans the proper way to eat.” After a couple of months, during which he failed to ensnare Yucatecans willing to learn the ‘right’ way of consuming food and drinks in a cantina, he was forced to close down his business. For some time, I thought that this was an extraordinary occurrence, until, one year later, my wife told me that a Mexican friend in her guitar group had launched an ‘economic kitchen’ (a take-out eatery) that soon failed. He did not like Yucatecan food and opened his business with the conviction that he would be able “to teach Yucatecans about good Mexican food” (Vargas Cetina, pers. comm.). This sort of ‘imperial certainty’, which is implicit in the social performance of central Mexicans and perceived as such by Yucatecans, plays a part in strengthening the cultural and social divide between local and non-local people. In addition to attempts to educate Yucatecans about the unquestionable superiority of Mexican food, Mexicans are reputedly imposing changes in the composition of traditional Yucatecan dishes. Instead of recognizing or showing a willingness to explore and respect the different and particular aesthetic

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forms of Yucatecan cuisine, Mexicans often complain about the lack of familiar ingredients (which Yucatecans perceive as alien to their own cuisine) and the scarcity of central Mexican dishes, requesting that they be introduced in the preparation of meals and in the menus of restaurants, respectively. Thus, cheese, an uncommon ingredient in local tamales, soups, and stews, is sometimes a distasteful—or at least an unexpected—find for Yucatecans who visit restaurants purportedly specializing in regional Yucatecan cooking. When Yucatecans either complain or voice their surprise, waiters or managers apologetically explain that the large number of Mexicans they serve has forced them to introduce those changes, because Mexicans did not like the dishes in their original form. As a result of their everyday interactions with this sort of Mexican, as well as widespread rumors about Mexicans’ ill-mannered behavior, some of which is observed first-hand, many Yucatecans now believe that Mexicans constitute a threat to Yucatecan culture, society, and identity. Thus, once, among many conversations I held with different acquaintances and friends about the increasing crime rates in Mérida, a couple of friends accused Mexicans of being the main source of crime. One of them passionately suggested: “We should start fencing the borders of the state. We should also give visas to foreigners and select those who will be allowed into Yucatán.” This attitude toward the people of Mexico is not uncommon, as some of my Yucatecan friends, probably alarmed at the breach of cultural intimacy, have suggested. 35 Today, Yucatecans may not call for independence from Mexico, but, as the following account illustrates, they always find an opportunity to voice their distance from Mexican society. During a house party in 2007, at which our hosts were serving Yucatecan tamales (vaporcitos), sandwiches filled with sandwichón mix, and cold overcooked pasta with a thin tomato sauce and fresh cheese sprinkled on top,36 I engaged in conversation with a Yucatecan entrepreneur. When he learned that we had recently driven about 6,000 kilometers from Ithaca to Mérida, he asked about our trip. In the course of giving an account, I mentioned that I had been surprised, when we arrived at the crossroads named La Tinaja in the state of Veracruz, to find a road sign pointing in the direction of the city of Veracruz and another one pointing to “El Sureste” (the southeast), encompassing under that term the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán. The entrepreneur laughed and then, turning serious, commented that he was aware that there had been, in years past, a project to build a channel in the Mexican Isthmus of Tehuantepec. He remarked that the official statement was that a channel was needed to facilitate trade between the Pacific and Gulf coasts of Mexico and as an alternative to the Panama Canal. However, he said, it was clear that it was in fact a strategy to separate physically the southeast from the rest of

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Mexico. In the end, the project did not prosper—which was a pity, he said, since it would have been better for Yucatán. After all, the people of the peninsula share a common culture, and there is enough ecological diversity to allow agricultural production to sustain the inhabitants of the region. There is oil around the peninsula, and Yucatecans also have the Caribbean coast, where the Maya Riviera and Cancún resort are located; hence, tourism could provide substantial revenue to Yucatán. When I reminded him that the Maya Riviera is in Quintana Roo and the oil is in the Bay of Campeche (states that border Yucatán), he reminded me, in turn, that they were originally part of Yucatán. Thus, together, these states would be able to exploit abundant natural resources and attract foreign capital to support themselves. Once separated, he added, Yucatecans could create a special residence tax for all non-Yucatecans living in the territory. Given their large number, this would provide a good amount of start-up capital for the new country. Feelings such as these reveal the belief among Yucatecans not only that their culture and society are radically different from those of Mexico, but also that the values that make Yucatán unique are superior to Mexican ones. Local people have been ready to accept the historical and archaeological narrative that opposes the Maya to the Aztec civilization. In the prevailing account, the Maya were wise and pacific, while the Aztecs were bloodthirsty warriors (Castañeda 1996; Jones 1997). If there were any truth in the Apocalypto vision of Maya culture, it was the result of Aztec colonization and its evil effects over the local Maya. In fact, contemporary Yucatecans often contrast their own hospitality and gentleness to the mistrust, hostility, and aggressiveness of Mexicans. These cultural traits are understood to be reflected in the foods of each culture. Yucatecan food is said to be pleasant, balanced, and, although spicy, characterized by the rare use of chili peppers during the preparation of foods. Locally, these traits are contrasted to Mexican foods, which are described as generous in their use of chili peppers (in the majority of the foods), making them tolerable only to those who are accustomed to eating spicy hot foods.37 When in 2000 my wife and I moved to work and live in Mérida, we went along with some friends to eat at a restaurant, near the downtown area, that specializes in Yucatecan food. I inquired about the ingredients in the dishes listed in the menu, explaining to the waiter that I was curious about changes introduced in the food to suit the palates of tourists, both national and foreign. The waiter, a man in his late fifties, responded that it was true that in the past the restaurant’s management had consented to adapt some recipes in response to requests and suggestions received from tourists—but they were not doing it any longer. He declared: “If tourists want to eat Yucatecan food, they have to eat it as it is. We are not adding weird things to our dishes. They have to respect our traditional food.”

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The waiter’s response seemed to echo messages that we had been hearing since our return to Mérida. Watching the local television channels or listening to the radio, we heard announcements sponsored by the regional media association (Grupo SIPSE, the Group of Information and Advertising Services of the Southeast)38 that advised: “Visitor, you who are moving into our land. Be respectful of Yucatecan values and society. Leave behind your ways and adopt our way of life, which is one of the reasons you are moving here.” Although we found these spots chauvinistic and offensive, many of our interlocutors— Yucatecans and non-Yucatecans alike—thought that SIPSE’s petition was correct, and many in-migrants told us that they felt morally obliged to accept and submit to local rules and norms.

Discussion: Nationalism, Regionalism, and Post-national Multiplicity The spread of nationalist ideologies has involved the use of pedagogical mechanisms that promote the feeling of commonality with peoples located beyond the field of everyday, face-to-face interactions. This imagined community, however, has great cultural and political consequences. The national community, to be imagined, needs to be thought of as homogeneous and located in ‘empty time’ (Walter Benjamin, cited in B. Anderson 1983: 24). In practice, this need is translated into the design and implementation of policies seeking to silence the heterogeneity of cultural practices, values, worldviews, and identities. In addition, the different media are called on to create awareness of the simultaneity of unconnected actions taking place throughout the community. As Bhabha (1994) suggests, there are two important dimensions in the constitution and institution of the nation that, in the same move, create a deep ambivalence: first, the deployment of pedagogical measures that establish and repeat, incessantly, the historical narrative of ‘the people’ and, second, a performative aspect that entails the everyday presentation of the nation, which, at the same time, triggers a crisis of representation. It is precisely through rewriting the past that Yucatecan elites have been contesting ‘Mexicanhood’ in Yucatán. They have created an imagined regional peoplehood—one that is based on its own invented common narratives of past and present—that diverges from, or is at least parallel to, the Mexican national project. Hence, Mexican nationalism and Yucatecan peoplehood stand in an opposition that reveals both excesses and deficiencies in each form of identity. In Derrida’s (1983) terms, these identities can be understood as supplementing each other. The Mexican nation has, over time, deployed a number of procedures that have been instrumental in the homogenization of the diverse cultures included within the territory of the

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state. The Spaniards superimposed their administrative institutions on former channels of Aztec domination, including those that extended over the territory of the peninsula of Yucatán. The needs of the nation were forced onto the regions, overriding local political and economic needs. Mechanisms of economic extraction, dominated by the center of the state, generated debt and economic dependency (Campos García 2004). Historical accounts of the movement that led to the emergence of the nation have been efficient in erasing the diversity of processes inscribed in the post-colonial history of the region. For example, one has to look into specialized texts to learn that Yucatán was not a part of New Spain and that its independence from Spain was the outcome of events different from those that took place in the central highlands. This knowledge is not part of the narrative passed on by educational institutions. In everyday parlance, Mexicans often refer to Yucatán as their ‘sister republic’ in recognition of a history of separatism, but they are certain that Yucatán and the Yucatecans belong to and in Mexico as part of a historical, ontological necessity. In the contemporary history of the Mexican nation, there are many ways in which the nation-state, with the support of the media and printed and audiovisual materials, has created and instituted a number of icons that represent Mexican nationality. Television programs and schoolbooks, for example, have promoted in their narratives the religious figure of the Virgin Saint of Guadalupe, who is the saint of the inhabitants of the central highlands. As a result of being broadcast nationally, this saint has been turned into the homogenizing religious icon of the Mexican people (despite the fact that several evangelical churches have been present in the territory since the nineteenth century and that there are contemporary Mexicans who practice the rites of Judaism and Islam). Locally meaningful religious celebrations have been displaced and subordinated to the national adoration of the Virgin Saint of Guadalupe.39 Television, cinema, newspapers and magazines, as well as the writings of cultural brokers, have reduced the ‘Mexican’ to the traits that characterize the culture of central Mexico: the charro, mariachi music, literature, subordination of pious women to macho men, drinking of tequila, and consumption of chili peppers. This homogenizing account leaves no room for the diversity of ways in which gender relations are structured in different regions; for the various ways that people express their affects through music, literature, and the arts in general; or for the heterogeneity of ways in which the history of regional markets and natural environments has shaped the diet of different groups. In fact, it also homogenizes the culture, values, and practices of the people of central Mexico, who are also marked by ethnic, economic, religious, and gender disparities. Yucatecan culture has been forged by distinct historical processes in an environment that differs from that of other Mexican regions; nonetheless,

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it is still connected to them and to a plurality of other political regions. Gabbert (2001, 2004), for example, has examined the process whereby a different structure of ethnic relations in Yucatán was forged. A wavering history of Spanish domination and Maya resistance to Spanish rule has blurred or obscured a direct reference to Maya identity among the majority of the population, who could be externally identified as such, based on their phenotype, but who publicly reject such identification. Different authors have highlighted the divide in the historical consciousness of the people of Yucatán, who recognize themselves as mayeros, that is, speakers of Maya language, yet claim no kinship with the Maya of the ancient civilization— “those who built the pyramids of the peninsula” (Castañeda 2004; Castillo Cocom 2004; Gutiérrez Estévez 1992; Hervik 1999a, 1999b). In practice, Yucatecan society has elaborated a post-revolutionary, post-colonial discourse about Yucatecan peoplehood that stresses the Mestizo figure and downplays the Maya roots of local culture. Yucatecan elites are fascinated by the Maya civilization that archaeologists have uncovered and are impressed by these ancient people’s skills in architecture, astronomy, and mathematics, but they find an unbridgeable fracture between themselves and the impoverished and marginalized present-day descendants of the ancient Maya. Older generations of migrants from other societies—Germans, Italians, French, Chinese, Koreans, and Cubans, as well as Yaqui, Oaxacans, and Mexicans from other regions—were largely assimilated into mainstream Yucatecan society, leaving no visible imprint on contemporary Mérida. Yet recent immigrants from those societies are now claiming the right to keep their own culture. Among the immigrants, it is only the Syrian-Lebanese who have been able to carve out their own social, cultural, and political space, after successfully joining ranks with established Yucatecan elites (Ramírez Carrillo 1994).40 Since the henequen boom, Yucatecan elites have been able to promote a historical narrative about the emergence of the Yucatecan people. In terms of this account, Yucatecans, marked by the particular geography that isolated them from the rest of Mexico, developed their own culture, values, social relations, and ethos, and this difference has served to distinguish them from Mexican society and culture. Wealthy Yucatecans, similarly to their counterparts in central Mexico, were educated in Europe, while those who were educated locally attended institutions that imported European philosophy and political theory. The economic self-sufficiency provided by the henequen trade allowed Yucatecan elites to reach such a level of confidence that they could claim the right to self-government and to take actions independently of the desires of central Mexican elites. The history of the twentieth century has been reframed, by the Yucatecan elites, as the history of the violations of those rights on the part of the central Mexican elites and government. By dwelling upon that story, Yucatecan elites are able to revive and fan the

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population’s sense of distinctiveness in their relation to the rest of Mexico. When the political context requires it, the awareness of Yucatecan peoplehood can be mobilized. In those instances, there is a feeling of regional belonging and an opposition to the nationalist ideology of Mexican commonality, in addition to a perception of being different from Mexicans. As a people, Yucatecans can claim to possess a different culture, different social values, and a different worldview from those whom they characterize as Mexicans. Yet even if Yucatecan peoplehood can emphasize the cultural separateness of Yucatán and Mexico, at the same time it homogenizes and elides the cultural differences that are to be found in the Yucatecan region itself.

2

Mérida and the Contemporary Foodscape

In this chapter, I describe Mérida’s contemporary urban foodscape. I make evident that Yucatecan food must, in the present day, compete with a vast array of other cuisines (ethnic, regional, and national) that are being disseminated during the expansion of the global foodscape. A crucial consequence of the translocal transformation of the foodscape is the presence of multiple culinary forms (and their publics) in the Yucatecan territory that challenge the co-extensiveness of Yucatecan culinary culture with the regional geography. Additionally, local Yucatecans’ growing acceptance of the flavors and culinary values of other cuisines is gradually relativizing and challenging the normative value of regional cuisine. Hence, Yucatecan restaurateurs and cooks are forced to recognize these transformations in the regional foodscape, and this recognition informs their efforts to reterritorialize Yucatecan gastronomy and to secure the ‘identity’ of Yucatecan food within the global foodscape. In using the term ‘foodscape’ I am further expanding Appadurai’s (1996) unpacking of the different dimensions constitutive of the process of globalization. Like him, I find the landscape analogy useful, as it makes it necessary to recognize that any subject’s perception of a landscape is shaped by the position that he or she occupies within it and by the viewpoint that his or her position affords; that is, there is no landscape independent of the subject who perceives it. Here I understand the foodscape as the arena where the ‘financescape’, ‘mediascape’, and ‘ideoscape’ interweave and reinforce each other. The mass media has played an important part by promoting the consumption of diverse types of commodities. In recent years, food has been placed at the forefront of the global marketing of goods, and print media, radio, and television have encouraged the consumption of foods ranging from breakfast cereals to processed and canned foods, from slimming drinks and ‘natural’ produce to fast foods.1 Many of these different types of foods are linked visually, in advertisements and in popular fantasy, to lifestyles credited to ‘advanced’ post-industrial societies, such as the United States and the countries of the European Union. – 76 –

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The publicity for these products shows them being consumed by carefree, young, white, thin, fashionably dressed men and women, whose appearance is androgynous or reveals firmly muscled and well-defined bodies. Arguably, along with food advertisements, these images promote and universalize a lifestyle attributed to the youth in the United States (Fantasia 1995). While this is hardly the only motivation to consume—the taste of the food involved may also be sought after—one can observe in restaurants how local youngsters mimic attitudes and behaviors that they have seen in movies and television sitcoms. For example, some Yucatecan teenagers mimic the behavior of the US white working class portrayed in movies such as Clerks or Mallrats (K. Smith 1994, 1995). The media in general, but television in particular, as Dolphijn suggests (2004: 50), contributes to the deterritorialization of food brands and franchises and hence to their reterritorialization in multiple localities. In an affective effect, the consumption of food marks individuals and consumer groups with a sense of distinction that draws on the values, practices, and discourses imagined as proper of the (seen from afar) glamorous middle and upper classes of the United States or, alternatively, of their romanticized disenfranchised groups.2 Although some recent movies—also exhibited in local cinemas, albeit for a short time—have been critical of the fast-food industry (Linklater 2006; Spurlock 2004), their message seems not to have had any impact yet on the flow of customers into local branches of fast-food joints, which are almost always crowded. As one young female (20 years old or so) told me early in 2010: “Don’t tell me! I’d rather not learn anything about the illnesses that hamburgers and French fries might cause, as I really enjoy them and go to [a hamburger eatery] at least twice a week.” In the city of Mérida, as in any contemporary site, there are individuals of different gender, age, and economic means, and the view that each subject affords of the foodscape depends on his or her standpoint, that of her or his friends, and their strategies of navigation.3 Each specific configuration of the Mérida foodscape corresponds to individual and collective experiences that, in turn, are the product of socially shaped intersubjective articulations of multiple national, regional, and ethnic cuisines available in the city, both through the restaurants where they are sold and through supermarkets and other commerce establishments where the ingredients, technologies, and cookbooks necessary for their elaboration are found. Dolphijn (2004: 34) has pointed out that the “town-form is a phenomenon of transconsistency; it shows us the city within a network with other cities.” In the contemporary world, it would be difficult to understand the shapes a foodscape takes if one were to disregard the processes and flows that occur in other ‘scapes’ and the variety of articulations they find in different sites. For example, the financescape includes the flow of capital and business ventures from one region or nation-state into another, as well as the geographical spread of transnational

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corporations dedicated to the production and marketing of foodstuffs. In Mérida, local, national, and international investors have launched franchises of restaurants and fast-food chains, so that today’s urban landscape is dotted with eateries linked to transnational capital as diverse as McDonald’s, Burger King, Chili’s, Pizza Hut, Subway, KFC, T.G.I. Friday, Italianni’s, Bennigan’s, and Boston’s, as well as the Mexican national restaurant chains Sanborns and VIPs. Also present in the city are regional chain establishments of Italian food, such as Messina and La Pergola; of Mexican food, such as La Parrilla (The Grill), Las Jirafas (Giraffes), and Los Trompos (Tops, like the toy, but also the popular name for shawarma-like meats); or, more limited in number, of Yucatecan food, such as Los Almendros and Príncipe Tutul-Xiu.4 All restaurant chains have the tendency to repeat and standardize the taste for food and to establish and maintain lateral connections among cities, regions, and nation-states. Local and regional entrepreneurs mediate national and international connections, directing changes in the urban foodscape by channeling flows of investment into food services and by giving preference to globally established brands that promise lasting economic success. As in most contemporary urban settings, the inhabitants of Mérida face rapid and progressive changes that have eroded the certainties that shaped local lives until just a couple of decades ago.5 The city continues to expand, engulfing small villages previously located in Mérida’s hinterland, and new neighborhoods sprout within the borders of the city. Immigrants from other regions of Mexico and other countries are giving the city a multicultural feel that is progressively replacing the presumption of a monolithic Yucatecan society. Increased access to financial credit has allowed more families to own motor vehicles, and traffic in the city is becoming more and more chaotic by the day. Also, the wider availability of air conditioning equipment has created the conditions to maintain uninterrupted working hours; in so doing, it has displaced the habit of the afternoon postprandial siesta and has introduced and enhanced faster rhythms of life and greater amounts of time spent outside one’s home. The steady economic decline that began in the 1980s has contributed to the transformation of one-income families into families with two or more income earners. The transformation of eating habits has been part and parcel of these changes. Many Meridans work close to or in shopping malls that, as in any other city in the contemporary global world, encompass food fairs that are crowded during lunch- and dinnertime. At these food fairs, as well as in food delivery services, Meridans can choose from Chinese, Lebanese, or Italian food (with the last being mainly pizzas and panini); Cajun dishes, US-style sandwiches, or hamburgers; or fried chicken, Mexican tacos, or Yucatecan-style sandwiches (tortas). At these malls, it is now common to find Meridans either eating with family members or friends or eating on their own. Isolated at a table within crowded spaces, every individual can eat his

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or her own preferred food, reducing the experience of commensality that is attached to sharing special occasions with other people. This emerging habit mirrors (and is mirrored by) the growing domestic practice whereby family members have stopped sharing a common meal during lunch or dinner; instead, each person eats her or his choice of reheated leftovers or a sandwich or hamburger, sharing only the dining table. My intention is not to contrast present-day realities with a nostalgic, rosy picture of the urban past. Instead, I seek to describe the ways in which the regional foodscape has inexorably changed and to highlight the ways in which the expansion of food choices contributes to the dissolution of an imagined Yucatecan community and thus to the deterritorialization of Yucatecan culture and identity. In the next sections of this chapter, I describe the configuration and heterogeneity of the urban foodscape. My descriptions are based on explorations that I conducted, guided by friends and relatives, and on what friends and relatives have told me about their own navigational practices of the urban foodscape. This arena is in constant transformation. As anywhere else, in Mérida, restaurants and diners open, and, despite stories of long-lasting success, sooner or later they fail; or change their working schedule to suit the demands of their patrons; or haphazardly attempt to satisfy a shifting demand, continuously changing their menu in desperate efforts to survive; or endure decades of hardship before closing or moving into less expensive marginal locations. Despite the volatility of the foodscape’s shape and the fragility of the restaurants and food places that constitute it, I suggest that the general configuration of Mérida’s urban foodscape is one where local consumers (Yucatecan or not) can affirm their insertion within the multicultural, cosmopolitan sphere, while, at the same time, both Yucatecan consumers and restaurateurs seek to provide a safeguard for the defense and preservation of regional foods. In the following section, I describe some of the transformations that the urban foodscape has undergone before arriving at its present form.

Mérida’s Changing Foodscape Today, going out to eat in Mérida means choosing from among a wide variety of culinary options. For some people, like my friends and myself, our choices often seem almost automatic: we know what we like and dislike. Thus, when we go out for a light dinner and some drinks, we often choose one among a reduced number of restaurants in the extension of the Paseo Montejo. For example, one evening in December 2008, we decided to dine at a restaurant with a patio. We sat outside and ordered whisky sours, the special drink of the night. While we waited for a friend, we asked the waiter to bring a focaccia or pan globo (balloon bread), as many call it locally because it fills with air while

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being baked. The waiter served it, adding a dash of garlic oil and filling a small saucer with a blend of olive oil and minced basil leaves and garlic to dip the bread in. We decided not to order the appetizers (a choice of chicken wings, sautéed mushrooms, and breaded cheese). From a menu that lists steaks, pizzas, pastas, and fish, our friend chose grilled tuna steak. She was served a seared tuna accompanied by a serving of rice, aesthetically arranged, and a few grilled asparagus spears placed on top of the steak. She was happy with her food, and we spent a couple of hours conversing, watching the parade of young men and women dressed in high heels and expensive garments, wearing fashionable makeup and jewelry and stepping out of new BMWs, Audis, Mercedes, Humvees, Jaguars, and an assortment of sedans and 4x4 vehicles. We pondered about the changing demographics of the restaurant, a place where we usually found people in our own age range (between 40 and 60) but, on that occasion, saw customers in their early twenties and thirties. Then we realized that it was Friday night and recalled that restaurants along the extension of the Paseo Montejo are mandatory stops for young people on their way to discos and nightclubs. Since the 1970s, Meridans have witnessed a series of radical transformations in the urban foodscape. The available literature provides scant and vague references to the culinary culture of Yucatán during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries (Miranda Ojeda and Negroe Sierra 2007). The first half of the twentieth century was the time of ascendancy and hegemony of Yucatecan cuisine in the regional public sphere. For centuries there have been inns in Europe offering travelers food and board. These varied in type and the quality of the foods served, and their expansion and diversification was tied to the growth of urban areas (Beardsworth and Keil 1997; Bell and Valentine 1997; Warde and Martens 2000). The restaurant is a more recent invention, fashioned in the French context where the breadth of Parisian regional connections provided a fertile ground for the emergence of restaurants and a sophisticated cuisine (Spang 2000). During the second part of the twentieth century, the wealth of international connections, the expansion of transnational corporations, and the shifting de- and reterritorialization of capital encouraged, first, the multiplication of restaurants in metropolises and important cities around the globe and, later, the propagation of fast-food franchises into practically all areas of the world (Dolphijn 2004; Fantasia 1995). Dislocated groups of people, along with their ‘ethnic’ foods, were uprooted from their original cultural territory and relocated to other parts of the globe. By establishing eateries in their new places of residence, they sought both to satisfy cravings for the food from their homelands and to coax food adventurers to experience their ‘exotic’ fare, thus turning their restaurants into regular destinations on gastro-nomadic itineraries (Cwiertka 2005; Heldke 2003; J. Roberts 2002; Watson 1997).

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The Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Foodscape Probably because food, mealtimes, and the provisioning of foodstuffs are perceived as part of a quotidian and taken-for-granted order of things, most Mérida chroniclers and foreign travelers paid little attention to the food of Yucatán in their written accounts. Stephens’s ([1843] 1963: 21) travel narrative described how, during the celebration of All Saints’ Day, he encountered the ritual of “Mukbilpoyo [sic]” in Mérida (in reference to the dish mucbil pollo, a chicken tamale). Throughout different episodes that he recounted about his stay in the city, Stephens briefly mentioned a breakfast of boiled eggs that the local cook prepared in a “strange way” (ibid.: 92). He also referred to the religious festivities of the village “Jalacho [sic],” that is, Halachó, where people ate turkey sold by vendors at stands located around the village’s plaza (ibid.: 114). In this now classic book, we find passing references to mealtimes, but no detailed descriptions of the foods that Stephens and his companions consumed. In Norman’s (1843) travelogue from the same period, there is no mention of the food that Yucatecans ate at that time. Norman described what he perceived as the exotic daily distribution of meals, telling his readers that he was offered chocolate and “panadolza [sic]” (pan dulce, or sweetened bread) early in the morning; breakfast, consisting of strips of meat, eggs, tortillas, and “frejoles [sic],” along with coffee and wine, at 9:00 am; and dinner at 3:00 pm, when his host treated him and his companions to rich and abundant dishes. In his travelogue, Norman gave no details of these meals, stating that “it would be absurd to enumerate [the] dishes” (ibid.: 25). He visited one of Mérida’s markets, reporting that he found fruits and vegetables, limited in number, as well as abundant and cheap poultry (ibid.: 37), but did not register the types of produce that were available. He also noted that Mérida’s inhabitants had, “by way of Belize and Havana,” access to European commodities, mainly dry goods originating in England and France (ibid.: 66). However, throughout his account Norman makes only cursory reference to the different moments and places of his food consumption. In 1865, a Russian traveler, S. K. Patkanov, visited Yucatán. In Mérida, he found Syrian, Lebanese, and German immigrants, favoring his relationship with the last. He spent his final night in the city, among German friends and “young mestizos from good families,” drinking beer and eating French food (left unspecified) of surprisingly good quality at a local restaurant (cited in Richardson 1988: 59).6 This was an indication of the growing importance in the local social arena of things French, including French food, which would later influence the banquets offered to President Porfirio Díaz during his visits to Yucatán at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Some decades later, after Stephens’s, Norman’s, and Patkanov’s visits to the region, Ober ([1883] 1887: 44) described Yucatecan diet as

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“farinaceous” and unchanged for centuries. He made note that Yucatecans, rich and poor alike, ate beans “twice a day, seven days a week,” always with red pepper or “chile” (ibid.: 46). During his stay, he journeyed through several villages and ruins, and while here and there in the text he noted that he had eaten breakfast or a meal, he did not bother to describe the food that he had been offered. While the earliest recipe book published in Yucatán (in 1832) lends support to Stephens’s and Norman’s impression of Yucatecan food as simple and uninteresting, by the time Ober visited the region, Yucatecan cookbooks reflect a richer and more varied diet than the one he claimed to have encountered (see chap. 4). In any case, the authors of these travelogues showed little interest in the food stands, eateries, bars, or cantinas that existed and that they could have visited (and likely noticed) during their stay in Mérida, their first stop after arriving in Yucatán, and which they consequently chose to omit from their descriptions.7 Visitors from the central Mexican highlands came at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century and added reports to those produced by the regional government. Their remarks were meticulous with regard to locations where agricultural and industrial production had been observed, but scant regarding regional culture. Some reports listed industrial and agricultural products, such as timber, plants, and other industrially processed products (e.g., oils, fibers, soaps), from different villages (Gobierno del Estado de Yucatán 1880). One observer, García Cubas (1887), highlighted the oddities of the Yucatecan temperament and provided a statistical digest of the state’s resources. However, he made no mention of local food, other than a short list of the animals and plants that were more common in the area. Whether or not they were included in the diet was not part of his report. In turn, de Zayas Enríquez (1908) published a monograph with statistical data on the state of Yucatán, a volume that also contained a description of the local customs. He pointed out that Yucatecans at that time displayed an increasing refinement and cosmopolitanism. He went so far as to describe the food of the peasants and the poor people of Yucatán, which, he wrote, was based on corn, beans, and chili peppers, and he noted that the Yucatecan poor seldom ate pork, milk, or eggs (ibid.: 57). However, this author, like those before him, failed to describe the food that cosmopolitan Yucatecans ate. Although de Zayas Enríquez mentioned the celebratory events and luxurious banquets organized for the presidential visit of Porfirio Díaz, he did not describe the types of food prepared or give details about the ceremonies or name the participants in the events.8 Later accounts provided by sociologists and anthropologists were concerned with the transition from rural to urban, from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ ways of life. Yet despite this focus, they also failed to pay attention to the

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regional culture of food. For example, in an article, Redfield (1934: 58) made a passing comment about the Spanish influence on Mérida’s culture by pointing at the availability of saffron, rice, oranges, “domestic fowl,” cattle, and “other Old World condiments” in the local market. Later, in his classic The Folk Culture of Yucatan, Redfield (1941: 22) noted, regarding Meridans, that “the diet of the well-to-do and of people in more moderate circumstances on special occasions contains such articles as apples, wine, cheese, ham, and canned goods of all kinds which are imported from Europe and the United States.” Although he provided a chronology of “significant events” in Mérida’s transformation (ibid.: 34–35)—including, among others, the formation of social clubs, the start of schools and the regional university, the creation of neighborhoods, and the establishment and dissemination of fashions—he did not mention the existence, emergence, or expansion of food establishments. His only reference to foods is made in his mention of villages’ festal occasions (not during urban festivities). During those events, he says, the foods are often “relleno, tzahbil keken [fried pork], tortillas, crackers and chocolate” (ibid.: 284). Asael Hansen, a student and collaborator of Redfield, was in charge of conducting a study on the cultural and social transformations of Mérida up to 1935 (see Hansen and Bastarrachea M. 1984). Despite his explicit interest in describing the ways in which Mérida’s culture was becoming more cosmopolitan and modern, and although he discussed the ongoing transformations in different cultural realms (religion, kinship, dress codes, consumerism) (ibid.: 59) and stressed the cultural distinctions between Yucatecan and Mexican societies and culture, Hansen somehow neglected the food culture of the capital of the state. Although he explicitly recognized that Yucatecan culture is not homogeneous (ibid.: 45) and that immigrants from Cuba, the Antilles, Lebanon, Spain, and Italy, along with fewer numbers from China and Korea, were joining Yucatecan society, the immigrants’ food culture and its impact on the development of Yucatecan cookery did not secure any lines among his observations.9 Not even more recent work on the role of Yucatecan elites in the transformation of the region’s culture, social structures, economic (im)balances, political forms, and religious practices pays much attention to food. While some studies have recognized the growing importance of Lebanese immigrants, they, too, failed to mention the Lebanese contribution to the food culture of the region (e.g., see Pérez de Sarmiento and Savarino Roggero 2001; Ramírez Carrillo 1994).10 Although they noted that the new arrivals imported food from their region of origin, these authors were not concerned with the extent of its incorporation into the Yucatecan culinary field (Pérez de Sarmiento and Savarino Roggero 2001: 114; Ramírez Carrillo 1994: 294). Additional studies took the rural diet into account, but only in terms of its nutritional deficits

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(Bonfil Batalla [1962] 1995) or its ritualistic importance during religious celebrations (Redfield 1941; see also Maldonado Castro 2000). Focused on rural, peasant people, these studies disregarded life in the city and the exchanges between the city and the countryside, or the city and other cities in Mexico and the world. In general, these scholars showed little concern with the ways in which food has become a marker of regional identity.11 From superficial and scattered descriptions of the Yucatecan urban foodscape at the beginning of the twentieth century, we can infer that there were food stands and eateries in the cities and towns of the state. Since Mérida has been the commercial center of the peninsula of Yucatán for over a century, it is safe to presume that there were fondas (diners) that offered meals for travelers and Meridans alike. Also, some of the early-twentieth-century hotels in downtown Mérida opened restaurants that included Spanish and French dishes in their menus. There are also signs of the existence of other fondas, such as one in the southern barrio of San Juan, where, according to the chronicler Montejo Baqueiro (1981a: 242), a Yucatecan cook had been selling panuchos since the 1910s. Members of the Medina family claim to be the ones who introduced the fashion of serving botanas in Yucatán when they opened their restaurantbar, La Prosperidad, in the 1970s. More recently, a newspaper announced that a local restaurant-bar, El Pocito (The Small Well) celebrated its 86th anniversary in May 2007. This establishment’s claim to fame lies in its success in crafting new and innovative botanas. Besides the traditional papadzul (rolled tortillas stuffed with minced boiled eggs and a green sauce of ground squash seed and with epazote covered with a fried red tomato sauce), they also offer alternative papadzules filled with a choice of chicken or beef (Diario de Yucatán, 27 May 2007). Newspaper accounts suggest that, during the early part of the twentieth century, Meridans probably faced a foodscape that was more homogeneous than the one they face today—one that was naturalized and taken for granted as the unmarked regional culinary standard. This is probably why it received little attention from both travelers and ethnographers.

Late-Twentieth-Century Transformations in the Urban Foodscape During the 1960s, when I was growing up in Valladolid (located 160 kilometers east of Mérida), my parents took me every so often to the capital city to visit relatives. Associated with those trips are a number of smells that remain inscribed in my memory: the smell of the vegetable oil (coconut) and soap plant as soon as one entered the city, and, a few kilometers ahead, the smell of kibbeh and other fried foods in the downtown area. As soon as we arrived in La Jardinera, the neighborhood where my relatives lived, I was enveloped by the smell of refried beans with fried onions and epazote and of freshly baked baguettes. As in Proust’s often-quoted passage referring to a

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madeleine pastry, whenever I encounter these smells, they never fail to trigger memories and feelings from my childhood. When I finally moved to Mérida in 1971 to live and study, the majority of the restaurants in the city specialized either in Yucatecan or Lebanese food. There was little cultural culinary variation available for customers, other than those relating to personal preferences and a family’s oral transmission of culinary knowledge. Some customers preferred the flavors of one cook’s papadzules or stuffed cheese, while other diners preferred those of another cook. Customers chose restaurants, bars, or diners depending on the correspondence between their memory of a dish and the particular version that was offered by a specific establishment. As the 1970s advanced, new restaurants emerged, selling meals previously unavailable to Meridans. For example, Yucatecan migrants returning from the United States opened the first pizza parlors and Chinese restaurants. The former opened in new middle-class neighborhoods or fraccionamientos, so named because large tracts of real estate were fractioned (divided) and sold to develop urban housing. Mérida’s first pizza eatery was Romanos in the Fraccionamiento Miraflores, in the east of the city. Soon after, other pizza restaurants sprang up in other fraccionamientos and along the Paseo Montejo.12 They offered an array of pizzas and pastas in their US versions (e.g., linguini with shrimp bathed in cream and Parmesan cheese, fettuccini Alfredo, or spaghetti Bolognese). A long-time favorite among Yucatecans was Hawaiian pizza, prepared with ham and canned sliced pineapples. Chinese restaurants, also inspired by the US interpretation of Oriental food, promoted chop suey and chow mein, making them regular favorites among Yucatecans and contributing to a local association of bean sprouts and soy sauce with Chinese food. Also during the 1970s, a restaurant opened that specialized in northernstyle grilled meats (from the state of Nuevo León), and a number of central and western Mexican restaurants sprouted along avenues in middle-class neighborhoods located in the northern half of the city and the extension to the Paseo Montejo. These restaurants popularized dishes such as pozole de Jalisco, cowboy beans, and guacamole (there were already some guacamole recipes in Yucatecan cookbooks dating from the 1940s and 1950s). Other restaurants, opened by immigrants from other Mexican regions, created a niche for tacos of grilled meats and sausages (chorizos), served with cowboy beans and guacamole. Later, restaurants opened up that specialized in flank steaks (arracheras), pork and beef chops (chuletas), fajitas, flautas, and burritos. Slowly but surely, tacos al pastor (a shawarma roast topped with slices of pineapple) became popular.13 These restaurants furthered the Yucatecan taste preference for jalapeño, chipotle, and serrano pepper, and began to make sour cream and melted cheese appealing ingredients in the everyday local diet. In the 1980s, there were some short-lived French restaurants, which were locally infamous for their small portions and large prices; Italian restaurants,

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which elaborated their own fresh pasta and were favored for their enormous servings of overcooked pasta; and Chinese restaurants, which employed generous amounts of sprout beans, soy sauce, and monosodium glutamate (MSG) in their dishes.14 Local entrepreneurs were not aware that they were laying the groundwork for fast-food franchises when they began selling charcoal-grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, accompanied by fries, onion rings, ketchup, and picked cucumber. Following suit, some Yucatecan restaurateurs opened their own diners to sell sandwiches of pork combined with a choice of ham, eggs, fried black beans, cheddar cheese, and pickled onions. The Paseo Montejo hosted a number of restaurants locally favored, some for their sandwiches (tortas), others for their wood-oven pizzas, still others for their Swiss enchiladas (made with very generous servings of sour cream and melted cheese) or for their sincronizadas (grilled pita bread stuffed with ham and melted cheese)—and others for their smoothies, champolas (ice cream with milk), and Dixie’s (ice cream and cola). Since this was (and still is) the posh commercial section of the city, new, upscale pizza parlors opened, along with Lebanese restaurants and cafés, in order to appeal to the urban middle and upper classes. Restaurants located in hotels along that boulevard sold so-called international food15 to their guests and were preferred by local patrons. Since Yucatecans had, by that time, wholeheartedly accepted grilled meats, this was also a decade propitious for the introduction of the first Argentinean restaurants. Some additional changes in the urban foodscape contributed to the expansion of Meridans’ self-conscious cosmopolitanism: delis and supermarkets appeared, supplementing the options for food commodities previously dominated by Yucatecan and regional produce available in local markets. Today, there are still several public markets in Mérida: two are located in the downtown area (Lucas de Gálvez and García Rejón), and others in some old barrios (Santa Ana, Santiago, Chem Bech, and San Sebastián); one is in the Fraccionamiento Miguel Alemán, and another in Miguel Hidalgo;16 and in former hinterland villages, now turned into Mérida’s suburbia, one is in Chuburná, and a new one is being built in the southern end of the city, near a new prison. The central de abastos, a large storing and distributing facility controlled by the state, is located in the west of the city. Here, national and regional products are centralized and then distributed to markets and supermarkets. Public markets are the sites where local people purchase seafood, meats, vegetables, fruits, or grains to take home to cook. Yucatecan meals, such as assorted sandwiches and tamales, panuchos, and salbutes, are also available, either to eat at a market table or to take back home. In these markets, some local cooks have earned their reputation as experts in cochinita pibil or baked piglet (lechón al horno); others are recognized for their tamales, panuchos, or salbutes; and some are known for their tasty tacos of fish and other seafood.

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From the moment they appeared in the late 1960s, delis and small supermarkets competed with corner stores and public markets. Corner stores had counters, and customers had to wait their turn to ask the owner for the goods they wished to purchase. These stores sold mainly regional and local products, but some were also stocked with Mexican or Spanish chorizo, butter, pork lard, olive oil, olives, capers, and other Iberian goods. One could also find in them pickled or salted dried plums (probably of Japanese origin) known as chamoy. These stores were located in old neighborhoods (barrios). Owners and customers knew each other, and it was common to buy goods on credit (fiado). The storeowner had a notebook in which the customers’ names and the tally of their weekly debt was recorded. In contrast to the corner store, the new supermarkets offered the convenience of self-service. In a small space, consumers had the opportunity to select their own goods from among a growing number of canned, boxed, and frozen products. Supermarkets also sold some fresh meat, and most had a section of cold cuts and cheese. One could find different brands of processed cheese and cooked ham, as well as slices of processed chicken and turkey. Most brands were initially regional and Mexican. Progressively, these sections included different brands of cream cheese, butter, margarine, and yogurt, and some were turned into delis. The majority of small supermarkets were local ventures, vying for a niche of the market by ensuring a steady supply of the most popular brands and items of the time. Later, during the 1970s, the large supermarket chains began to displace small supermarkets.17 Local and regional entrepreneurs, many of Lebanese origin, invested in large supermarket chains that opened at strategic locations within the city and later expanded to other cities within the state and the peninsula of Yucatán. The supermarket chains promised two advantages. The first was their diversity: they included a larger variety of goods than the early small supermarkets. In their spacious premises, shoppers could find row upon row of different types of cereal or brands of canned vegetables, sauces, oils, grains, beans, chickpeas, spices, soups, processed foods, and many other products that originated either within the state of Yucatán or other Mexican regions. Some supermarkets added a section of imported goods from the US, Spain, France, or Italy.18 Their wine and liquor section included mainly Mexican drinks, Yucatecan and Mexican brands of beers, and a range of imported wines or liquors (cheap brands of gin, vodka, brandy, whisky, rum, and tequila). The second advantage of supermarket franchises was that the owners were aware that different social classes have different levels of purchasing power and tastes. The goods displayed on the shelves therefore varied (and still do) according to the section of the city where they are located.19 Hence, one can choose a supermarket of preference according to one’s economic means and the corresponding range of products available in any given establishment.

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However, not all supermarkets offer produce that correlates with the income of residents in the districts where they are located. Many shoppers must travel (by car or bus) to a distant neighborhood to find the prices and quality of products that they can afford or like. In general, supermarkets located in the north of Mérida, a preferred residential area for liberal professionals and entrepreneurs, offer a selection of high-end goods that include, for example, Italian balsamic vinegar, truffle oil and vinegar, foie gras, and caviar; champagne, cognac, single malt Scotch whisky, Russian and European vodka and gin, and Caribbean rum; Australian, South African, Italian, French, German, and Spanish wine; Argentinean, Belgium, Canadian, Dutch, German, Guatemalan, Italian, and Spanish beer; and other European, North American, and South American goods. Nonetheless, around the area where these supermarkets and department stores are located, there is a large neighborhood (Francisco de Montejo), with about 70,000 inhabitants, whose majority is composed primarily of middle- to lower-middle-income workers and students. In the east and west sides of the city, where the population seems to be dominated by employees and bureaucrats, supermarkets include a wider selection of local goods and cheaper brands of boxed, bottled, and canned products. In them, one cannot find Italian prosciutto, Spanish Serrano ham, or other imported meats; instead, the most generic and cheaper brands of processed cheeses (e.g., cheddar, Manchego, Oaxaca, mozzarella, and cream cheese) are on offer. Wines are mostly low-end Mexican, as well as some cheap Argentinean, Chilean, Portuguese, South African, and Spanish brands. The south side of the city, inhabited mainly by manual laborers, has only one supermarket.20 For the most part, residents rely on the corner stores of their neighborhood. Supplementing supermarkets—an array of franchises of self-service stores that stay open 24 hours a day, seven days a week—have sprouted up in all neighborhoods of the city. Acting as a proxy for those Meridans who do not live near supermarkets, they are convenience stores for others, where one can purchase a few goods and avoid the long lines at the supermarket. Hypermarkets arrived during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Three US hypermarkets and one that was French-owned opened in the northern region of Mérida. While the US stores have remained open for business, and even multiplied, the French one closed in 2004, to be replaced, at the same site, by a middle-class-oriented supermarket. One of the US hypermarkets now has three branches—one in Paseo Montejo, one in the east, and another in the west of the city—despite the opposition of inhabitants to the construction of one of the branches in the north that had been approved by City Hall. These hypermarkets are the usual oversized, hangar-like establishments that contain seemingly endless rows of goods. In fact, some friends have commented that, since the buildings are so large, they choose to shop elsewhere, in order to

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avoid having to walk long distances to complete their shopping. To emphasize the excessive size of the hypermarkets, some friends remarked on the fact that in one of them the employees use roller skates to move from one end of the establishment to the other. These hypermarkets offer a large supply of Yucatecan, Mexican, and European goods. Despite its location in the north of the city, the French franchise reported nationwide low sales and closed all branches in the Mexican territory. In recent years, a German master butcher has been crafting and selling his own sausages, hams, and meats, as well as northern European bread. He has been successful enough to expand into a small section where he sells sandwiches made with his own products, and in 2007 he opened another vending point farther north in the city. For decades now, Lebanese entrepreneurs have maintained stores where Lebanese and Yucatecans alike can purchase germinated wheat, canned grape leaves, chickpeas, hummus, kibbeh, tahini, baba ghanoush, olives and olive oils, couscous, and other assorted Middle Eastern ingredients and condiments. At department stores, hypermarkets, and supermarkets, as well as in several specialized stores scattered over most of Mérida, Yucatecans can also purchase kitchenware of varying quality. One can find, for example, national and imported (often Chinese) pewter and aluminum pots and pans, Tefloncovered pans and pots, and inexpensive wooden kitchen utensils. There are also some cheap brands of cast-iron pots, fondue sets, and woks. However, in large hypermarkets and department stores, one finds German, Italian, Brazilian, US, Spanish, and (every so often) French cookware made of steel; Italian, French, German, and US kitchen utensils, such as hardwood spoons and ladles; and electric kitchen appliances imported from Italy (e.g., espresso machines), the US, and Germany (such as wine coolers, bar fridges, electric crock pots, rice steamers, deep fryers, woks, knives, fondue sets, can openers, mixers, kitchen robots, grinders, blenders, bread makers, ice cream makers, convection ovens, steel stoves, microwave ovens, grills, and many other appliances). Access to this varied technology enables Yucatecans to establish and to generate new cooking styles and to experiment by cooking foods from cultures that differ from the local one. In this diversified culinary context, Yucatecans from all walks of life can enter and navigate the foodscape from different points, following the route of their choice. Corner stores (including US, Mexican, and regional franchises of self-service stores), supermarkets, department stores, and delis of different sorts provide the inhabitants of the city with an availability of ingredients—ranging from the ‘authentically’ local to the more cosmopolitan and fashionable foodstuffs—to purchase and cook at home. In chapter 3, I describe what Yucatecans eat at home; in the following sections of this chapter, I describe the possibilities that inhabitants of Mérida face when they decide to go out to have their meals.

Photograph courtesy of G. Vargas Cetina, 2010.

Figure 2.1. Supermarket in Mérida

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Eating Out: Multiplicities and Fragmentation of the Urban Foodscape Meridans, like consumers in any other city of the world, navigate the foodscape for different reasons. For a long time, the academic literature focused on the family-maintenance and community-building effects of shared meals (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998; Douglas 1984; Falk 1994; Fischler [1990] 1995). However, due to modernization, industrialization, and the expansion of the urban space—and also taking into account the transformation of work schedules, the growing number of dual- or multiple-income families, and escalating vehicular traffic in the city—it has become increasingly difficult to consume every meal at home. Responding to workers’ and employees’ need for meals, there followed an expansion of catering services, both within the working space and around it (Beardsworth and Keil 1997; Bell and Valentine 1997). Simultaneously with the growth of the restaurant industry, there emerged an increasing internal differentiation within the sector that allowed for the performance of distinction practices. Analyses of the development of the food industry in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom concur in the importance of the part played by French chefs, who traveled abroad and instituted culinary standards and rules, new criteria of sophistication, and prices that were affordable mostly to well-off global consumers (Ferguson 2004; Goody 1982; Kamp 2006; Trubek 2000). Unfortunately, in Latin America, there is a lack of comparable studies. However, indirectly, through the high status granted to French culture in different Latin American societies, we can conclude that French cuisine and French culinary values were accorded normative value by the members of national and regional elites (Needell 1987; Pairé 1999). For consumers located at the other end of the social spectrum, fast-food venues proliferated, promoting what they portrayed as advantages over home-cooked meals: low price, convenience (for consuming meals on the go), and consistency in preparation and flavor. Additionally, promoters of fast food pointed out that it facilitated women’s domestic chores, already complicated by the growing participation of women in the workforce. Fast-food entrepreneurs targeted the increasing disposable income of adolescents, who, due to their parents’ and schools’ schedules, were now eating out more often. Stressing the diversity of available venues, they also took advantage of the internal differentiation of the workforce, allowing for distinction practices among fast-food consumers (D. M. Brown 1990; Fantasia 1995; Hurley 2001; Lloyd 1981). Outside the United States, fast food has become associated with an informal, democratic, and casual lifestyle, appealing mostly to young people (Fantasia 1995; Stephenson 1989), and has displaced other local foods that fulfilled a former and analogous function to that served by present-day transnational

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restaurants. All of these changes have been taken as diagnostic of the progressive fragmentation of the food market and of consumers into different strata (Fantasia 1995; Noguchi 1994; Pilcher 2006; Stephenson 1989). Meridans with high incomes and a university education take pride in being food connoisseurs, in particular of regional Yucatecan food. The foodscape available for their enjoyment expands and contracts at different economic moments and times of the year. Often, they give paramount importance to the quality of the food rather than the beauty of the restaurant.21 For example, it is not rare to find upper-class Meridans in one of the numerous restaurantbars (cantinas), drinking beers and eating botanas that have acquired a good reputation all over the city. Also, some diners that have developed a longearned standing for the quality of their tamales, panuchos, or salbutes receive patrons every evening, from all social and economic groups, who sit on plastic chairs around tin tables to consume the legendary foods of the locale. In other instances, friends get together on a Saturday or Sunday and travel 160 kilometers to Valladolid to eat at the local Cenote Zaci restaurant or to have tacos or sandwiches of cochinita pibil or lomitos at the market. On other occasions, they may drive 114 kilometers to Maní to eat the highly reputed poc-chuc (although some would rather travel 87 kilometers to Ticul to get poc-chuc at the restaurant whose owners claim to have invented the dish). During the warmer months of the year, and during vacation periods, Meridans flock to the northern ports of Progreso, Chelem, Chixchulub, Chuburná, Celestún, and Telchac to have seafood cocktails, fried fish, and beer by the sea. Although Mérida is a large city (covering 180 square kilometers), Meridans are willing to visit restaurants at the farther end of the city, provided that the reputation of their cooks is excellent. When Príncipe Tutul-Xiu, the most famous restaurant in Maní, opened a branch in the southern part of Mérida, upper- and middleclass Meridans, usually afraid of the inhabitants of the urban south, found in the food a good reason to venture there. Mérida has experienced changes similar to those found in other expanding urban centers in the world. Fernández Repetto and Negroe Sierra (2003) and Fuentes Gómez (2005) have pointed out that the colonial center of the city was, for a long time, the site of residence for the wealthier segments of society. Starting in the early twentieth century, these groups gradually began to migrate toward the northern part of the city. First, they moved to the Paseo Montejo and later to new neighborhoods, such as Itzimná, Colonia Mexico, the Club Campestre (Country Club), and the Golf Club La Ceiba, a gated community in the north of the city. The more recent (post-1950s) modern architecture, reused by restaurants, is characterized by a lack of remarkable features to attract customers, while the more appealing colonial architecture of downtown Mérida has been left to tourists and to middle- and lower-class Meridans to explore and enjoy.22 Restaurateurs have profited from

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this appreciation for colonial buildings, as tourists choose their restaurants by taking into account the beauty of the place. In contrast, local patrons are often more concerned with the quality of the food and the availability of air conditioning than with the view from the restaurant’s windows, especially since the outdoor temperature is likely to reach 35 to 43 degrees Celsius (95 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit) during the spring and summer. The current distribution of restaurants in Mérida has pushed most diners to the outskirts of the city. Anyone seeking a place to eat out in downtown Mérida can find cafeterias, bistro-type establishments, Mexican restaurants, two Spanish and a few Italian restaurants, and a vegetarian restaurant, as well as a few diners. The northern region of the city features Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Argentinean, Brazilian, Colombian, Cuban, Mexican, northern Mexican, French, German, Irish, Italian, Spanish, Mediterranean, and Lebanese restaurants. Fast-food franchises dot the northern and downtown sections of Mérida but have not ventured into the south. Meridans and outsiders find restaurants of regional food in almost all areas of the city. Those with the greatest reputations are currently Los Almendros (downtown); Príncipe Tutul-Xiu (in the south); Los Almendros,23 La Tradición, and Cantamayec (in the north); and El Truk (in the east). Just outside the city, some entrepreneurs have bought and restored several former haciendas, turning them into high-end hotel-restaurants. X’kanatun, Temozón, and Teya are the three restaurants that dominate this particular culinary scene.24 The urban foodscape has seen many restaurants come and go. Two Thai restaurants failed to gain the favor of Meridans. Among the many who were unfamiliar with Thai food, the main complaint was not its spiciness but rather the high prices that were charged. A Brazilian meat restaurant opened in 2000, featuring an all-you-can-eat meal at a fixed rate—a promotion that did not take into account the Yucatecans’ penchant for meat. Soon after, the restaurant changed its policy to a buffet service, whereby the customer could pack onto his or her plate as much as desired but then had to weigh the food on a scale and pay accordingly. A short time later, it closed down. There have been entrepreneurs from central Mexico who opened restaurants to introduce food from Mexico City and the ‘concept’ of serving scant finger food as appetizers to accompany the beer that was consumed. Unable to compete with the generous amounts of botana served in regional restaurant-bars, they did not last very long.25 A couple of German restaurants had to close after locals found their food to be both lacking in diversity and difficult to digest. Finally, Japanese restaurants have had a wavering acceptance. Despite Yucatecans’ liking for ceviche (seafood and fish marinated in lime juice), for a long time they could not come to grips with raw fish and Japanese-style seafood. They also found no justification for the handsome prices charged when the first Japanese restaurants were opened. Today, three Japanese

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restaurants compete with small fast-food sushi bars (mostly franchises of national restaurant chains). In the following sections, I describe some of the strategies used by Meridans in their navigation of the heterogeneous urban foodscape to satisfy their need for meals throughout the day. Individuals from different social groups traverse the foodscape along different trajectories. For Meridans, it is now evident that the contemporary foodscape has expanded and is becoming increasingly fragmented. These developments have changed not only the experience of food and of eating out, but also the meaning of regional Yucatecan food and its place within the global market of ethnic and national foods.

Eating Out for Breakfast An elderly acquaintance, realizing that she had not treated friends and relatives to a meal out for some time, invited about 20 people to have breakfast at a Chinese restaurant one Sunday morning. The establishment in question has changed ownership and menus a couple of times during the first few years of this century, and the new managers had decided to introduce breakfast service. Hoping that, finally, I was going to find dim sum in Mérida, I accepted the invitation. To my surprise, the menu listed completely conventional, non-Chinese fare: scrambled and fried eggs, different types of omelette, ham, bacon, sausages, fruit juices, fruit salad, and coffee. There were absolutely no Chinese dishes listed as breakfast alternatives. Nonetheless, the restaurant’s three large rooms were crowded (with about 300 sitting customers). Our host explained to me that she had selected the place because the food is good and the prices are low. Although some guests were mildly upset at the waiters’ lack of concern and their tardiness in bringing coffee and drinks, they were inclined to overlook the inefficiency in the service, as they were all happy to be together, appreciative of the party’s host, and, in the end, content with the menu of habitual meals that they found. On another occasion, a national state agency summoned professors and researchers to a breakfast buffet at the restaurant of a hotel close to downtown Mérida for a formal administrative meeting of academics. We arrived at the established time. The waiters, formally dressed, served us coffee and juice at the table and invited us to look at their buffet service. At one end of the restaurant, the waiters had placed a line of tables with white tablecloths and hot trays containing an array of Yucatecan dishes. We found cochinita pibil and pollo (chicken) pibil on banana leaves, turkey in black stuffing, escabeche de pavo Valladolid-style, lomitos de Valladolid, steamed tamales, refried black beans, x’ni pek (a sauce of minced habanero pepper, cilantro, onion and Seville orange juice), and scrambled eggs. One could ask the cooks standing at stoves to prepare eggs motuleños or an omelette with chaya leaves and

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Edam cheese, or other conventional dishes (fruit salad or scrambled, fried, or boiled eggs), and waiters delivered the orders to the table. There were also different types of sweet bread available, as well as French-style baguettes to accompany the food. Several academics had been brought from other Mexican states, and they, like the Yucatecans, piled up an assortment of different foods on their plates. We were all amazed at the richness and variety of the food made available to guests. At the restaurant, besides our party, there were many tourists, both national and foreign, and there were also Yucatecans, since many look forward to this weekly buffet. In Mérida, it is common for people from all social groups to go out for breakfast (see table 2.1). This is as good a time as any to enjoy food cooked outside the home and the sociability that commensality affords. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, parents and children have a diverse breakfast schedule: often, the children eat early before going to school, giving the parents (together or separately) the freedom to share time with friends who would find it difficult to get together later in the day. To begin with, there are transient food stalls located at different corners of the city where specialists sell food that, nowadays, is cumbersome to cook at home. Hence, one common reason why a Meridan may decide to go out for breakfast is the craving for a complex or elaborate dish. Throughout most of the week, men and women eat their breakfast at home or at an established food stand or restaurant. On Saturdays and/or Sundays, they take the liberty to follow their whim and seek street food from itinerant vendors. Some of the foods sought at street stands are considered too time-consuming for home preparation. Also, some domestic cooks find that, despite their fondness for a dish, certain

Table 2.1. The urban foodscape—eating out for breakfast Type of Restaurant

Specialization

Venues

Yucatecan Yucatecan

Itinerant vendors Street food stands Markets Restaurants

Mexican

Itinerant vendors Street food stands Restaurants

Central Mexican, Oaxacan, Hidalgo state, Michoacán, Chiapas

International Chinese, Cuban, international

Restaurants Cafés

Naturist Vegetarian, naturist

Restaurants Cafés

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foods (e.g., tripe and squid), when being cooked, release strong, unpleasant odors that they prefer to avoid. Added to the convenience of street food is its cherished taste, resulting from the oils used in frying or the quality of the ingredients or the cooking procedure. Cochinita pibil, baked piglet, some types of tamales, pig’s feet, and tripe (along with many other dishes) remain breakfast favorites of Meridans despite years of repeated injunctions issued by the medical establishment. As a concession to the health rhetoric of the medical status quo, Meridans have lessened their consumption of these dishes, or now choose special ‘light’ versions, but seem far from abandoning them. All over the city, in poor and wealthy neighborhoods, some well-reputed street vendors have become established fixtures at particular corners or on the sidewalks of one or another avenue, where customers know that they will invariably find them (see fig. 2.2).26 Every day they set up their tin carts, trays, tin tables, and plastic chairs to provide gastronomic pleasure to Yucatecans and non-Yucatecans living in the city. A casual observer might assume that street vendors in wealthy neighborhoods cater to the alimentary needs and cravings of laborers and domestic workers employed by wealthy families. However, in my visit to some of these stands in the north, east, and west of the city, I have found medical doctors, lawyers, teachers, and accountants sitting at these vendors’ tables, consuming their tacos or tortas, or standing in long lines to purchase portions of meat by weight, sandwiches, or tacos to take back home or to work.27 Responsive to their customers’ health concerns, vendors offer a choice of ‘regular’ and ‘special’ tacos or tortas. Special tortas of lechón al horno, for example, are made without shreds of fat or fatty pieces of meat, and they do not include pieces of offal. In order to ensure cleanliness, one aid slices the bread, while another places the meat, pickled red onions, and cilantro into the torta and, before closing it, adds a small piece of crackling (crispy pork skin) on top of the meat. Regular tortas are prepared first by lightly soaking the bread in the fat and then stuffing it with an assortment of meat, offal (especially entrails), and fat. I have witnessed many health-conscious consumers who, arriving in their sportswear and sweating from running, order one or two special tortas and a diet cola, a practice that Pilcher (2006) refers to as ‘slumming’. In general, however, in Yucatán the street vendors’ stalls are seen not as ‘slum’ stands but rather as a convenience where one can purchase and consume foods prepared by specialists in different types of comestibles. These establishments are often visited regularly on a weekly (or sometimes daily) basis by individuals and families. Meridans seldom attach a negative association to eating at food stands since these meals are difficult to prepare at home. They also find that restaurants are now offering revised versions of these dishes that lack the desirable flavor, texture, and aroma, turning street food stands into the only place where Meridans can enjoy a cochinita pibil or a lechón al horno that is acceptable to their own culinary standards.

Photograph by the author, 2006.

Figure 2.2. Street vendor of cochinita pibil and baked piglet, Mérida

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The markets of the city are another early morning location where the yearning for local foods can be satisfied. These markets are very clean and regulated by the state’s Health Secretariat. At different markets one can find a more extensive diversity of choice. In addition to cochinita pibil and baked piglet, one can find an assortment of panuchos, salbutes, tamales, and tortas of breaded steaks, grilled meats, turkey with black stuffing, breaded pig’s feet, scrambled eggs with longaniza, and turkey in escabeche. Also, in markets it is possible to find shrimp, squid, calamari, fish tacos, fried fish, seafood cocktails, and fish or shrimp ceviche. The flavor is important when choosing a market to visit. Some cooks marinate the pork for cochinita pibil or lechón al horno in white vinegar instead of Seville oranges, as is usually done, because vinegar is cheaper. Some customers do not mind the modification and may even prefer it. For example, I once came across friends, a married couple, sitting at a table in the market of Colonia Alemán, dining on tortas of cochinita. Our conversation turned to the quality of the food. The husband had been born and raised in Mérida, and he told me that he liked the cochinita pibil from that vendor. His wife remarked that, in Mérida, she prefers baked piglet, which was unfortunately unavailable at that market. A native of a small town in the state of Quintana Roo, she said that she would rather wait until she visits relatives in Valladolid to eat cochinita, adding that she finds all cochinita in Mérida to be substandard in comparison to the way it is cooked elsewhere in the state.28 In some markets, panuchos are fried in pork lard (the traditional version), in others in regular vegetable oil, and in yet others in the cheapest oil available. In markets one can also find tortas and tamales. At the market in Colonia Alemán, one of Mérida’s northeastern districts, the owner of one food stand told me that his business opens early in the morning (at 5:00 am) and stays open until the early afternoon, at which point in time they have usually run out of food. Their customers are mostly laborers and employees (there are several banks and government offices nearby), but one can also find there clients from different liberal professions, eating their meals and drinking cola or a fruit drink, while listening to the popular tunes of a charanga (musical group) playing on the market’s sidewalk. Another reason I was given for eating breakfast out is to catch up on last week’s news with one’s friends. Some women have established routine meetings with friends to have breakfast, renew their ties, and hear the latest news about each other’s family, place of residence, or workplace.29 For example, two groups—one composed of female lawyers and one of women from Valladolid who are now Mérida residents—assemble at an established time on a set day of every week in order to share each other’s work-related or family news. Their choice of venue is often wide. For those concerned with their weight, they meet at one of the several ‘naturist’ restaurants. There they feel guilt-free, consuming fruit salads, cereal, and yogurt, or they might order sandwiches made with mayonnaise, cheese, and meat, along with fruit drinks blended with milk and

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sugar or yogurt. Chaya leaves or cactuses blended with another fruit are also popular, due to their presumed health benefits, as promoted by the media. Parties may choose to meet at the restaurant of a hotel for breakfast, and some hotels in downtown Mérida now offer group rates. Once, a member of a voluntary civic association invited us to accompany her to one such breakfast. Her group has sporadic meetings, either to award public recognition to the work or activities conducted by one or several of their members or to celebrate their anniversary. The restaurant was located in a small hotel near the main plaza, and the party, consisting of some 30 members and their relatives and friends, nearly filled the locale. The waiters served coffee and fruit juice, and there was a fixed breakfast menu for all: fruit salad, eggs, and bread. On another occasion, we were invited to the annual meeting of a cultural association. People born in Valladolid, but residing in Mérida, got together to celebrate their club’s anniversary and to render homage to distinguished people from Valladolid who have contributed to the cultural life of their hometown or who have advanced it regionally, nationally, or internationally. The meeting was held at a hotel, near the southern end of the Paseo Montejo, where twice a week a breakfast buffet of Yucatecan food is offered. Despite our hope to eat from that buffet, when we arrived, we were led into a separate, private room that the restaurant books for group breakfasts. Sitting in the company of the club’s members and their relatives and acquaintances, we were served coffee, fruit juice, and fried chicken (comparable to Kentucky Fried Chicken), which the party ate with great joy. Smaller groups of friends, however, may choose to get together for breakfast to try the food at some of the high-end restaurants located in the hotels at the Paseo Montejo. As times goes by, some restaurants that have enjoyed the ephemeral patronage of Meridans lose favor to other restaurants, which become the new meeting places. Nonetheless, these restaurants continue hosting group meetings. Our friends choose different restaurants, sometimes because they like the pastry at a certain establishment, sometimes because they have a craving for Mexican-style breakfasts, such as chilaquiles, enchiladas, molletes (grilled bread with a spread of refried beans and melted cheese), Mexican-style eggs, or various sandwiches. Hotel restaurants and Mexican restaurants (located in or near large hotels) are also the choice of groups of professionals: lawyers, medical doctors, accountants, and others choose to meet at these locations to talk about business and have breakfast. It may be difficult to find a suitable venue for those who wish to have a Yucatecan breakfast at a hotel. Locally, certain dishes, including eggs motuleños, some types of tamales, cochinita pibil, and even spicy turkey in black stuffing, are considered proper breakfast dishes. However, some of the most renowned restaurants of Yucatecan food do not begin serving breakfast until 11:00 am. In 2007, a national chain of restaurants decided to promote regional foods,

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showcasing each month the food of a different state. May was dedicated to the state of Michoacán, while June was dedicated to Yucatán. On this occasion, the restaurant made available for breakfast three ‘Yucatecan’ dishes: eggs Motul-style, eggs Uxmal-style (which I had never heard of, nor could find in any Yucatecan cookbook), and ropa vieja (old rags), that is, eggs scrambled with shredded meat, onions, tomatoes, and sweet chili pepper. Finally, sometimes groups of friends, colleagues, or co-workers choose one of several coffee houses to meet in order to have breakfast and to catch up with news, politics, and work, or simply to gossip. Although these places typically offer only standard breakfast fare (fried, scrambled, and boiled eggs, omelettes, and sandwiches), they are selected for the quality of their coffee, their location, and their ambience. Some are located in downtown Mérida and others along the Paseo Montejo. Some cafés, situated near municipal markets in the downtown area, are frequented by patrons of Lebanese origin and other Meridans who enjoy a strong cup of coffee and labne for breakfast. Two bookstores have their own coffee houses, one each in downtown Mérida and along the Paseo Montejo. Although Meridans often take advantage of breakfast as an occasion to arrange meetings, many choose almuerzo as the opportunity to go out to eat with relatives, colleagues, and friends.

Eating Out for Almuerzo In Yucatán, it is uncommon to have lunch (almuerzo) at noontime. After a Meridan has breakfast, she will not begin her almuerzo, a full meal, until sometime between 2:00 pm and 4:00 pm.30 In Mérida, in comparison to breakfast, the options for almuerzo are wider (see table 2.2). In effect, the extensiveness of the foodscape allows many Meridans to eat their almuerzo at home without having to cook it. There is, in the city, a widespread availability of what is locally called cocinas económicas (economic kitchens). These are not food relief operations; rather, they are small, family take-out businesses whereby women (and sometimes men) cook, on a daily basis, a restricted and established number of dishes for their customers. Their menus change every day of the week, but repeat on a weekly basis, so that they replicate the Meridan cycle of foods, adding one or two alternatives for those who want to eat something different (see chap. 3). Commonly, economic kitchens, unlike many take-out restaurants in the United States, do not have room to accommodate sit-down patrons. Rather, they take orders early in the morning when their customers pass by on their way to work, and, by the time of almuerzo, the food is ready to be served when their patrons return, bringing plastic containers or pots to pick up the rations that they had ordered. The food is reputedly of ‘homemade quality’ and satisfies the gastronomic longings of hundreds of Mérida families.31 In addition, the food is cheaper than at

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Table 2.2. The urban foodscape—eating out for almuerzo Type of Restaurant

Specialization

Venues

Yucatecan Yucatecan

Food stands Markets Bars and cantinas Economic kitchens Restaurants

Mexican

Central Mexican, Oaxacan, Hidalgo, Nuevo León, Jalisco, Michoacán, Chiapas

Food stands Economic kitchens Restaurants

International

Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Italian, Spanish, German, French, Lebanese, Argentinean, Cuban

Restaurants Fast-food establishments Shopping mall food fairs

Naturist Vegetarian, naturist

Restaurants Cafés

Fish and seafood Yucatecan, Mexican, international

Food stands Markets Restaurants

restaurants, and, as a friend told me, it has the advantage of being less costly than if it were prepared at home, while eliminating the toil of cooking.32 On hot days, every so often, we get calls from friends who ask us to meet at a restaurant-bar for beer and botanas. We usually choose to meet in the locale’s air-conditioned room, away from the noise of live bands and performers, although we are often surrounded by television sets showing sports events. In a smoky environment, we order our beer and are served abundant botanas. In contrast with other North American societies, such as the United States and Canada, in Yucatán, on account of the heat, it is still socially and morally acceptable to consume beer with almuerzo. One or two beers—even three—constitute an acceptable number of drinks before resuming work in the afternoon.33 As we have discussed (Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2005a), hard liquor is typically not drunk at this time of day; it is considered better left for the evening hours. Yucatecans see restaurant-bars as an acceptable setting to have an almuerzo after noontime. There is a wide variety of restaurant-bars, ranging from very cheap to fairly expensive. Hence, although they promote sociability, they stratify customers, since high prices prevent low-income patrons from frequenting the expensive restaurant-bars in the north of the city. Some of these establishments have been turned into urban institutions and constitute a point of reference, both geographically and socially. They often

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follow a system that reflects a direct relationship between the number of beers consumed and the quality of the botana served. For example, with the first round of beers, patrons receive small plates of offal, pig’s ears in escabeche, fish ceviche, fried kibbeh, hummus, baba ghanoush, dzotobichay (a tamale of chaya leaves and ground squash seeds), and pool kan (Maya for ‘snake’s head’, i.e., fried cornbread that is shaped like a snake’s head and stuffed with a paste of refried white beans [ibes], cilantro, ground squash seed, and minced habanero pepper). With the second round of beers, clients usually get tacos stuffed with chicken in escabeche or black stuffing, a piece of steamed chicken or pork tamales, papadzules, and cochinita. The list varies from one restaurant-bar to another, with cheaper ones having a smaller selection (and/or serving food of dubious quality). More recently, probably on account of the growing number of urban residents from central Mexico, these establishments began serving flautas (similar to a fried burrito) and enchiladas covered with sour cream and fresh or melted cheese (ingredients classified by popular wisdom as potential hazards, since in the hot weather of Yucatán they tend to decompose very quickly). In some bars there are now printed notices on the tables in which the management makes explicit how botanas are rotated. Other places have moved to a system of paid botanas whereby patrons can order the botana they prefer, whenever they wish to have it. These changes were introduced, waiters have explained to me, due to outsiders who, unacquainted with the local system of botanas, began demanding a more substantial botana with their first beer, rejecting and disrupting the local etiquette. Restaurant-bars are a mid-day refuge for many urbanites. Unlike elsewhere, in Yucatán children can drink small portions of beer when supervised by their parents. Beer is attributed medicinal properties, and it is also believed that if children are taught to drink it properly, they will not drink excessively as adults. Hence, many restaurant-bars are classified as ‘family bars’ and allow the presence of children accompanied by their parents. Sometimes children are invited ‘to try’ the beer but drink soda with their share of botana. Many of these restaurant-bars have a thatched ceiling that provides a cool environment on hot days. Men and women alike visit them, and it is not uncommon to find tables taken by whole nuclear or extended families, by friends and co-workers, by groups of seniors and retirees, or by women-only parties. For many Yucatecans, these are places of choice to celebrate birthdays, the end of school terms, graduations, or other landmarks. They are also sites where Mérida residents showcase the regional gastronomy to guests from other Mexican states and abroad. Local businesses take their employees to restaurant-bars on special occasions, such as Secretary’s Day, Mother’s Day, or Teacher’s Day, or simply to watch soccer games during national or international sports tournaments. Usually, in restaurant-bars located all over the city, patrons can consume their beers and food in peace as customers at each table

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make an effort to respect the privacy of people at other tables. Restaurantbars in Yucatán are not the rough places depicted in Mexican cowboy movies; rather, they are family-friendly spots that welcome everyone. Another important choice for an almuerzo outside the home involves an array of restaurants specializing in fish and seafood. Yucatecans are accustomed to consuming fish and seafood for breakfast or almuerzo, but not for supper. Correspondingly, most fish and seafood restaurants are open from noon until 4:00 or 5:00 pm, closing before suppertime. Only recently, one of them, which is close to large hotels, chose to remain open until 11:00 pm on some evenings of the week. However, few local clients go there at night. There are, in Mérida, taquerías and cheap diners (cocktelerías and fondas) where patrons can consume ceviche, seafood cocktails, fried fish, fried shrimp, tacos of breaded fish or shrimp (also fried), and fish kibbeh, along with a couple of beers. Many of these locales lack air conditioning and can be fairly hot, resulting in a greater consumption of beer. Alternatively, one may choose somewhat more expensive places with air conditioning, where the quality of food is often similar to that of cheaper restaurants but where one can also find more fancy dishes, such as squid and calamari in their ink, fish filets stuffed with seafood and cheese, grilled fish and shrimp, as well as the peninsular pan de cazón (baby shark cake). The majority of these second-tier restaurants also sport a limited wine list (mostly cheap Mexican wines) and a variety of Mexican beers.34 On Friday (a day of abstinence in the Catholic calendar), a couple of upscale hotels, one in downtown Mérida and another in the Paseo Montejo, offer a fish and seafood buffet. At these hotels, it is common to find a short list of overpriced wines from Chile, Argentina, France, and Italy. They are a place of choice for tourists staying at the hotel, for non-Yucatecan residents who buy a restaurant membership in order to obtain prices that are lower than in other restaurants, and for Yucatecans seeking to take advantage of the cost-value equation in an ‘international’, cosmopolitan ambience. In filling a special niche, these hotels seek to compete against the high-end fish and seafood restaurants in the city. Two of the latter restaurants are located in the northern section of Mérida, both near Paseo Montejo and its extension. One of them, founded in the mid-1980s, specializes in international recipes, although its chef and cooks have developed a number of dishes that use ingredients indigenous to the region. Yucatecan fusion foods are listed, along with dishes inspired by Spanish, French, Moroccan, and Italian cuisines. Customers find a wide choice of imported wines and Mexican beers. The Mexican wines in the menu come from the valleys of Baja California and command a high price. The second restaurant, which opened in 1999, specializes in peninsular recipes. It is the franchise of a restaurant that originally opened in the city of Campeche in 1987. Both venues serve recipes of their own creation, along with other Mexican dishes. The

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franchise is the only restaurant to offer piguas (a type of crayfish) in Mérida, and it popularized coconut-covered shrimp, a dish previously restricted to high-end fusion food establishments. The clientele in this restaurant often belong to the middle and upper classes of society, and it is a habitual meeting place for politicians and other public figures from the state of Yucatán or Mexico. Yucatecans are highly appreciative of fish and seafood. Depending on their cultural capital and disposable income, consumers choose from among seafood eateries to have a good meal in the company of friends, relatives, and co-workers. Although people from all social strata like to consume fried fish, many Meridans often reserve this dish for their visits to the port city of Progreso, located 40 kilometers to the north of the city. Especially during the hot season, Meridans flock to restaurants along the shoreline for their almuerzo before returning to work. The number of Meridans who go to Progreso and its connected beaches is so large35 that one of the Mérida restaurant-bars opened a branch in Progreso, where they provide seafood and fish as their main botana. In addition, many Mérida-based restaurants practically take their entire business there during holidays.36 A long-time choice for Yucatecans is that of Lebanese food. Not only are many Yucatecans descendants of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, but also some of the Lebanese dishes can be found at everyday venues as an integral part of the regional culinary culture. Meridans find kibbeh, baba ghanoush, and hummus in most restaurant-bars as part of their choice of botanas. During their morning break at school, children can find street vendors on the corner, just outside the schoolyard, carrying glass containers filled with fried kibbeh and pool kanes.37 Meridans can also find fried kibbeh at the baseball park and at the beach. Area supermarkets carry several local brands of hummus, baba ghanoush (locally called tjine de garbanzo and tjine de berenjena, respectively), and pita bread that Meridans purchase to consume as dips during their parties at home. There are also take-out establishments that offer baked or fried kibbeh, hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh, and stuffed cabbage leaves. Some Lebanese cafés remain in the downtown area and the barrio of Santiago, where, for several decades, friends and local intellectuals have gathered for hours to consume coffee or beer, finger food, and pastries, while engaging in debates about political and social issues in the best coffee-house tradition (Ellis 2004). Most Meridans look on Lebanese food as a proper meal for almuerzo, as its spiciness and heaviness make it less desirable for supper (although it is not excluded). Hence, many Meridans visit these Lebanese restaurants to enjoy the flavors that they have grown accustomed to over the past several decades. During the 1970s, Meridans witnessed the emergence of pizza parlors and restaurants of Chinese food in the style developed for the taste of US consumers. Chinese and Italian restaurants have progressively expanded their presence in the city, although most of them prioritize food delivery and take-out sales.

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In Mérida, Chinese restaurants continue serving food laced with MSG, starch, and sugar. As more Meridans profit from the availability of flights to visit the US, Canada, and China itself, the upper-middle and upper classes find local Chinese food less satisfactory. Nonetheless, Chinese restaurants are still attracting people with a taste for sweet, spicy, and salty dishes. In fact, every day one can see motorcycles delivering Chinese food at homes, during both almuerzo and suppertime. As Wu (2002) suggests, Chinese migrants have often found in the provision of food a resource to ensure their economic survival. There are many Chinese cooking traditions, and people outside China are not acquainted with the diversity of Chinese food. When we moved back to Mérida, some friends strongly recommended that we try a restaurant located on Paseo Montejo. Each time we went there, the locale was nearly empty. The décor was Chinese, and all the food tasted the same: pork, beef, shrimp, and fish were served bathed either in soy sauce or oyster sauce. Some time later, this restaurant failed. However, two Chinese restaurants launched by Yucatecan restaurateurs since the 1970s still survive. One recently moved into a cheaper location and has expanded its delivery service. A third restaurant is a franchise of a peninsular chain of Chinese food. They all deliver food and continue to cater to customers seeking Chinese food for almuerzo. Recently, some Chinese restaurants have switched to home delivery in the evenings and are not open for supper, closing sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 pm.38 Italian food underwent a different process. Some restaurants began as pizza joints that included, for variety’s sake, some pasta dishes in their menus: linguini and spaghetti with seafood, spaghetti in Bolognese sauce, lasagna (pasta al forno), fettuccini Alfredo, and spaghetti Carbonara. There were no (or very few) delivery services during the 1970s, when it was considered ‘chic’ to be seen at these restaurants eating overcooked pasta, garlic bread, and thick pizzas. New restaurants, where cooks prepared fresh pasta and expanded their menus with meat and fish recipes and Italian desserts, were added to the old ones. Starting in the 1990s, the peninsula of Yucatán became a destination for Italian immigrants, who were attracted by the development of Cancún and the Maya Riviera, and more restaurants followed. Some chose to do business only at night, but others, in the north and east of the city, were (and still are) open for almuerzo and supper. Although the latter originally prepared food according to Italian standards, they gradually had to adjust to the local demand for thick pizzas and plentiful servings, with generous amounts of cheese and garlic. However, their menus remain varied and refined, including Italian aperitifs, desserts, wines, and coffee. Today, Mérida’s downtown is the main center of tourist attraction, and some Italian immigrants have started small restaurants in old colonial buildings. In this part of the city, they are forced to compete against conventional pizza parlors, including some transnational franchises and Mexican versions

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of pizza (topped with chili peppers or Mexican meats and chorizo). Many friends, because of their work, spend considerable portions of the day in downtown Mérida. After visiting these restaurants, they have praised them for the flavors and aesthetics of their dishes. An Italian restaurant that opened in the eastern part of Mérida warned customers that their food was ‘authentic’; hence, their pizzas were thin, and their use of cheese scant. At night, it is common to see Italian venues in all parts of the city crowded with tourists and Meridans alike. Although the taste for both Chinese and Italian foods is generalized, I have found that it is mostly middle- and lower-income groups that prefer Chinese restaurants, while Italian restaurants are more fashionable among high-income groups in Mérida. When Meridans are looking for a restaurant in which to sit and eat their favorite cuts of meat for almuerzo, they have several options within the city. One may choose to go to a ‘Mexican’ restaurant. These restaurants, which began to appear during the 1970s and specialize in tacos, cowboy beans, pozole, chorizo, melted cheese, and quesadillas, have spread throughout the city. Most Mérida neighborhoods, from downtown to the north, have a Mexican restaurant, or at least there is one nearby. Some are air-conditioned. Most have expanded their menus to include cuts of pork and beef, as well as chicken and beef fajitas. Unlike most restaurant-bars serving Yucatecan food, which provide light snacks gratis before the meal, Mexican restaurants charge for all their appetizers. These often include guacamole, quesadillas, stir-fried mushrooms with chili pepper and cheese, and grilled onions. They are sought out more for their tacos than their cuts and ribs. Moving up the price ladder, one finds a northern Mexican restaurant located in the western part of the city that opened during the first half of the 1970s and has remained open ever since. Over time, its patrons became familiar with goat meat (cabrito), thick cuts of beef and pork, and the standard fare of arracheras (steak flanks), cheese dishes, beans, and fajitas. Another Mexican restaurant opened in the 1980s in Itzimná, a barrio in the northeast part of the city. Air-conditioned and elegantly furnished, it served meats, baked potatoes, beans, cheeses, soups, and some central Mexican desserts. Entrepreneurs (both men and women) often saw this restaurant as a place to enjoy formal meals after or while conducting business. It closed down in 2008. Since the 1990s, Argentinean restaurants have expanded the choice of meat cuts for almuerzo, with meat imported from Argentina or the north of Mexico.

Eating Out for Supper It is Monday night. After spending the weekend with family members and being involved in domestic activities, a group of friends agree that it is worth beginning the workweek by visiting a restaurant in Paseo Montejo, where

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high-end restaurants are lined along an avenue several kilometers long. Like every Monday, there is a wide range of places to choose from. Will it be La Fattoria,39 the Italian restaurant located near the lobby of a large transnational hotel chain? Or the bar La Próxima, which is across the street at another high-priced hotel? Deliberations turn to whether the party is going for drinks and snacks or whether someone in the group feels like having a ‘real’ dinner. A female friend suggests that they all go to Trastevere, an Italian-inspired restaurant located on the boulevard’s extension. She reminds the group that Trastevere’s ‘happy hour’ runs from 7:00 to 9:00 pm and urges that a decision be made soon. Another friend suggests that the group could try out a new Spanish restaurant that just opened in the northern neighborhood of Itzimná. One of the friends proposes another new restaurant that she heard described as a Mediterranean-style place (run by the same restaurateurs of Trastevere), where the food is reputedly good. Yet another member of the group says that she is tired of Italian food and suggests that it would be better go to a certain restaurant with a wider selection of Mediterranean cuisines that is located near the church of Itzimná, but someone else remarks that although she was there once for lunch and not at night, she was not favorably impressed by the food. After a short deliberation, they settle on the new Mediterranean restaurant by the extension of the Paseo Montejo. Upon their arrival, they find a spacious interior with two terraced levels, a bar, a garden, dimmed lights, soft music, and well-dressed waiters. The prices are on the high end. Some in the group order margarita and tequila sunrise cocktails, others beer, and others wine by the glass. Examining the menu, they find a number of Argentinean and Mediterranean fusion dishes, and some choose to have dinner. One of the group orders a pasta dish, another Argentinean empanadas, someone else grilled chicken, and yet another a grilled steak. The others in the party select assorted tapas to consume along with their drinks. Friday has arrived. A younger person, from a different group, is celebrating her birthday. Her party is composed of a large number of friends and relatives, mostly between the ages of 30 and 40. In Yucatán, for a long time, it was a common practice to host friends at home on one’s birthday. However, since the 1970s, cooking at home for a party has become less common, while eating out has become a widespread and acceptable practice. Hence, our friend has invited her party to a restaurant. Since it is customary for the host to pay, she is expected to choose the venue as well.40 Trying to make up her mind on the spot, our friend ponders her choice, considering franchises of Irish-American, US, and Tex-Mex restaurants. In the end, she chooses the franchise of a US restaurant located on the extension of Paseo Montejo. When we arrive, I find that most of the patrons are fairly young (in their late teens or early twenties), that the music is loud, and that a dense layer of cigarette smoke hangs in the air.41 However, our host and those in her party

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enjoy the ambience. We sit around the assigned table and order hamburgers, flank steaks, guacamole, nachos, and beer. The waiters, informally dressed, are very slow in delivering the orders. When they eventually bring the food, they place it anywhere on the table, expecting each customer to grab the dish that he or she had ordered. The prices are fairly cheap, and the young people who fill the place seem to know each other, moving continually from one table to another within the premises. There is loud pop music, and a television set on a wall is tuned to a soccer match. At our table, we are all forced to raise our voices in an effort to engage in some form of conversation. Customers stay at their tables for a long time without being harassed by waiters, who seem unconcerned about vacating tables to replace one group of customers with another. I ask our friends why we are in this place, where we cannot talk to each other, and someone replies that the food is good and the locale provides a festive ambience for parties. At the end of the meal, the bill is shared equally by all of the guests, including the ‘host’. Going out for supper often transposes to restaurants the everyday habits of Meridans’ consumption of their evening meal. As I discuss in the following chapter, most Yucatecans in general, and Meridans in particular, make of supper the lightest meal of the day. At home, Meridans often have only a glass of milk or cup of cocoa, along with a piece of sweet bread. Sometimes, when they crave something different, they go to food stands in markets and parks, or to vendors located along certain avenues, to buy local tamales, panuchos, or salbutes to take home. I have been invited to some birthday parties and to small gatherings at which the hosts served food that they had purchased at their favorite evening food stands. On other occasions, families may choose to go to one of the old, established Yucatecan diners (loncherías), which often are not licensed to sell alcohol, located in the garage or the garden of a house. Sitting on plastic chairs at tin tables, parents and children consume tamales, turkey and pasta soups, panuchos, and salbutes accompanied by cola drinks, horchata, tamarind, or hibiscus drinks (refresco de jamaica). As immigration from other Mexican regions has increased, the variety of foods has increased for supper as well (see table 2.3). Tacos al pastor, a shawarma-like dish imported from northern Mexico, has, for several decades, been so popular in Yucatán that it is now seen as a Yucatecan specialty. There are currently some neighborhoods in the north, west, and east of the city where establishments specialize in Mexican-style tamales, as well as sopes, huaraches, and sandwiches. Some of these diners sell Mexican- or Hidalgo-style barbecues, pozole, and goat or lamb broth (caldos). Economic kitchens may also sell supper dishes for customers to pick up on their way home, and some of them now offer home delivery.42 In some neighborhoods, Yucatecan food stands are being displaced by those offering Mexican food. In other instances, these foods co-exist, and some vendors offer sopes along with panuchos and salbutes.

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Table 2.3. The urban foodscape—eating out for supper Type of Restaurant Specialization

Venues

Yucatecan Yucatecan

Itinerant vendors Food stands Markets Restaurants

Mexican Central Mexican, Oaxacan, Nuevo León, Michoacán, Hidalgo, Jalisco

Itinerant vendors Food stands Restaurants

International

Restaurants Fast-food establishments Shopping mall food fairs Cafés

Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Cuban, Argentinean, Colombian, French, US, German, Italian, Spanish, Lebanese

Naturist Vegetarian, naturist

Restaurants Cafés

In their search for light foods, Meridans in general, but young people in particular, have a range of informal restaurants to visit. They may go to casual venues where patrons can consume different types of tacos, quesadillas, hamburgers, pizzas, Italian sandwiches (panini), and many other sandwich variations. Due to the peninsula’s proximity to Cuba, some of these small restaurants offer what they call Cuban sandwiches (buns stuffed with roasted pork, ham, shredded chicken, black beans, cheddar cheese, and pickled jalapeño pepper). Some taquerías sell Arab tacos (tortillas stuffed with grilled meat and garnished with garlic cream), besides the usual fare of grilled pork and beef tacos. There are, in addition, several Yucatecan establishments that serve local versions of hamburgers, as well as a large number of transnational franchises to choose from, where (mostly) young people can find light Chinese, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Tex-Mex, and US food. A couple of Mexican franchises supply their own version of Mexican fast food: they are not advertised as such, but the quality of their food is very similar. Despite the fact that fast-food restaurants are, for the most part, spurned by the middle and upper classes in the United States (Fantasia 1995), in Yucatán, as elsewhere, they still enjoy the preference of local young people (cf. Dolphijn 2004; Fantasia 1995; Stephenson 1989; Watson 1997). At these establishments, although the food is served quickly, the customers spend long hours sipping drinks and are not asked to leave before they are ready to do so. Some restaurants open only during the evenings and make a point to advertise their happy hour. Some restrict their offer to national drinks, but others

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extend the reduced prices to imported drinks, with the exception of wine. Most of these restaurants offer Italian, Argentinean, Spanish, and Mediterranean food. They are located along the extension of the Paseo Montejo, or in neighborhoods near it, in the city’s north, and their prices are usually high.43 Most of the restaurants that open for almuerzo remain open at night. Downtown Mérida offers a different ambience at night. The drop in temperature (often to 25–28 degrees Celsius, i.e., 77–82 degrees Fahrenheit) makes it more comfortable for customers to sit outside in patios, balconies, and small restaurants. Meridans and tourists find an active nightlife in restaurants that offer Mexican, Yucatecan, Italian, Lebanese, and international food. On Friday and Saturday nights and all day on Sunday, the streets of downtown Mérida are closed to traffic. Restaurateurs place their tables on the streets, bands set up small stages on which to play live music, and artisans sell their crafts. Tourists and local people mix together, sometimes vying for tables at the improvised patios in the street. A growing number of Italian immigrants have opened restaurants that do business only at night and cater mainly to Italians and other tourists, as well as some local people.44 Also, vegetarians can find one of their very few havens in downtown Mérida, and tourists have access to the main businesses specializing in popular brands of tequila, a type of alcohol that, as Vargas Cetina and I have already discussed (see Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2005a), Yucatecans usually do not prefer. In fact, it is tourists who constitute the main demand for tequila and tequila-based cocktails, while Yucatecans have a stronger preference for beer, rum, and brandy, the latter two mixed with cola and soda on abundant ice.45 Also, downtown Mérida is the location for a couple of the most prestigious nightclubs where local musicians perform trova music, the regional variety of traditional music cultivated by regional elites and appropriated also by workers and bureaucrats (see Vargas Cetina 2007), while local people and tourists consume drinks and international and Yucatecan food. Even restaurants of Mexican food often offer Yucatecan trio music, either traditional or ‘new’ trova. Restaurants serving Yucatecan food remain open at night and do not change their menu from almuerzo to suppertime. As this chapter illustrates, the urban foodscape of Mérida is a changing and unstable one. Meridans from all social classes often go out to eat breakfast, almuerzo, and supper. Each individual, family, or group of friends or co-workers chooses a venue to share a meal with friends according to their means. The high prices at some eateries and restaurants, however, prevent even professionals—lawyers, doctors, architects, and engineers—from taking a large family out to supper. The more disposable income an individual has, the more likely it is that he or she will be willing to spend it on outings with friends, during which expensive cosmopolitan meals and drinks may be consumed. However, manual laborers, clerks, and white-collar workers tend to

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frequent taquerías, street food stands, and small family-owned eateries selling panuchos, salbutes, and tamales or to purchase hot dogs from street vendors. Mérida’s foodscape encompasses cuisines from the region (Creole and Maya) and those of different Mexican regions, South and North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The food consumed by Yucatecans in general, and Meridans in particular, is far from the homogeneous diet of corn, tomatoes, beans, and chili peppers attributed to indigenous people (see Long-Solís and Vargas 2005). Even the poor and indigenous people in the state aim at introducing some variety into their diet.

Discussion: Foodscapes and Global-Local Mediations In this chapter I have discussed the changes that the urban foodscape of Mérida has undergone since the nineteenth century, the variable constitution of the field, and the heterogeneous strategies for its navigation. Disposable income permitting, the foodscape allows families and groups both to stress the region’s cosmopolitan connections and inclinations and to affirm the importance of local foods in the construction of regional gastronomic culture. People can find cheap versions of Mexican food to supplement their regional diet and, hence, affirm their extra-regional connections. Those with more disposable income can choose from an even larger variety of foods to ground and affirm their sophistication and cosmopolitanism, fostering different levels of gastro-nomadism and food adventurism. Yet it is important to recognize that the cosmopolitan orientation displayed by Yucatecans has different facets. First, for most Yucatecans, introducing variety into their food choices is a means of gaining control over the foreign. Foreign foods, including Mexican ones, are assimilated into their eating out habits and thus become experientially and socially subordinated to their consumption of Yucatecan food. For this reason, foreign foods, despite their evident part in the colonization of taste, are not experienced as a threat to the local gastronomy, and the presence of transnational fast-food franchises is accepted, since these eateries are looked on simply as part of the variety of foods available for fun. However, some Yucatecans have embodied the dominant discourse communicated by national television and the print media and are changing their food habits to imitate the taste of central Mexicans. This may be a strategic performance, whereby some Yucatecans seek to reposition themselves in a society where they are marginal. Identifying with a dominant national culture provides them with the opportunity to discount the preferences of other local groups as parochial and to underscore their own geo-political affiliation with national icons and gastronomy. These people often serve Mexican dishes at their parties and, when they go out to,

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ask for food preparations at Yucatecan restaurants that mimic central Mexican tastes and preferences (e.g., cheese or cochinita on panuchos, both alien to the regional culinary logic). Second, as I explain in the following chapter, the assimilation of foreign foods, ingredients, and techniques into regional culinary preferences and practices is the general condition that has given birth to a hybrid cuisine now referred to as ‘Yucatecan’. This cuisine is one forged by the local appropriation, adoption, and adaptation of the foreign into what is specifically local. Hence, the contact with a growing variety of foreign cuisines allows Yucatecans to experiment and play with their food, creating new dishes that in some cases may remain in the domestic realm but in others may reach the public sphere of consumption. Hence, rather than experiencing these foods as the imposition of foreign standards, Yucatecans see them more as a means to celebrate their own creative invention of something intrinsically regional or local and to highlight the cosmopolitanism of local elites. Yucatecans often consider Yucatecan food as superior to all other cuisines. As I discuss in chapter 5, restaurateurs stress the international appeal of Yucatecan food. However, and despite the widespread presumption of superiority of Yucatecan cuisine, this does not lead to a rejection of the foreign—not even of Mexican food. More typical are sharply worded protests against the imposition of Mexican taste preferences onto Yucatecan food, with some central Mexicans seen as explicitly trying to change local food and foodways. Nonetheless, and despite the affirmation of Yucatecan cuisine, the end result is that the great variety of foods found in the contemporary urban foodscape challenges the normative value of Yucatecan gastronomy. Nowadays, local foods may be considered appropriate for special celebrations (birthdays, weddings in rural areas) or for certain days of the week, when a particular craving for a Yucatecan specialty needs to be satisfied. But other foods—pizza, pasta, Chinese take-out—are now consumed on a regular basis. In fact, many young people do not like Yucatecan dishes any more, and older ones receive (sometimes ill-informed) medical advice to abandon their customary diet, replacing it with more ‘natural’ and healthier meals. Hence, the expansion of the global foodscape into the state of Yucatán promotes the deterritorialization of Yucatecan cuisine. It is in this context that we need to appraise the efforts to reterritorialize Yucatecan gastronomy. To accomplish this, Yucatecan food in restaurants must be presented as pure, authentic, and traditional in order to secure a place of privilege within the regional foodscape and to make inroads into the global foodscape. Thus, the foodscape has the double effect of creating the conditions for both the creation and maintenance of the culinary field and the constitution and institution of the gastronomic field. The contemporary urban foodscape in Mérida is the product of global connections that have been fostered by the flow of international capital, the

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weakening of the nation-state against the power of transnational corporations, and the insertion of local groups into international markets. It is also the product of the transformations of society and culture usually encompassed by concepts such as ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’ that translate into an emphasis on individualism, new forms of sociability, the ambivalence manifested in questioning tradition and its revaluation in a nostalgic quest for authentic forms of the past, and the growing consumerism of individuals who engage in food adventures and forms of gastro-nomadism. Media- and ideoscapes, thus, have played and continue to play an important part in shaping the perception that Yucatecans have of themselves, of their food, and of everything foreign. In sum, the contemporary articulations of the global and the local have spawned a supplementary relationship between the cosmopolitan and the local/vernacular, wherein the first term of the equation is revealed as a local construction, itself the offspring of the global. The urban foodscape constitutes and is constituted as the context that legitimates the supplementary fusion of the apparently contradictory dimensions of cosmopolitanism and localism. It is within this foodscape that Yucatecan cuisine has emerged, first as a culinary and later as a gastronomic tradition. In the following chapters, I will be discussing the constitution and institution of the culinary and gastronomic fields, as well as the processes of bifurcation and mutual reinforcement that exist between them.

3

The Yucatecan Culinary Field and the Naturalization of Taste

In this volume I am using ‘culinary field’ as a concept to describe and analyze an arena where ingredients, recipes, technologies, cooking techniques and procedures, and rules of etiquette are integrated into the cultural logic of everyday food production, circulation, and consumption. This field includes the discourses and textual practices that establish the connection between a style of cooking and eating and the culture that creates it.1 I understand this field as encompassing and ecumenical, open to external influences from the translocal and global foodscape. In Yucatán, it is located in the realm of everyday domestic cooking practices and connects the private and public domains of social interaction.2 Accordingly, it is an arena where cooks play with their food, experiment, improvise, and create new dishes by combining recipes, flavors, and colors; by modifying cooking techniques; and by improvising in the use of cooking technologies. However, for these practices and discourses to be recognized as a manifestation of the regional ethos, they must be widely perceived as possessing a high degree of cultural coherence. Individuals must find them meaningful and isomorphic with the values, worldview, and group perceptions that define this culinary assemblage as Yucatecan. Consequently, those sharing a fondness for this type of cooking— its smells, flavors, colors, and textures—assert that it is a manifestation of the spirit of the ‘people’, their own spirit. Through the food that they prepare, eat, and enjoy, Yucatecans can represent themselves as civilized, cosmopolitan, non-aggressive, hospitable, friendly, warm, loving, caring, and polite, and can affirm their pride in their land, their culture, and their society, with its various forms of local sociability. The food that Yucatecans like is, in their eyes, one that conveys those values: colorful, ordered, with complex aromas, tastes, and textures, reflecting the sophistication and complexity of Yucatecan everyday life. It is a type of food that incorporates other culinary influences into Yucatecan cuisine and thus provides a space for the performance of Yucatecan cosmopolitanism. The food is cooked and served in a way that highlights local good manners and – 114 –

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respects personal choices and tastes. In this sense, the culinary field affirms the co-extension between food and the cultural practices and representations of a society. Yucatecans, therefore, are inclined to draw boundaries around their food, defining what belongs and what does not belong in their cultural and culinary ‘tradition’ as a distinct people. To illustrate: many friends in Mérida have grown fond of Chinese food, so, once, for a party, our hosts decided to cook a Chinese-inspired meal. They did not see a problem in serving their guests plates with bean sprouts, tofu, and soy sauce, while offering minced habanero pepper as a garnish. On that occasion, our host struck some of those present as being ingenious, maybe cosmopolitan, but no one would have suggested that, because of the use of habanero pepper, the recipe could be seen as an addition to the Yucatecan culinary field. To them, it was still a meal belonging in the Chinese field, although adapted to local preferences by the addition of a locally favored chili pepper. In contrast, an acquaintance told me that, once, at a Yucatecan restaurant in Mexico City, she ordered pork and beans (frijol con puerco) and was served grilled pork filet and a bowl of beans. She was both surprised and disappointed, as pork and beans, in Yucatán, is a stew of chunks of pork, beans, onions, and epazote that, when served, is garnished with pickled radishes and cilantro leaves, a sauce of roasted tomatoes, pickled minced red onions, slices of lime, and minced habanero pepper. Not only was the dish missing key ingredients, it was cooked differently from the accepted Yucatecan fashion and, hence, was unrecognizable as such. Whereas, in the former instance, the inclusion of a local chili pepper was not taken to alter the general logic of the recipe, making it Yucatecan—it was accepted as suggestive of Chinese cooking, not as a Chinese recipe—in the latter instance, the change in cooking technique and the choice of ingredients radically altered the recipe, making it, for this Yucatecan, a misrepresentation of her culinary tradition. This does not mean that dishes from the culinary field are fixed and unchanging. Similarly to local disputes over the preparation of ‘authentic’ cod Biscayne-style, for several years I have engaged in endless conversations about the ‘proper’ way of cooking lomitos de Valladolid. Some friends add oregano, some garlic; others fry the tomatoes and meat before stewing them, some roast them; some add a signature, secret ingredient (e.g., a commercial soy-based seasoning sauce), others add another local chili pepper into the tomato sauce (e.g., habanero, but neither xkat ik nor central Mexican chili peppers). There is, however, an important restriction: any Yucatecan can recognize the ingredients that make a dish more or less Yucatecan. Habanero, dry red pepper, oregano, pork, garlic, and tomatoes are all accepted as part of the Yucatecan flavor. Chipotle, guajillo, and other peppers are alien to Yucatecan cooking. Cumin has long been an ingredient in everyday Yucatecan cooking, but never part of lomitos. These and other ingredients can be

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introduced to change domestic food, or they may be added as evidence of a cook’s improvising arts when an ingredient is missing and another must be substituted. Some of these alternative ingredients and flavors are now part of everyday food at home and are tolerated, even celebrated, in the private space. However, they are seen as transgressive deformations of the authentic Yucatecan flavor when found in the public domain of cantinas, restaurants, and fondas, or even when hosting friends at home: on these occasions, foods must be served ‘the way they should be’. In our global society, we all learn to recognize the cultural origin of dishes by their flavors, colors, aromas, and textures. Therefore, when we are served a piquant meal with lemongrass, galangal, coconut milk, and cardamom (among other spices), we can safely guess that it is a Thai or Indonesian dish. If we are served lamb in a thick yellow sauce with turmeric, fenugreek, cloves, asafetida, cinnamon, ginger, and chili peppers, accompanied by basmati rice, we can safely assume that it is an Indian meal. If we face a dish prepared with wheat-based noodles, tomato sauce, meat, garlic, and oregano, sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, we assume that it is Italian. When we are offered rice with garlic, saffron, pimiento, and seafood, we believe it to be a Spanish paella, which, in turn, we can distinguish from a jambalaya (normally served spicy hot). Similarly, in Mérida, when people are invited to share either a Yucatecan or a Mexican meal, they sit at the table with a solidified set of expectations. In this chapter I describe the routines, culinary practices, and forms of social interaction that contribute to the naturalization of taste and, hence, to the constitution, institution, and territorialization of the Yucatecan culinary and gastronomic fields. My argument here is that it is insufficient to inscribe recipes textually or to formalize by fiat a set of prescriptions regarding the etiquette of food consumption. Individuals must collectively develop and institute a set of culinary rules regarding the use of specific ingredients and their possible (and acceptable) combinations, their potential and factual organization into recipes, and, through everyday processes of repetition and standardization, the routinization of their production and consumption, including the rules for eating specific meals. The practices conveyed by the various recipes have been refined into a set of norms that have gradually contributed to the institution of a culinary logic that has been made co-extensive with the territory of Yucatán. These standards have consolidated into a complex culinary aesthetic that naturalizes the arrangements of flavors, aromas, colors, and textures present in regional food. This process of territorialization is of crucial importance, as Yucatecan cooking does not depend exclusively on indigenous products but rather includes a large number of ingredients that are produced elsewhere and have been made available locally as an effect of the historical inscription of the region within the global market. In contrast to other societies that

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root their culinary tradition in the primacy of locally produced indigenous foodstuffs,3 Yucatecans include products and ingredients from elsewhere in the elaboration of meals, combining ingredients from both the global and the local markets. In consequence, Yucatecans find no reason to doubt, for example, that stuffed cheese (queso relleno) is a Yucatecan dish, despite the fact that the ingredients necessary for its preparation include Dutch Edam cheese, ground pork, capers, olives, onions, raisins, almonds, saffron, black pepper, garlic, wheat flour, tomatoes, and green peppers—foodstuffs that, in the majority, originated in the ‘Old World’. The recipes that constitute the (rather closed) Yucatecan gastronomic field bifurcate from the regional culinary field. Hence, in the culinary field, we find a particular constellation of flavors, aromas, colors, and textures that are affirmed as a manifestation of the Yucatecan character (and spirit) and that, therefore, are perceived as being tied to the ‘nature’ of the group. This aesthetic configuration is reflected in the gastronomic field but, simultaneously, it reflects back into the culinary field. This process of naturalization is made possible by the structuration of practices and discourses (overlooking their historically diverse sources) into a seemingly coherent logic to be reproduced and performed on an everyday basis (Ayora-Diaz 2007b). In the process of inventing the regional culinary field, Yucatecans are involved in acts of performance that are meaningful within the cultural logic of the imagined Yucatecan community. Following B. Anderson (1983), it is possible to argue that social and culinary practices are performed in a seemingly homogeneous time that foregrounds the identity of the local group against that of newly arriving settlers—in the case of Yucatán, primarily those from central Mexico. Advocates of regional cuisine have been constrained to carve an autonomous niche in a global foodscape where the representation of ‘Mexican’ food is dominated by that of the central highlands, overshadowing the diverse regional cuisines that are present within the national territory. The challenge to the homogenizing/hegemonic power of Mexican national cuisine is one of the sources of cultural ambivalence. Producers of Yucatecan food must struggle to create a gastronomic tradition that can be perceived, from different standpoints, as being both Mexican and non-Mexican at the same time. Regionally, professional and domestic cooks constantly seek to highlight the cultural specificities of Yucatecan cooking and stress the aspects that constitute their identity, opposing it (implicitly or explicitly) to the homogenizing and hegemonic central Mexican culinary code. To understand how the culinary field is naturalized in Yucatecan everyday practice, we need to take into account the actions and discourses of individuals and groups within the context of the unequal power structure of national-regional relations. Yucatecan society has developed a specific cultural code responding, at least in part, to the complex relationship that local elites have historically

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maintained with central Mexican institutions. Some local groups have aligned themselves with central Mexican political interests and have embodied and accepted the task to promote central Mexican values and viewpoints in an attempt to reposition themselves within the regional structure of power. Alternatively, other Yucatecan groups, who are opposed to these local elites, as well as to central Mexican forces, profess the will and determination to defend the established local social order against disrupting external influences. Therefore, despite all efforts, the imagination/invention of the Mexican nation has been a difficult enterprise that is often at odds with regional interests. At the regional and local levels, ambivalence has become a product of central Mexican attempts to devise a monolithic and homogeneous national consciousness. However, far from reaching the universal acceptance of the values promoted by central Mexican institutions, the Mexican nation continuously reveals its fractures, as when regional elites actively steer social, cultural, and political centrifugal forces.4 The development of both national and regional cuisines has tended, particularly in the state of Yucatán, to mirror the complexities of central-regional struggles. Despite pedagogical efforts on the part of nationalist intellectuals and institutions to construct a lineal historical narrative capable of encompassing and taming regional forces, the local everyday performance of identities takes place in the in-between spaces where hybrid local-regional cultural practices and products have been, and still are, created through ingenious articulations of diverse local and global elements. As Bhabha (1994) suggests, the ambivalent discourse of nationalism contains the seeds of its transformation. As the nationalist model is disseminated, nationalist discourse undergoes important and significant transformations during the heterogeneous processes of appropriation by diverse local, regional, and national elites. Thus, within distinct regions, nationalist discourse provides the logical and philosophical foundations for the affirmation of localized cultural forms and identities, which are lived and defended as alternatives to those promoted by the colonizing nationalist elite, producing the complex forms of dis/semi/nation that I discussed in the introduction. In the invention of national identities, the print media and cultural formations have played an important part in shaping national consciousness. These resources have been adopted by regional and national elites worldwide. If Mexican national cuisine was promoted through newspapers and magazines, publicity campaigns, and cooking classes at schools in the different Mexican states, those same means and media could also be appropriated to advance regional culinary preferences. Despite all Mexican nationalist efforts, Yucatecans have, in their everyday culinary practices, created, promoted, disseminated, and routinized the employment of cooking techniques and technologies, of ingredients and recipes that are affirmed as exclusive to the people of the region. This process is

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the result both of the convergence of social and cultural forces internal to the region that gave origin to (and instituted) local culinary practices and preferences, and of the historically shifting market forces that favored the availability of technologies, ingredients, people, and culinary traditions imported from different places that joined with and became a part of Yucatecan society and cuisine. Yucatecan cuisine is both an oppositional and a self-constituting cultural practice, that is, it simultaneously separates Yucatecans from Mexicans and supports the identity that Yucatecans have built (and continue to build) for themselves. In this sense, Yucatecans employ, in their everyday cooking, local ingredients and techniques that have been supplemented and enriched by ingredients, technologies, and techniques imported from abroad. Notwithstanding the availability of recipes and ingredients from central Mexico, Yucatecans have borrowed selectively from Caribbean and European cuisines to develop, over time, a cuisine that stands apart from the Mexican culinary tradition. However, it was Yucatecan cooks who found that some ingredients were more fitting than others to their taste. It was in the space between the global market and domestic kitchens that a new culinary hybrid was born. The Yucatecan culinary field has emerged from the active negotiation and experimentation with, and the selective appropriation of, culinary resources from heterogeneous origins. The selectivity of the appropriation and the experimentation that cooks engage in are partly fashioned by the contingencies of product availability, the ebbs and flows of the market, and the booms and busts of the regional economy, but also by a conscious effort to create meals that satisfy the local palate and mark it as different from other cuisines, particularly Mexican cuisine. During the confection of their everyday food, Yucatecans favor some cooking ingredients and reject others.5 As Yucatán was a wealthy region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the elites were in a position to choose from Spanish, French, British, and Caribbean culinary traditions, ingredients, and techniques, allowing them to create a culinary culture that was different from, and sometimes opposed to, central Mexican society and cuisine. In the next section of this chapter, I illustrate the processes whereby contemporary culinary practices naturalize local taste, generate a coherent culinary field, and provide the grounding for the purification, standardization, formalization, and repetition that support and sanction the regional gastronomic field.

Mestizo Cooking: Recados and the Dissemination of Taste In this section I discuss how a particular configuration of flavors, aromas, colors, and textures has been inscribed in Yucatecan cooking, supporting the local certainty that there is a distinguishable and definable Yucatecan taste.

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Howes (2005) has suggested that taste is ‘hyperaesthesic’, that is, a sensual experience that involves all of the senses at once. Consequently, when we talk about consuming a meal, the taste experience cannot be reduced to the flavors; rather, it engages many, if not all, of our senses. Yucatecan cooking, in this sense, can also be considered hyperaesthesic. We see the meal or the main ingredient in the plate and find its colors and composition inviting or not. We smell the aromas of the spices and condiments. We touch some meals with our bare hands (e.g., panuchos and salbutes) before carrying them to our mouths. When we bite into the food, we find it soft, crunchy, dense, liquid, cold, warm, or hot, and we experience the texture and sound of the food being processed in our mouths. Although one flavor (salty, spicy hot, sweet, or sour) may overpower the rest, our appreciation of the food is based on a complex merging into the flavor of a given meal. First, it tastes and smells like escabeche. Then we identify the different ingredients, recognizing the presence of black pepper, allspice, onions, garlic, bay leaves, and, of course, turkey or chicken. There is hardly a bodily sense excluded when we consume a meal. I find it important to analyze the process by which we come to associate a selection of ingredients (e.g., types of meat, spices, herbs, condiments) and a group of culinary techniques and technologies with identifiable cuisines. Despite the fact that some authors have reduced taste to its biochemical dimension (see Bartoshuk and Duffy 2005; L. Roberts 2005), or to the basic tastes perceived by the mouth (Kuipers 1991), in anthropology we are more concerned with the social grounding and meanings of taste. For example, Stoller (1989) has shown how the taste, smell, and textures of a meal can be manipulated to convey emotions and to draw social boundaries. Holtzman (2009), in turn, has made evident the relationship between favored and disfavored tastes and ingredients in individual and group efforts to affirm their modernity. In social analysis and commentary, there is a long tradition that extends the meaning of taste to convey social distinction and to highlight its instrumental value in establishing or maintaining structural differences within society (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Elias [1939] 2000; Frisby 1997; Gronow 1997; Mennell 1985; Veblen [1899] 1931). As is the case with other national cuisines, Yucatecan food connects cuisine to distinction and class, especially through the normative precepts that define its ‘authenticity’ and assert its value. However, my concern is with the dynamic processes that ensure the naturalization of Yucatecan food and its co-extensiveness with the Yucatecan territory. Here, and in the next two chapters, I look at the contributions of everyday culinary practices, the production of cookbooks, and the part played by restaurants in naturalizing Yucatecan taste. I begin with the process whereby flavors, aromas, textures, and a particular aesthetic are inscribed in the everyday preparation of meals and in the preferences of the majority of Yucatecans.

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Recados and Dissemination in the Everyday Culinary Field Visiting markets in Mérida, as well as in any other town or village of the state, brings the cook in contact with women and men displaying and selling, on tables or counters, small bags with recado—blends of different spices required for the elaboration of a variety of Yucatecan dishes. Most of these women and men are peasants, probably of Maya origin, but some are of European or Asian origin or from mixed ancestry. The preparation of a recado normally requires the cook to roast and grind different spices, garlic, herbs, and chili peppers, to blend with either the juice of Seville oranges or white vinegar. Different recados and some spice pastes, such as adobo (achiote),6 recado for relleno negro (black stuffing), and white recado for steak, are regularly employed in meat marinades. During the preparation of any specific recado, in different villages, cities, or regions of the state, cooks may vary the proportion of spices but seldom the spices themselves, so that the producers preserve its ‘identity’. Customers can then choose the markets where they find the recado paste that matches their preference for color, aroma, and flavor.7 It is through the multiple, non-coordinated efforts of the women and men who prepare recados and spice pastes for their patrons that vendors throughout the state of Yucatán reinforce each other, repeating, disseminating, and establishing a recognizable Yucatecan flavor. There are specific ingredients that correspond to each recado, and their proportion, their use, or their absence in one or another recado reflects the differences in flavor that each dish has, while, at the same time, inscribing the taste, color, and smell of regional food in the Yucatecans’ palate. For example, Hernández Fajardo de Rodríguez’s cookbook (n.d., ca. 1930) includes the following recados: adobo colorado (red rub) for roasts, adobo blanco (white rub) for puchero, chilaquil for tamales, and others for mechado, alcaparrado, chilmole, mole, and turkey in escabeche Valladolid-style (ibid.: 1:37–38), as well as for duck and cochinita (ibid.: 2:33–36). The spices, herbs, and ingredients used differently in these recados are achiote, allspice, black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, coriander seeds, and cumin; bay leaves, epazote, oregano, parsley, and saffron; pimiento, sun-dried red pepper, xkat ik chili pepper, capers, raw and roasted garlic, olives, onions, and raisins; Seville oranges, vinegar, and wine. The constellation of flavors and aromas derived from the blend of these different ingredients lends Yucatecan food a recognizable identity.8 But how are we to recognize Yucatecan flavor? This is an important question, particularly when we take into account Mérida’s contemporary transformations and those in other urban centers of the state. The location of Mérida in the peninsula of Yucatán—near the sea and at the center of a regional network of roads and railroads—has fostered the development of productive industries and of educational, medical, and tourism services that cater to the

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needs of the inhabitants of the peninsula and the states of Tabasco in the Gulf of Mexico and Chiapas in the south, as well as the inhabitants of Belize, Guatemala, and other Central American countries. Yucatecan cities receive immigrants from different parts of the country and abroad, especially as a spillover from Cancún, the resort city in the state of Quintana Roo, and the promotion of tourism that features archaeological sites and colonial cities in the state of Yucatán. Despite the presence of a large percentage of the population with an indigenous phenotype, in Yucatán ethnic boundaries are blurred in institutional and everyday discourses and practices. Meridans, in general, endorse the selfreferential, all-encompassing identity term ‘Yucatecan’,9 a label that conflates the meaning of several identity terms. For example, the nationalist narrative on Mestizos underscores the blending of indigenous and European cultures. At the same time, ‘Mestizo’ is the local term used to designate people who would be called ‘indigenous’ in other Mexican regions, and, according to the context, it may have negative connotations. More confusing, in Yucatán, as well as in other Mexican regions, the term is also endowed with the positive connotations that have been attributed to the mixing of cultures since the time of the Mexican Revolution, turning the term ‘Mestizo’ into an indexical marker of positive hybridity. Within this rhetorical field, Vasconcelos ([1925] 1992) famously suggested that the Mestizo blends together the virtues of the European and of the indigenous people. While most Yucatecans would not find it troubling to celebrate the achievements of the Aztecs and the Maya civilizations of yesteryear, in practice, contemporary indigenous people are continuously pushed to the margins of mainstream society.10 Often, when Yucatecans speak of Yucatecan culture and cuisine, they are prone to celebrate its Mestizo character. Restaurant managers, journalists who write pieces on regional gastronomy, local cookbook writers, and cultural authorities (e.g., the representatives of the state’s different cultural offices) often affirm that Yucatecan culture (including its food) is a Mestizo tradition that has blended local and international cultures into a particular and specific regional culture. In actual practice, while the local stress on Mestizo culture in the public sphere recognizes the contributions of different groups to local culture, at the same time it conceals the culture both of indigenous and of immigrant groups. In the private sphere, many Yucatecans brandish terms loaded with negative, classist, and racist connotations, such as ‘Mestizo’ and wiro, to characterize an individual or group as ‘uncivilized’ or ‘uncultured’.11 In conversations with friends in Mérida I found that most were willing to recognize the contribution of Maya culture to Yucatecan cooking. When pressed about it, they often point to dishes in which local ingredients prevail— meals that use corn (tamales), squash seeds (papadzules, pipián), or achiote (cochinita pibil)—although it would be difficult for anyone to determine the

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territorial origin and the culture of the minds and hands that crafted any particular dish. In fact, the ingredients and cooking technologies employed in these dishes suggest that they may be the product of past culinary exchanges with other cultures. For example, as described in the cookbook El cocinero mexicano (The Mexican Cook) (Anon. [1831] 2000: 1:244, 245), the cooking procedure followed for barbacoa otahitiana and barbacoa mexicana— barbacoa itself being a Taino word and procedure adopted by the Spanish conquerors—is similar to the technique used in preparing cochinita pibil, a dish whose creation, Yucatecans confidently affirm, is solely Yucatecan. They would hardly accept or concede that it was informed by external sources.12 These remarks are not meant to suggest that Yucatecans are ‘wrong’ or misled in their opinions. Rather, I believe that their views point to the naturalization of the dish, which is the result of a process of territorialization and assimilation that brackets the historical sources that allowed for its creation. This process inscribes, through the culinary practices of Yucatecans (which are reproduced throughout the state), the conviction that the method followed to cook cochinita pibil is an authentic and original local creation, leaving little room for dissent. Thus, it is common to hear that even though pork did not exist before the arrival of Europeans, its introduction simply displaced the local game in the manufacture of the meal. In their view, cochinita pibil is actually a dish created by the Maya (see, e.g., Ponce 2004).13 I suggest, however, that over the last two centuries Yucatecans have appropriated a large number of recipes, ingredients, techniques, and cooking technologies that have allowed them to develop a regional culinary logic. In practical terms, the ‘real’ origin of any particular ingredient, technique, or technology is made irrelevant by the specific constellation of flavors, aromas, colors, and textures in the food that Yucatecans prefer. Hence, stuffed cheese, even though its only American ingredients are sweet peppers and tomatoes, continues to be a highly esteemed Yucatecan dish.14 At this point in time, Yucatecans favor a set of ingredients that mark this regional cuisine as being different from other Mexican and Caribbean cuisines. Today, there are some ingredients that most Yucatecans recognize as particular to the local taste and that allow for locally ingenious combinations. Common herbs in the Yucatecan culinary field are bay leaves, cilantro, epazote, oregano, parsley, saffron, and thyme. Favored spices are achiote, allspice, black and white pepper, cinnamon, cloves, coriander seeds, and cumin. Among preserved foods, Yucatecans favor capers, green olives, pickled onions, almonds, pine nuts, and raisins. Favorite greens and vegetables are chaya and mac’ulam leaves (hierba santa), garlic, radishes, and red and white onions. With regard to fruits, many recipes prescribe marinating meats with the juice of either limes or Seville oranges,15 and avocados are a regular complement to dishes such as pork and beans and puchero. Among the vegetables that

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Yucatecans often consume we find beets, chayote, cucumbers (there is also a regional variety called kat), plantain, potatoes, squash, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. Yucatecans favor chili peppers that are different from those preferred in central Mexico; regionally, the most common ones are habanero, max, red, sweet, and xkat ik. Meals are often accompanied by a choice of black beans, lentils, rice, or noodles. Also, regarding meats, Yucatecans prefer pork, turkey, chicken, and fish and other seafood. Although they are enjoyed, beef and lamb have for a long time been second to pork. The preferred substance for frying is either pork lard or Spanish olive oil, although in the last 50 years other vegetable and synthetic cooking oils have partly displaced both lard and olive oil, and, more recently, Italian olive oil has been as easily found as Spanish brands. Butter is a fairly recent addition and is mostly used for dishes in the culinary but not the gastronomic field.16 Although contemporary Yucatecans display a greater acceptance of different types of cheese in their daily diet, for a dish to be considered ‘Yucatecan’, cooks usually choose between Dutch Edam and fresh cheese. Most Yucatecan cookbooks include instructions on how to prepare recados, but these spice blends are now available in packaged, industrially processed presentations. Since different recados are created specifically for different dishes, they have played an important part in the naturalization of Yucatecan taste. During this process, domestic and professional cooks and cookbook writers have in/formed each other. Unquestionably, the latter have contributed to inscribing, formalizing, and normalizing the use of specific combinations of ingredients to prepare specific dishes. For decades, families following their recipes have prepared meals in which the flavors arise from the spices that local culinary authorities have prescribed, including the recados that have been elaborated and can be purchased in the market. Yucatecans have grown used to consuming foods that, give or take this or that spice, have been instituted across the Yucatecan territory, dis/seminating the local rules of taste. Hence, contemporary Yucatecans cannot accept a dish as ‘authentic’ if it is missing an important, defining ingredient. For example, pork with black beans does not taste ‘quite right’ if epazote or onions are missing in the broth; or if, instead of garnishing the food with lime juice, one adds a different citrus; or if the dish is spiced with red instead of habanero pepper. In these instances, the dish may taste good, but it is not ‘right’. Likewise, pork in white beans does not taste right if, instead of the juice of Seville oranges, one chooses to add lime juice, or if habanero peppers are used instead of red chili peppers. In the case of recados, most young people are unable to grasp the difference between escabeche and steak recados; however, for those who grew up appreciating the subtleties of these dishes, they are not interchangeable. In fact, steak recados are based on garlic, salt, and black pepper, while the recado for escabeche requires garlic, salt, black pepper, allspice, cumin,

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coriander seeds, and (in some recipes) a touch of cinnamon. Using steak recado to cook an escabeche gives the dish a similar flavor, but not the one that the knowledgeable consumer expects. Also, when preparing cochinita pibil, pork must be marinated with achiote and other herbs and spices. Using achiote without the other ingredients may lend the desired color, but not the flavor and aromas that the dish usually conveys. Recados are important in recreating and reproducing the tastes that Yucatecans ‘know’ should be present in a given dish. Consequently, they play an important part in disseminating, territorializing, and establishing the Yucatecan culinary field. Researchers have sometimes described Yucatecan food as homogeneously Maya (Long-Solís and Vargas 2005) or have expressed their surprise at what they see as a homogeneous gastronomic culture in the Yucatán peninsula. However, there is no such homogeneity, since even if the recipes for a given dish are similar from one cookbook to another and coincide with some versions in the oral tradition, the field allows for the expression of individual and family preferences and for improvisation when, in different communities, some of the ingredients for a given recipe are not available. Thus, replicating a recipe allows for local variation within the region, with the result that the same dish may have a different nuance from one village or town to the next. However, in each case, the core ingredients and a certain culinary technique are required in order to maintain the identity of the dish. Within this regional culinary logic, Yucatecans know that a pibil dish is wrapped in banana leaves and cooked on a tray placed in a pit-hole where stones have been previously heated. The container is covered with branches and leaves and left to cook for several hours. After the required amount of time, the meat is tender, with abundant liquid and fat to be served along with the meat. Cooking it in a stove oven or, as some people do nowadays, in a pressure cooker results in a meal that Yucatecans recognize as resembling in taste and texture a ‘real’ cochinita pibil, but one that is not quite it. Along this same line, most Yucatecan tamales are wrapped in banana leaves rather than cornhusks (the preferred wrapper in central Mexico), and pibil meats are marinated in the juice of Seville oranges and spices before being baked. The normative shape of these statements is meant to illustrate the value that Yucatecans give to their food. With regard to regional foods, Yucatecans expect flavors, aromas, textures, and tastes that have been routinized and made normative in their elaboration. In everyday life they are willing to tolerate slight deviations—using vinegar instead of the juice of Seville oranges, substituting vegetable oil for pork lard when preparing dough for tamales, or replacing turkey with chicken in some dishes—as long as the food remains recognizable. Recipes that are today part of the regional culinary canon are hardly altered, other than provisionally, for instance, when confronting the scarcity of an ingredient. Hence, for Yucatecans, the attributes of their food

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are substantial and easily recognizable, and even slight departures, alterations, or changes are considered unacceptable when the ingredients are perceived to be alien to the regional culinary culture.17 In addition to the part that local markets play in the naturalization of the Yucatecan taste, contemporary supermarkets carry industrially processed and packaged versions of the most common recados. Today, in any city of Yucatán, it is possible to purchase achiote paste or the recado for black stuffing or steak recado in small boxes containing vacuum-packed bags. Some local supermarkets also have a section where customers can acquire in bulk different Yucatecan recados, side by side with Oaxaca moles or central Mexican condiments. But as home cooking becomes rare, Yucatecans have been slowly changing into less discriminating customers. As families turn to economic kitchens and delivery services, the taste for specific dishes has been changing, too. For example, during a visit to a restaurant at the cenote (natural well) of Valladolid, formerly a bastion of the town’s cuisine, I was handed the menu and told that all the dishes were “traditional local food.” When I opened the menu, I found Mexican chilaquiles and dishes traditionally made with turkey (e.g., escabeche, turkey in black and in white stuffing) prepared with chicken instead. Also, when my wife asked about the way in which chicken pibil was cooked, she was told that it was not baked wrapped in banana leaves but rather fried. On another visit to Valladolid, we were invited to a mid-afternoon meal in which we were offered escabeche. Although this dish was reputedly created in Valladolid, when the food was served (it was not cooked by our hosts), we were presented roasted chicken in a broth with steak recado, lacking all of the other ingredients that characterize escabeche de Valladolid.18 Our hosts, and many other friends from Valladolid with whom we talked about this experience, said that they believe the cooking of this dish to be ‘authentic’, although we have also found some disagreement. It is the recado of escabeche, however, that makes it possible for this dish to change as it is cooked and served, while maintaining some consistency in flavor. Recados have been and continue to be instrumental in the institution and constitution of the Yucatecan culinary field as, even with small variations, their effect is to repeat and territorialize the taste of Yucatecan meals. In the following section, I describe the forms of culinary repetition besides recados that contribute to naturalizing the taste of Yucatecan food.

Domesticity and Repetition: Embodying Yucatecan Taste In contrast to the public domain, where the gastronomic field in/forms the representation of Yucatecan cuisine, it is in the private domain of homes where the taste for Yucatecan food is forged. At home, cooks maintain a ludic attitude toward cooking and food and are often unconcerned (or only a little

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concerned) with respecting the rigorous aesthetics of a particular dish. At home, too, members of a family are more inclined to indulge in the consumption of foods that restaurateurs are afraid to introduce in their menus. Hence, pig’s feet, beef tongue, liver, kidney, brain, tripe, fish roe (hueva), and diverse types of fats and oils are more likely to make an appearance in the customary elaboration of meals at home than in restaurants. Nonetheless, even at home this sort of food is rarely cooked, and it is more common to find meals in which pork, chicken, turkey, or beef is the main ingredient. Some of the recipes are cyclically cooked and consumed, making it possible to generate and embody a ‘Yucatecan taste’. It is a process of repetition with difference. That is, within the culinary (and also the gastronomic) field, recipes, procedures, and tastes are repeated in a multiplicity of sites, but this repetition never produces an identical dish. Each culinary performance introduces difference. Secret ingredients and personal taste preferences and dislikes modify the final product, but they do so within limits that still allow its recognition. In this section I describe some of these rhythms and suggest that the dishes repeated by families are prepared in ways that reproduce rules of regional cooking, making Yucatecan cuisine distinguishable from other regional Mexican cuisines, as well as from other international cuisines. First, I describe the cycle of everyday main meals, as this is the realm where the iterative practices of the Yucatecan culinary field mark the days of the week and inscribe Yucatecan taste in the (social) body.

The Weekly Cycle of Meals The main everyday meal is, in general terms, consumed by mid-afternoon. Many Meridans eat a snack by mid-morning, and sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 pm, families (and sometimes friends) sit at the table to share a meal. Since everyday home cooking is a private rather than a public act, family meals are often carefully prepared but usually are not the fancier, aesthetically sophisticated versions served in restaurants. This is often forgiven on account of the fact that most homes in Mérida’s new fraccionamientos are small spaces crammed with a medium-size refrigerator, a small stove with four burners and an oven, and a microwave oven. There is little space for cabinets, and hence most kitchens are ill-supplied with kitchenware. A few pans and pots, sometimes a pressure cooker, some spoons and ladles, and a few cheap, often unsharpened knives are usually all that can be accommodated. Cooks seldom turn on their ovens, as the small space of the kitchen would overheat, so the oven space is often reserved for additional storage. In fact, among these families, in which both parents must work in order to cover their own and their children’s needs, cooking at home is becoming rare. Instead, buying food at economic kitchens is often preferred.

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Having become used to a certain style of food when growing up, many Yucatecan family members embrace a repetitive cycle in the preparation and consumption of meals that mark the day of the week. This repetition both normalizes and affirms the Yucatecan inclination toward a specific set of flavors and aromas. According to what I have learned from my older friends, relatives, and acquaintances, the most common explanation for the regular weekly preparation of some dishes is that for a long time some preserving technologies were scarce in Mérida, and the seasonal availability of spices, herbs, and ingredients fashioned a regular rhythm in the preparation and consumption of meals. In the 1950s, few families were in possession of electric refrigerators and thus had a limited capacity to store meats and ingredients for long periods. Also, after living accustomed to the taste of fresh, local ingredients, when families finally had access to modern appliances, they found that refrigeration negatively altered the flavor and texture of meats, vegetables, and fish and seafood. Some continued to cook on coal or wood because they found that gas stoves imparted a different flavor to the food and that the texture of the sauces and meats was adversely affected by gas burners. Men and women preferred to visit the market on an everyday basis in order to purchase the ingredients that merchants made available only on certain days. On some days of the week, slaughterhouses were closed, and, at times, the merchants of hogs or cattle did not bring animals on an everyday basis to be butchered. Hence, not all meats were available every day, and it was common knowledge that on certain days the quality of the foodstuffs was better than on others.19 Many cities and towns located away from the sea did not have regular access to fresh fish and seafood other than on Fridays, when trucks equipped with iceboxes delivered their produce into the inland markets of Yucatán. This regularity was also shaped by the fact that the Catholic Church, long the hegemonic religion in the region, prescribed the consumption of sea produce and proscribed the consumption of other meats on abstinence Fridays. By the second half of the twentieth century, a food cycle had been established, and some dishes have become indexical markers of certain days of the week. Hence, on Mondays, many Yucatecan families choose to consume pork and beans. This is a stew prepared with black lima beans and chunks of pork that is boiled with epazote leaves, onions, and salt. Families sit around the table to eat the stew, serving meat chunks on a plate, the broth and beans in a bowl, and, in separate dishes, the different garnishes used for this meal: curtido (a mix of minced onions, radishes, and cilantro), lime slices, a sauce of roasted tomatoes, minced habanero pepper, slices of avocado, and a side dish of white or black rice. The whole is consumed with corn tortillas or baguette bread, depending on the family’s social class, while the more affluent may choose white bread. Older generations still prefer their meat with generous amounts of pork lard, although medical proscriptions are forcing men and

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women to watch their cholesterol levels and to replace pork with chicken, another fatty meat. While Yucatecans may eat alternative meals on Monday, this dish is deeply ingrained in the culinary preference of families so that economic kitchens and restaurants always list this dish as Monday’s ‘special of the day’. In consequence, some families may find the consumption of pork and beans on another day of the week as a culinary anomaly. For example, when in 2006 we were getting ready to leave Mérida for our sabbatical, some friends offered us a meal. They asked us what we would like to eat, and when we said that we had not had pork and beans for quite some time, the wife, somewhat disconcerted, replied: “But … it is not Monday! I mean, I can cook it if you wish, but it is not a Monday!” Although they regularly eat this dish at her home on Mondays, she complied with our request, upsetting her family’s weekly cycle of meals for us. On any of the midweek days, Yucatecan families prepare and consume fried or roasted chicken, beef casserole, or Milanese pork steaks. Most families with whom I am acquainted to do not engage any more in roasting or frying chicken; rather, they buy it from any of multiple locales that specialize in doing so. As an alternative, families cook chicken with a sauce of tomatoes, onions, oregano, garlic, allspice, and black pepper. In keeping with this culinary preference, some economic kitchens schedule a choice of chicken recipes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Before being roasted or fried, chickens are often marinated in the juice of Seville oranges or white vinegar, with oregano, black pepper, salt, and garlic. When served, they are usually consumed with leftover refried black beans (rolling over from Monday’s pork and beans), rice, and pickled red onions. The reheated or refried black beans contribute to routinize the flavor of beans, epazote, and onions all week long, and the pickled onions repeat the aroma and flavor of bay leaves, allspice, and the juice of Seville oranges. When cooking beefsteak casserole, home cooks broil beefsteaks and sliced potatoes with tomatoes, onions, garlic, oregano, xkat ik chili pepper (left whole to impart flavor, but not piquancy), and cilantro (although some families prefer parsley). The steak is served with rice and refried black beans on the side, as well as with corn tortillas. During the consumption of these dishes, Yucatecans often serve whole or sliced habanero and/or max peppers. Thus, family members who like their food spicy hot can garnish their meal with chili peppers. For some families, Thursday is the day for potaje, a local variation on pot-au-feu that includes sausages (local longaniza or Spanish chorizo), meat (chicken or pork), onions, garlic, tomatoes, cumin, sweet pepper, thyme, and lentils. On abstinence Fridays, Yucatecan families, in the majority Catholic, follow Christian prescriptions and consume sea products. Shoppers find in markets an assortment of fresh fish and seafood, and supermarkets stock extra varieties on that day. Patrons find displayed on ice an array of squid, calamari, crab,

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shrimp, lobster, mussels, salmon, tilapia, red snapper, baby shark (cazón), catfish, mero (grouper), boquinete (hogfish), and sea snail. Families with less disposable income often respect their abstinence days by fasting with vegetables instead of fish or seafood. Probably due to the fact that Mérida is not directly on the seashore (it is located some 40 kilometers south of the shoreline), many Yucatecan families do not have a wide repertoire of recipes for preparing fish. On Friday, most families buy fried fish and garnish it with pickled onions, shredded cabbage, and chili peppers, or they cook fried breaded fish filets or shrimp. Home cooks with more time available may choose to cook either fish tikin xik or mac’um. However, the former involves wrapping the fish in banana leaves to bake or grill, making cooks less inclined to prepare it than mac’um, a fish casserole (cooked with tomatoes, onions, xkat ik chili peppers, bay leaves, allspice, and olive oil, although low-income families may use low-quality vegetable oil). On Fridays, some families take advantage of lower-priced items such as fish heads (to prepare fish soup) or roe (to fry or grill). Although some supermarkets and fish stores have made mussels, clams, and oysters available, and even though old Yucatecan cookbooks contain recipes to cook them, families either do not trust their freshness or dislike their texture, and so they are more likely to consume canned smoked oysters. It is among non-Yucatecans that I have found a greater inclination to purchase frozen shellfish and to prepare deviled oysters or to include them in paellas. In fact, Viera Hernández (pers. comm.) told me that during her fieldwork in Chuburná, a neighborhood in the north of Mérida, most of her acquaintances confessed that they did not know any recipes for cooking fish. They like fish and seafood and buy them weekly at local eateries, or, when they can do so, they travel to restaurants in the port of Progreso to eat these foods (see Viera Hernández 2007). There are other alternative recipes for Fridays. For example, home cooks can prepare vegetables such as chayote. They slice it, soak it in a batter of egg and breadcrumbs, deep-fry it, and serve it garnished with fried tomato and garlic sauce, accompanied by refried black beans. Other families consume chaya leaves, sometimes in tamales, sometimes with scrambled eggs, or sometimes in a vegetable soup locally called puchero vaquero, into which an egg frittata may be added. Deep-fried potato patties can also give variety to the Friday diet. Often, families accompany these dishes with refried black beans and rice. However, since Friday is for many the week’s payday, it is not rare to find a large turnout in seafood restaurants and restaurant-bars of the city, where families and friends get together to eat abstinence botanas (e.g., ceviche, shrimp cocktail, seafood tacos, and fried squash) and to share beers. Saturday is a day that may be dedicated to visiting or hosting friends. A group of friends, perhaps composed of two or more families, may arrange to share the purchase or elaboration of Saturday’s main meal. Often they choose

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a simple dish that allows friends to share a six-pack of beer and to renew friendship and kinship ties. For example, every so often, a friend calls my wife and myself on Friday to set an appointment to get together on Saturday with friends to share chicharra (deep-fried pork rinds, chunks of meat and fat, and offal) and/or blood sausages. One person gets the chicharra and the ingredients to dress it, another gets the beer, and someone else brings the corn tortillas.20 Often, to accompany chicharra, friends purchase buche (pork stomach filled with diced offal and spices, deep-fried in lard) to consume in tacos. On weekends families face the moral and social duty to share Sunday almuerzo with parents, brothers, sisters, and other members of the extended family (sometimes including uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, and cousins). Hence, Sundays are reserved for the presentation of a special meal for which the mother, or the main female member of the household, has gained family recognition. Although families may choose alternative dishes, Sundays are days on which the three-meat puchero is turned into a form of domestic religion. The woman in charge of cooking this meal has to spend most of the morning preparing it. She must slice and dice assorted vegetables (taking into account local availability and taste preferences), pork, beef, and chicken, and cook a stew with these meats and vegetables. The broth is flavored with a blend of black pepper, garlic, oregano, and cumin. Once the stew is ready, the cook uses the broth to prepare noodles and rice colored with saffron (or a yellow colorant). For the garnish (curtido), the cook minces radishes, cilantro, and onions and puts them to pickle in the juice of Seville oranges. During the appropriate season, the garnish may include slices of lima, an aromatic citrus indigenous to the Yucatán peninsula. Also, for those who like the stew spicy hot, sliced and whole habanero peppers are made available at the table. Lastly, mashed avocado is used to decorate the plates and accompany the dish. The servings of this meal are plentiful as they include meat, vegetables, rice, noodles, avocado, garnish, and corn tortillas. In the process of localization of the dish, the word puchero, which in Spanish derives from the container (a large pot, with the same name), has been transformed in Yucatán into a derivation of puch, a Maya word that means ‘mashed’. In many families, before serving puchero, the cook mashes the vegetables and the avocado and shreds the meats, mixing them with the mashed vegetables in a large bowl. At the table, individuals are served a bowl of soup with rice and noodles and a plate of puch, which is then garnished according to each individual’s taste. This recipe has a clear Spanish influence (a friend, attorney Teodora Zamudio, cooked it for us in Buenos Aires), but some Yucatecan friends insist that the way we eat it is specific to Yucatán. I have been told, furthermore, that the only other place where it is eaten “just like here [in Yucatán]” is in the Canary Islands, where Yucatecan migrants are said to have taken the recipe some decades ago.

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Also, on Sundays, and as clear evidence of the regional Spanish heritage, Yucatecan families may opt for a Valencia-style paella. This is a dish that many Yucatecan men take pride in cooking. Using saffron, paprika, garlic, and parsley, the home cook prepares large amounts of rice that is cooked with a choice of fish, seafood, meats, and sausages. On Sundays (although not on every Sunday), relatives living in different towns travel to the place where their parents live to eat their family meal together. Within Mérida, relatives who do not see each other during the week—either because they live in different neighborhoods or on account of their work schedules—repeat this practice. During the weekend, friends and relatives of the extended family who choose to eat together often accompany their food with beer and rum cocktails. This repetition of spices, meats, and recipes throughout the year favors the gradual, lifelong embodiment of taste for what individuals perceive to be the flavors of Yucatecan cuisine. The routine practice of hospitality with relatives and friends reinforces the ‘naturalness’ of their taste preferences and, on an everyday basis, draws firm boundaries around the members of the group.

Performing Cosmopolitanism and Localism in the Private Domain Breakfast and supper meals are seldom made into social events. In fact, breakfast at home is mostly a private affair. Most days, families get up early in the morning, and, in preparation for the school day, mothers (and sometimes fathers) fix their children a light breakfast. Often, this is no more than a bowl of cereal and milk, with or without some fruit juice, and coffee or a drink of any brand of soluble chocolate dissolved in reconstituted powdered milk. In Mérida, as elsewhere, cereal and milk come in boxes, processed, packaged, and marketed by transnational corporations. Other families have a morning breakfast of fried or scrambled eggs, refried black beans, and tortillas or baguette, accompanied by juice and coffee. While coffee is still served to children in many families, the medical doctrine proscribing it for children is gradually catching on. It is not uncommon to hear that parents do not give coffee to their children anymore, or that they never have (although very often cola drinks, with caffeine, are served to them). Some families may still keep the custom of heavy breakfasts. None among my current friends and acquaintances in Mérida or in Valladolid follows this practice. However, when I was growing up in Valladolid, I was often served for breakfast items such as calf’s liver in onions, fried fish or shrimp cocktails (on Fridays), and tacos of cochinita pibil, dishes that alternated throughout the week with eggs and breakfast cereal with milk. Currently, many of our friends consider this type of breakfasts excessive for children. However, every so often, either for Saturday or Sunday breakfasts, some families receive friends or relatives from other towns and purchase cochinita pibil or lechón al horno at a favorite food stand to

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share with them. In other instances, the female of the house grills and chops some steaks and serves her family and friends tacos or baguette sandwiches with a spread of refried black beans and minced grilled meat. Supper is also a family affair. Relatives may sit at different times to eat tacos or sandwiches of reheated leftovers from the afternoon’s lunch. However, not all members of the household are compelled to share the same supper. The evening is more open to personal taste, and many members of Yucatecan families consume simply a piece of pastry and a glass of either milk or hot chocolate. Although eggs are widely classified as breakfast items—exceptions being their use as an ingredient in some afternoon meals, such as in papa­ dzules or in picadillo (minced or ground meat) for stuffing—some families choose egg sandwiches with a spread of refried black beans for dinner. As I described in chapter 2, it is also common for parents to order pizzas or Chinese food to be delivered at home, especially when their children organize unplanned parties with their friends. Many families in Mérida are made up of working parents whose children go to school in the morning and evening.21 In the afternoon, especially when the children do not have classes scheduled in the evening at their schools, the parents take them to ballet or piano lessons or to private tutorials for subjects they are failing at school. They seldom share the afternoon meal or, if at all, rapidly eat a simple meal purchased at an economic kitchen and hurriedly reheated at home. In compensation, they gather as a family for supper. However, this does not imply that elaborate meals are prepared. They may purchase tamales or panuchos at their favorite food stand to be eaten together at the table or in the living room (sometimes while watching soap operas on television). Many Yucatecans find comforting the consumption of long-established familiar flavors at supper, and the widespread availability of foods on the street allow families to turn supper into a social occasion that affirms the taste for local flavors. However, it may also be the occasion to host friends and engage in performances of cosmopolitanism. It is common knowledge among Yucatecans that—even though for many of them Yucatecan food may be the best in the world—it is too heavy to eat at suppertime. Hence, some nights of the week (especially Fridays and Saturdays), many couples cook at home to host friends and enjoy this opportunity to display their sophistication and cosmopolitanism. On these occasions, some cooks select from among a repertoire of recipes from China, Italy, Spain, or the circum-Mediterranean region in general, or from central Mexico or Jalisco. For example, one evening, a couple of friends invited us, along with about eight other guests, for dinner at their home. They served baked potatoes with rosemary leaves, chicken in a sauce of aromatic herbs, and rice with garlic and herbs. Another couple who hosted us for dinner offered a Yucatecan interpretation of Chinese food in which soy sauce and vegetables were the main ingredients.

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Other friends have told me about suppers they were invited to. For example, one told about a Yucatecan couple who invited him along with other friends for pozole Jalisco-style, a recipe the host had learned to cook while living in central Mexico. Also, since restaurants have popularized some dishes, it is common to be offered some variations on carpaccio or a pinzimonio of vegetables and olive oil for dipping. Carpaccio often consists of slices of packaged smoked salmon in olive oil, garnished with minced capers, hardboiled eggs, onions, and habanero pepper. In some other instances, hosts scour their cookbooks for rare recipes that can impress their friends, due to their sophistication and complex elaboration. For example, despite her disinclination to cook, a friend once invited my wife and myself for dinner and offered us her own rendition of a Spanish stew. Another couple of friends had us for a supper of grilled meats in the style of Nuevo León, a northern Mexican state, and other friends invited us for grilled German sausages. In fact, these exchanges of visits affirm the bonds and boundaries of groups as well as the sophistication and cosmopolitanism of all involved. However, it is not uncommon, especially when hosts receive friends from other Mexican states or abroad, to select Yucatecan food, such as different types of Yucatecan tamales, panuchos, and salbutes. On occasions such as these, the preference is to include the guests in the local culture by immersing them in the flavors and the aromas favored by Yucatecans. This is understood as a display of hospitality that momentarily opens the boundaries of the group and allows for the partial assimilation of outsiders. From there on, it is the responsibility of the guest to accept or reject the host’s hospitality and the opening that has been created. Visitors who mock local foods (and there are many) are seen not only as lacking an understanding of food culture but also as arrogant visitors, undeserving of hospitality, and they may never be invited to that home again. They may also be perceived locally as unsophisticated, uncouth, narrow-minded, or plainly disrespectful. These varied circumstances turn the culinary field into a private arena where local and cosmopolitan flavors co-exist. This co-existence does not threaten the pre-eminence of Yucatecan food; rather, it allows Yucatecans to place their regional food in a privileged niche within the global-regional-local foodscape. For them, the experience of other flavors underscores the value of Yucatecan ingredients and their contribution to local culinary flavors and aromas.

Special Foods: Seasonal Meals and the Yucatecan Culinary Field There are a number of special meals that Yucatecans are fond of and that, in the past, were tied to specific seasonal events. In twenty-first-century Yucatán, however, people can find most of them available whenever they feel a craving for the dish. In the urban context, among those meals that are still marked by

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seasonal recurrence, mucbil pollo is sought after during the weeks of All Saints’ Day and the Day of the Dead in the fall, cod Biscayne-style is favored during the Christmas season, and chocolomo is preferred during the late winter. If the weekly cycle of meals inscribes the flavor and aromas of foods in the bodily memory of the place, seasonal repetition further helps to engrave in the Yucatecan body the flavors of, and the preference for, local cuisine and to implant a ‘natural’ order—that is, to institute certain places and times as the proper context for the consumption of a given meal. Even though street tamale vendors make sure, nowadays, that one can eat a mucbil pollo at any time of the year, it is always during the proper season that consumers demand more authenticity in its preparation. Friends have told me that they take particular pleasure in eating this dish when temperatures become cooler and one can enjoy a tamale accompanied by a hot chocolate or coffee. In local custom, these tamales are firmly tied to the religious celebrations of the Day of the Dead that take place at the end of October and beginning of November, leading local people to ‘feel’ that they are the naturally preferred meal for this time of the year. During the winter months and at the beginning of every new year (during what Yucatecans live as the ‘cold season’, compared to the rest of the year), there are a number of religious festivities celebrated in rural settings in Yucatán. In those locations, religious and secular authorities arrange for bullfights to take place in makeshift rings built in public spaces. Since the 1980s, local municipal governments have built permanent rings and fairgrounds in order to control the movements of the thousands of people who attend these fiestas and also to derive a secure income from permits issued to set up temporary amusement facilities (merry-go-rounds, rides, and games) and closed rings (for staging cockfights and concerts) and from licenses issued for the sale of assorted items, including alcoholic drinks and foods. In Mérida, a permanent bullring was built in 1930, located away from churches and from downtown Mérida.22 Bullfights are regarded as secular events in Mérida, but in other cities of the state they remain tied to yearly religious fiestas. For example, in Tizimín they coincide with the celebration of the Magi who witnessed the birth of Christ (5 January) and in Valladolid with the celebration of the Virgin of Candelaria (2 February).23 At least in the past, on the weeks surrounding those dates, bullfights were held during every afternoon of the week, with two to six bulls being killed. After each dead bull was carried outside the ring and into an improvised slaughtering area, a few butchers quartered and carved up each of the bulls for an anxious crowd of customers, who, as soon as they received their treasured portions of blood, meat, bone marrow, and offal, ran to their homes to deliver the products to their wives for making chocolomo.24 When the latter received the meat, they immediately cooked it in a stew with roasted onions and garlic, oregano, thyme, tomatoes, black

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pepper, and xkat ik chili peppers. Women sent their children to the bakery to buy fresh baguettes or had already stored a sufficient amount of corn tortillas for supper. Then they roasted habanero and xkat ik chili peppers to pickle them, preferably, in the juice of Seville oranges. Earlier in the afternoon, the mother had already pickled minced radishes and cilantro and had roasted and mashed tomatoes that would be used to garnish their plates. Once supper was ready, family members and guests sat at the table to eat steaming hot portions of the stew. It was often the father (but this could change from one family to another) who received the best piece of succulent bone marrow. If he was on good terms with the butcher, he had probably obtained extra pieces of bone marrow to share with his companions, along with other favored pieces of offal and meat. Even today, after garnishing their dishes with habanero and xkat ik chili peppers, it is expected that everyone at the table will break into a sweat while enjoying the meal. However, during the cold days of the year, most find the experience pleasant. For many families, the entire process of experiencing the bullfight, obtaining the meat, preparing the meal, and sharing it with friends and relatives endears this dish as part of the annual cycle of special recipes and reinforces the season as a special time of the year. Chocolomo cooked off-season often compares poorly to the one prepared in season, as the bullfight is credited with enhancing the flavor of the meat. Later during the year, anticipating the early days of November, families begin to prepare for the Day of the Dead and All Saints’ Day. Women and children visit cemeteries to clean and adorn with flowers the graves of relatives and, if necessary, to refresh the paint on headstones. Families with more disposable time pay laborers to maintain the graves during the weeks preceding the festivities. Although less common in Yucatán than in the rest of Mexico, some families display altars for their dead in their homes.25 On the Day of the Dead and All Saints’ Day, families place, on altars and at gravesites, plates with the favorite meals of their deceased relatives, as well as pieces of mucbil pollo. Of course, the home cook will prepare mucbil pollos for the living as well. These are special, large, labor-intensive tamales, measuring about 60 centimeters long, 40 centimeters wide, and 10 centimeters deep. The home cook must make the corn dough (masa) and mix it with salt, lard, and achiote paste. In a casserole dish, one or two chickens (pollo) are prepared in a sauce of broth, tomatoes, onions, achiote, sweet peppers, salt, and abundant epazote leaves. Once the chickens are done, most cooks debone the meat and add some corn flour to the broth to thicken it. Some cooks also add hard-boiled eggs, sliced into halves, to the tamale. They then pass banana leaves over a live fire and, after placing them on a tray, shape the masa over the container of leaves, placing pieces of meat and hard-boiled eggs on it and covering it with gravy. Then the cooks place sheets of masa on top of the tamale and seal and wrap it with banana leaves before placing it in the

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oven. Depending on how many people each family expects to feed (taking into account both relatives and friends), women or men (the latter especially in rural areas) prepare enough mucbil pollos for all the living and for the dead kin. Mucbil pollos in small villages and towns are still made pibil—that is, they are baked in a pit-hole like the one used for cochinita pibil. In larger cities and in Mérida, to approximate the flavor and texture of tamales cooked pibil, families reserve oven time and space in local bakeries. Those less concerned with replicating the authentic flavor are content to bake mucbil pollos in their own ovens at home. Once the mucbil pollos are cooked, family members and friends sit together to eat slices of this tamale, often accompanied by hot chocolate but, more frequently, by cola drinks or beer. Alternatively, families may skip altogether the time-consuming elaboration of these tamales and purchase them in bakeries that produce them during this time of the year. In recent years, mucbil pollos have become a point of contention between Yucatecans and outsiders. As I have already suggested and will discuss in chapter 4, in a few instances, Yucatecans do cook with two main types of cheese— Edam and fresh. However, within the Yucatecan culinary logic, cheese and milk products are not considered part of the regional tamale ‘tradition’, although they are amply used in central Mexican dishes. In recent years, in response to the growing number of central Mexicans taking residence in Mérida, tamale vendors, bakeries, supermarkets, and the odd restaurant have begun to sell mucbil pollos stuffed with cheese. While Yucatecans are not against cheese per se (as evidenced by the Yucatecan specialty queso relleno, or stuffed cheese), in general they reject the inclusion of cheese in their mucbil pollos. The feeling is strong enough as to warrant editorial notes in local newspapers against this “distortion of local tradition” and to provoke heated conversations among Yucatecans who bitterly complain about the negative effects of the Mexican presence in the state. In the contrary direction, accusations of parochialism have been directed at Yucatecans by both Mexicans and those Yucatecans who have adopted the view that central Mexican culture is better than, or non-threatening to, local culture. As an example of this contention, in 2005, a couple of friends told us about their experience at a nightclub. On that occasion, a party of women were celebrating a birthday on a night before the Day of the Dead festivities, and in the middle of an act, the master of ceremonies took the microphone to launch invectives against Mexicans who were “perverting” local traditions, inviting them to leave the state and go back to Mexico City, where they can add all the cheese they wish in their own tamales. Nonetheless, as I have suggested, the culinary field is all-encompassing, and in it people, families, and cooks are allowed to play and experiment with their food. I have found that some Yucatecan families are now preparing small batches of two versions of mucbil pollos—some without cheese, for those who

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prefer them as prescribed by local tradition, and others with cheese, for the friends and relatives who find the mixture of flavors pleasurable. However, it is when dishes are presented in the public sphere, as iconic representations of Yucatecan culture, that Yucatecans expect tamales to conform to the traditional gastronomic field, firmly marking the boundaries of regional culture. I have already mentioned cod Biscayne-style in the introduction, and I will return to this dish in the following chapter. Suffice it to say here that the most common recipe produces a rich stew served in a thick fried tomato sauce, with olive oil, fried cod, fried onions, olives, and sliced sweet red peppers (pimientos morrones), making it a desirable winter recipe. This dish is marked by the seasonal availability of products. It is only during the month of December that Yucatecan stores are supplied with large quantities of Norwegian salted cod to satisfy popular demand. At the beginning of the twenty-first century— even though salted cod (not necessarily Norwegian) and frozen unsalted cod are now available several times during the year—Yucatecan families reserve the preparation of cod Biscayne-style for the Christmas season. While it is not a mandatory dish for all Yucatecan families, this is one of those meals that Figure 3.1. Family Christmas Eve supper table set in buffet style

Cod Biscayne-style in the center-front, between the salad and the pasta. Photograph courtesy of G. Vargas Cetina, 2007.

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have gained widespread acceptance among middle-class families and is typically consumed during the Christmas season and on Christmas Eve.26 Alternatively, some Yucatecan families prefer to have baked ham with pineapple (Hawaiian ham) or ham in a clove sauce (jamón claveteado), others choose baked pork leg, and still others prefer to have baked turkey. In general, families choose for Christmas Eve supper the recipe that they favor the most and consider most special for sharing with relatives and guests.

Local Appropriations, Local Cosmopolitanism During the history of ambivalent relationships between Yucatecans and Mexicans from the central highlands, a number of dishes that originated in other Mexican regions have gradually become part of the local Yucatecan cuisine. In the process, these dishes, although they may somewhat resemble the original recipes, have been adapted and altered to suit the Yucatecan palate. Some families have integrated these meals into their regular, repetitive cycles. For example, chicken in Puebla-style mole may be a family favorite, eaten regularly on mid-weekdays. But instead of preparing mole from scratch, which involves soaking, frying, and blending different chili peppers and nuts, Yucatecan domestic cooks boil chicken, adding canned pureed tomato and industrially processed (canned or bottled) mole paste, diluting it in the broth and then thickening it with sugar, roasted sesame seeds, and a small amount of corn flour or bread crumbs (with some cooks using mashed plantain). When eating mole, Yucatecan families serve it with refried black beans (“to aid digestion”) and rice. Yucatecan mole is often cooked sweet, in contrast to the bitter and spicy hot versions cooked in central Mexico. For Yucatecan families, mole has the added advantage that leftovers are treasured in order to fulfill the occasional longing for enchiladas for supper. The Yucatecan recipe of mole shares a special place within family habits, along with another sweet dish, pollo en china (in Yucatán, as in other Caribbean places, china is the short name for sweet China oranges). This is chicken stewed in the juice of sweet oranges along with tomatoes, onions, raisins, and olives. Both dishes fit within the logic of some early-twentieth-century recipes that were sweetened with port or sherry and, after the 1950s, during years of scarcity, with cola. These recipes may be included more or less regularly in the weekly diet or at least are considered viable alternatives to other, more established meals when someone in the family craves them. These appropriations are now more easily recognized, since the analysis of the cultural and economic processes of global and local interactions has become more sophisticated. In Yucatán, as elsewhere, the relationship between the local and the global is one that needs to be understood outside

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the dichotomous opposition of imagined monolithic and timeless global and local entities (Pieterse 2001; Trouillot 2003; Tsing 2005). The global and the local have many fronts and points of encounter, and they are not, nor have they ever been, purely local events (Ayora-Diaz 2007a). Hybrid cultural formations are the norm, even though sometimes, when their history remains hidden, they are mis/recognized or mis/represented as ‘authentic’ local products. The heterogeneous composition of the population of Yucatán (in ethnic, class, religious, political, and social terms) must be taken into account in order to explain the fragmentary nature of the local appropriation of the global, whether it is represented by ideals of modernity imported by Yucatecans from Europe and the US, or enforced by central Mexican elites, or promoted by supra-national agencies and transnational corporations (e.g., McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund), or born from the local consciousness of the global. Hence, whenever we face local cultural appropriations, we need to consider the ways in which the unequal structure of power is inscribed into emerging cultural hybrids. Bhabha (1994) has suggested that this type of cultural hybridity fosters ambivalence among individuals found in interstitial locations. In Yucatán we see this ambivalence at work: in some instances, the local replication of Mexican or foreign cuisines is, at the same time, an affirmation of cosmopolitanism and a rejection of the local. For instance, some Yucatecan families celebrate Mexico’s Independence Day (16 September) by inviting friends over for supper and serving Mexican foods, such as pozole or chiles en nogada— recipes that they learned to cook while living in Mexico City or by exploring Mexican cookbooks. Both dishes are representative of central Mexican culture, although the former was created in the state of Jalisco and the latter is, according to Pilcher (1998), an adaptation of an Italian recipe. At these celebrations, hosts and guests eat Mexican food and drink tequila, while in the streets of downtown Mérida, Yucatecan and non-Yucatecan families walk around, listening to or joining in the cries of “Viva México!” In other instances, however, Yucatecans appropriate alien foods as an affirmation of their power to transform a foreign dish by making it palatable to their own taste. Yucatecans have several versions of cowboy beans (frijoles charros) and pozole, both originally Mexican highland recipes. In Yucatán, the former has developed into a baroque stew of red beans—known locally as frijoles caprichosos (whimsical beans)—that includes beef, pork, chorizo, bacon, ham, onions, tomatoes, sweet and serrano peppers, cilantro (or parsley), cumin, and, as a finishing touch, beer to stop the boiling. More recently, some meat cuts have been borrowed from northern Mexican cookery. Yucatecans buy arracheras (flank steaks) already marinated, or marinate and grill them at home, to be consumed with cowboy beans and quesadillas or melted cheese. To marinate an arrachera, Yucatecans often use the juice

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of Seville oranges, adding garlic and a pinch of steak recado, thus making the dish more appealing to their taste. Another common side dish when eating meat cuts is guacamole. While each region has its own version of guacamole, and Yucatán is no exception, the earliest first edition cookbook that I have found that contains this recipe is a book that was published in Mexico City in the early 1950s by a central Mexican cook (Velázquez de León 1952).27 In fact, I have often heard central Mexicans and foreigners complain about how difficult it is to find ‘authentic’ guacamole in Mérida.28 Lastly, after it was introduced in Mérida by Mexican restaurants during the 1970s, pozole is increasingly becoming a popular dish to cook at home, and many young people even consider it a Yucatecan dish. Although, early on, Meridans were content to eat pozole every so often in those restaurants, some supermarkets made the type of corn required for the dish (hominy) more widely available. At first, it was imported frozen, later in refrigerated bags, and now in cans. Hence, domestic cooks feel free to use their imaginations and experiment, creating versions of pozole that sometimes make only nominal reference to the original dish—although some may seek to recreate the authentic recipe from a cookbook or an Internet download.

Local Cosmopolitanism Some foreign cuisines have had a long-standing presence in Yucatán, which has allowed for their gradual incorporation into the regional culinary field. Starting in the nineteenth century, when they were still subjects of the Ottoman Empire, a large number of migrants from Lebanon and Syria moved into Yucatecan cities and villages, climbing their way up the economic and social ladder throughout the twentieth century (Ramírez Carrillo 1994). There are, in contemporary Yucatán, many successful academics, businesspeople, restaurateurs, professionals, and politicians of Lebanese or Syrian origin. Other groups of immigrants who arrived during the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, such as Germans, Italians, Chinese, and Koreans, left no immediately recognizable imprint in the Yucatecan culinary culture. The Lebanese and Syrians, however, have contributed to the culinary field with a number of recipes that not only are sustained by their families, but also have been integrated into everyday Yucatecan food preferences. One possible reason for the ready acceptance of these foods is that the Arab-inflected cuisine from southern Spain is one of the main influences on the Yucatecan culinary field. Before the arrival of Syrian and Lebanese immigrants, Yucatecans were already using ingredients such as cumin, cilantro, different citrus fruits (lime, lemon, and various types of oranges), garlic, onions, olives, capers, and almonds. The introduction of sesame seeds, grape leaves, pine nuts, and eggplant did not alter significantly a diet that was already Mediterranean-informed. Also, since

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the new arrivals were Catholic, they consumed similar meats (pork, poultry, and fish), plus lamb. When I was a child growing up in Yucatán, I encountered street vendors who set up improvised stands outside school grounds and sold fried versions of kibbeh. Attending Triple-A baseball games, along with other Yucatecans, I found, among other snacks, this same food, and it can still be bought from itinerant vendors on the beaches along the northern shore of the peninsula, where Meridans frequently enjoy their Easter and summer holidays. On the beaches of ports such as Celestun, Chelem, Chicxulub, Progreso, and Telchac, vendors walk among families sitting on the sand, carrying in glass boxes pieces of fried kibbeh, along with a jar of pickled red onions and habanero pepper and a jar of shredded pickled cabbage for garnishing the kibbeh, which they serve on pieces of paper. Even today, in conversations with other Yucatecans, I have found that many are surprised when I tell them that kibbeh is a Lebanese dish and not, strictly speaking, Yucatecan. For example, a state tourism officer once introduced me to a Japanese woman who wanted to write a book about Yucatecan cuisine. She approached me with the offer that whatever I told her would serve to enlighten Japanese consumers about Yucatecan food and would promote Yucatecan cuisine abroad. During our conversation, which took place in the presence of the tourism officer, I commented to her that Lebanese cuisine is important in shaping the taste of Yucatecans, to the extent that some dishes have been granted naturalization as ‘Yucatecan’. The officer could not hide his surprise when I mentioned that kibbeh is one such dish. When visiting Yucatecan cantinas, it is common to find garlic cream, baba ghanoush, and hummus among the different botanas served to accompany the patrons’ beers. Over time, Yucatecans have incorporated their own adaptations of Lebanese recipes into their cooking preferences. Some domestic cooks prefer to bake and others to fry their kibbeh. It is common to find shoppers at local markets requesting beef and pork to be ground together, along with onion and spearmint leaves. They take the ground meat home and mix it with germinated wheat to make small patties, which they bake or fry. Although I have found Yucatecans who like and eat raw kibbeh, it is among friends of Lebanese origin that I have found a greater inclination for this recipe.29 Yucatecan families have also adapted and prepare their own versions of hummus and baba ghanoush. On account of the relative scarcity of grape leaves in the regional market, Yucatecan and Lebanese cooks have replaced them with cabbage leaves for wrapping a blend of rice and meat with spices. According to Infante Vargas and Hernández Fuentes (2000), a common Yucatecan garnish—known locally by its Maya name, x’ni pek or ‘dog’s nose’ (so named because it is prepared with enough minced habanero pepper to wet the nose)—is a Yucatecan variation on the Lebanese tabbouleh, a

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salad widely consumed among Mérida families. As I will discuss in the next chapter, despite the incorporation of many Lebanese foods into the everyday Yucatecan diet, Lebanese recipes are seldom included in the cookbooks that specialize in Yucatecan cuisine. In contrast to Lebanese and Syrian foods, which were introduced mostly during the twentieth century into the Yucatecan culinary field, French, German, Italian, and Spanish recipes were already included in late-nineteenthand early-twentieth-century cookbooks. Their presence in everyday Yucatecan cooking attested to the cosmopolitanism of Yucatecan elites, who had appropriated recipes of foods they enjoyed during their trips to Europe, AngloAmerica, and the Caribbean. Hence, pastas have been for many decades a common everyday food (although they are often overcooked until they turn soggy), k’ol is a local adaptation of béchamel sauce, sausages have been included into festive diets, and paella is a common alternative to puchero at Sunday family tables. It has only been in recent years that the increasing number of Italian, German, and Spanish immigrants has made Yucatecans acquainted with a larger variety of ‘authentic’ national foods. Consequently, even if somewhat slowly, Yucatecan families are increasing their domestic repertoire of international foods, although the contribution of these other cuisines is not yet as significant as that of Lebanese cooking. While Yucatecans enjoy German, Italian, and Spanish forcemeats (ham, prosciutto, sausages, pâtés), they are not inclined to make them. The Yucatecan weather is not favorable for the preparation of domestic sausages and hams, as the high temperatures and humidity spoil the meat before it can be safely cured. Hence, Yucatecans purchase these products, already prepared by specialists,30 and grill, fry, steam, or bake them at home. Chinese foods, too, have found little and sporadic interest on the part of Yucatecan domestic cooks. This food is easily and cheaply available at restaurants and fast-food joints, or for take-out and home delivery, reducing the interest in learning how to cook these recipes.

Assemblages, Hospitality, and the Yucatecan Culinary Field The multiple contemporary global, post-national, and post-colonial rearticulations of cultural, social, political, and economic processes, previously understood as autonomous spheres, have acted to destabilize the meaning of firmly entrenched practices and discourses, including those of the anthropological discipline. Whether we choose to label this general dis/organization as ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’, it is now more commonly accepted that the seemingly transparent relationship between concepts and the ‘reality’ that they are presumed to describe no longer holds (de Landa 2006). The partition

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between community and society charted by Tönnies ([1887] 1955) and by the sociologists and anthropologists he inspired, including Redfield (1941), who became an obligatory reference in studies of Yucatecan society, and Wolf (1957), led to a number of overlapping conceptual oppositions. The opposition between society and community was analogous and conceptually linked to those between complex and simple social forms, global and local, modernity and tradition, urban and rural, cosmopolitan and parochial, technologically sophisticated and unsophisticated, rational and irrational, (scientific) knowledge and (popular) beliefs, democratic and authoritarian, and secular/bureaucratic and religious/charismatic forms of authority, to name a few. Based on these oppositions, anthropologists and sociologists have sought to explain the different mechanisms that cultures forge in order to bind persons to persons, thus forming exclusive and meaningful groups. It was in these efforts that the (sometimes implicit) influence of Tönnies was deepest: individuals in communities were seen as bound to each other by blood ties, by face-to-face everyday interactions, and by the authority of the elders. Communities, furthermore, were to be found among ‘traditional’ groups. In contrast, modern society undermined and dislocated these ties. Other, secondary affiliations emerged in urban settings, allowing the recreation of community-like associations that, on account of their artificiality, proved to be of a transient nature (see Ayora-Diaz 2003; Vargas Cetina 2005a, 2005b). Most contemporary anthropologists find unsatisfactory both these rigid dichotomies and the presumed transparency of the concepts that inform them (Amselle 1999; Augé [1994] 1998; Rabinow 2008). Today, concepts such as ‘community’, ‘locality’, and ‘tradition’ have currency in everyday language. However, a large number of sociologists and anthropologists have grown dissatisfied with the neatness and boundedness of these concepts and have proposed alternative frames for the analysis of contemporary processes and events. Even so, academic discourse often becomes entangled with the endorsement of new social movements, leading to an ambivalent use of previously taken-for-granted terms (Escobar 2001; Gibson-Graham 2006; Latour 2005; Trouillot 2003). It is no longer possible to assume that in urban settings one finds forms of sociality that are opposed to those that characterize rural groups—or, alternatively, that communities of lifestyle, expressive communities, communities of taste and consumption, and ephemeral associations are exclusive to post-industrial societies and cannot be found in societies of the ‘south’ (see, e.g., Featherstone 1991; Friedman 1994; Hetherington 1998). Rural societies in Yucatán have been involved, since the nineteenth century, in transnational migratory flows from other parts of the globe into Yucatán and between the peninsula and other Central American states (as well as to the United States and Canada), making unsustainable the argument that rural inhabitants (Maya or not) preserve

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one and only one form of communal organization and a static form of sociality that has remained unchanged over time.31 In addition to the effects of having assimilated Chinese, Korean, Yaqui, and German immigrants within rural Yucatecan societies, we need to account for the effects of remittances that migrants send back home, triggering forms of conspicuous consumption among their village’s relatives, as well as for the effects that returning migrants have over local everyday interaction as they reproduce locally alien forms of sociality that they embraced in their target destinations (Mexico City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Oregon, Portland, Dallas, Houston, among many cities). In consequence, I suggest that we need to look beyond conventional understandings of community in order to grasp effectively the current process of social and cultural change that characterizes Yucatecan urban and rural societies (Ayora-Diaz 2003, 2007a). Concepts such as ‘community’ and ‘locality’ reveal their shortcomings as soon as we have to take into account that Mérida’s population is made up of long-established families (both poor and wealthy); of immigrants from other Yucatecan cities and towns and from rural villages from across the three peninsular states; and, more recently, of growing numbers of immigrants from other Mexican regions and abroad, including Canada, the United States, Europe, and different South American countries. Today, in Yucatecan cities and towns, Yucatecans and non-Yucatecans alike engage in relations of translocal and transnational nature, and, despite the appearance of stability, the meaning of contemporary forms of sociability has changed. Confronted with ongoing social, economic, cultural, and political transformations, Meridans steer away from the belief in a monolithic regional culture, moving toward acceptance of post-national, post-colonial, and multi­ cultural configurations. In consequence, we need to explore different theoretical frameworks to understand changes that either point to new forms of emerging sociality or indicate the resignification of old ones. In this search for conceptual alternatives, I have found useful de Landa’s (2006) recuperation of the Deleuzian concept of ‘assemblage’. I find this theory productive against the familiar notion of seamless and bounded societies. Instead of assuming the existence of monolithic societies, the concept of assemblage forces us to take into account the multiplicity of forms in which individuals construct and articulate social interaction. This concept also challenges the attribution of unchanging essences to the modes of identity performed in the contemporary world. Furthermore, the contexts where assemblages are found need to be recognized for their heterogeneity and multiplicity, instead of their uniformity. Social relations are assembled in different forms, and in each particular place and time there are different modalities for the inclusion of individuals into assemblages (see also Patton 2000). Following the steps of Deleuze and Guattari’s ([1980] 1987) and de Landa’s

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(2006) arguments, I find it necessary to recognize the importance of a set of attributes that are common to all assemblages, even if to different degrees: (1) they are characterized by relations of ‘exteriority’; (2) they are involved in processes of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization; and (3) their form is constituted by the integration of their materiality and of expressive forms.32 These traits suggest that contemporary social assemblages are transient, unstable, and involved in continuous processes of recreation that challenge the presumption that societies are well-integrated, monolithic, static, organized, and self-controlled. In thinking about food and the politics of identity in Yucatán, I have had to take into account the ways in which social relations contribute to establish assemblages and their modes of interaction. In this context, it is particularly important to look at hospitality as a privileged cultural practice that Yucatecans deploy in their attempts to territorialize and reterritorialize the regional culinary field. Hospitality is a subject that has long occupied anthropologists (see, e.g., Ayora-Diaz 2000a; Satta 2003). If anything, this form of socio-cultural performance has proved ambivalent, with explanations ranging from subject-centered demonstrations of honor, self-respect, and shame to social manifestations of the host’s aggression toward his or her guests (Cowan 1991; Da Re 1998; Gilmore 1987; Herzfeld 1980; Pitt-Rivers 1968). The post-colonial fragmentation of the nation has exacerbated the ambiguities and tensions that remain implicit in the concept of hospitality and have further complicated our contemporary understanding of this socially engaged practice. Facing massive movements of populations triggered by economic inequality, political instability, war, famine, and the lure of the post-industrial world, citizens and representatives of nation-states have all appropriated and extended a culturally specific, small-scale understanding of hospitality to encompass the relationship among masses of newcomers and the established residents of a place. That is, nation-states, families, and individuals rooted in a territory define themselves as ‘hosts’ and the arriving immigrants as their ‘guests’ (Rosello 2001). This attempt to extend the meaning of a social, face-to-face, interpersonal, and inter-group practice to the relationship between nationals and large numbers of ‘guests’ has destabilized the moral content of hospitality. Current analyses of the phenomenon stress the conflict among moralethical-political codes inscribed in the exchanges between hosts and guests (themselves extremely varied assemblages). Consequently, today’s guests may be resignified in ways that characterize them, variously, as inoffensive persons (or groups) who are reliant on their hosts’ kindness and protection, or as a ‘horde’ of hostile invaders, or as social and economic ‘parasites’. These tensions and ambivalences are further complicated in situations of cultural colonialism and neo-colonialism, for example, when the guest is a colonialist settler who not only despises and refuses the local moral code and practice of

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hospitality but seeks to impose his or her own cultural and political understanding of it, or when the guest expects to be the beneficiary of local hospitality without giving anything back to the hosts in return (Benhabib 2004; Derrida 2000; McNulty 2007; Sassen 2000). Because hospitality entails a series of reciprocal obligations that can be enacted only through face-to-face engagements, it informs contemporary forms of Yucatecan sociality that seek to affirm local culture and to resignify its ‘others’. In Yucatán, hospitality plays an important part in the territorialization of social assemblages and in enforcing the local attachment to a culinary culture. Since this culinary culture coincides with the culinary field, it is important to recognize the effects of the repetition of culinary practices, such as the elaboration of recados, during the dissemination and establishment of normative practices. This repetition and standardization leads to the naturalization of taste, turning culinary products into a shared Yucatecan tradition. Despite the social, ethnic, economic, religious, and political differences that have a tendency to fragment Yucatecan society into different groups, the culinary field becomes co-extensive with the territory of the state of Yucatán and is shared, to a large extent, by all assemblages, supporting the imagination of a monolithic Yucatecan community and identity. The practice of hospitality supplements the territorializing effects of the repetition and standardization of taste that is fostered by the regional use of recados. The pedagogical and performative value of hospitality leads individuals and groups from different villages, towns, and cities in the state to act, at different times, as either hosts or guests of friends, relatives, and visitors. Hence, when Meridans visit friends in Valladolid, they receive food as a gift from their hosts. On such occasions, the food is selected from among those dishes that the hosts see as representative of the local taste. At the same time, in offering regional foods, they continue to repeat, re-enforce, and reinscribe in the territory the ‘proper’ taste of Yucatecan culture, thus maintaining the illusion of territorial co-extensiveness, cultural continuity, and, on this account, a shared common culture that founds their common values, viewpoints, and culinary preferences. Exchanges between hosts and guests reproduce the sense of community, and the values that local people associate with a common identity contribute to the territorialization of the Yucatecan culinary tradition, furthering the naturalization of local taste. For example, there are some specific dishes that Yucatecans often choose to serve to guests on special occasions. For wedding celebrations in rural villages and in towns, it is common to offer a meal of turkey in black or white stuffing. In these locales, weddings are often scheduled early in the morning or in the early afternoon. After the religious ceremony, guests arriving at the party are served small portions of steamed tamales (vaporcitos) or papadzules, along with a choice of drinks that include atole (corn porridge), cocoa, and

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alcoholic beverages, such as beer or cubas (rum or brandy mixed with cola). Following the appetizers, guests are served the main course, which is usually a portion of white and dark turkey meat along with servings of stuffing (called but in Maya). The meal is followed by the wedding cake, often a simple one that combines layers of cake and fruit jam covered with meringue. For large parties, in Mérida and other towns, it is common to hire a specialist to prepare cochinita pibil or to purchase large amounts of crackling and fried pork for preparing chicharra (minced crackling and pork bits mixed with minced cilantro, onions, tomatoes, habanero pepper, and the juice of Seville oranges). The regularity with which these dishes are served all across the Yucatecan territory marks the commonality of social bonds and confirms that both hosts and guests share a regional culinary tradition. In small towns and villages, festivities in honor of patron saints and/or the local Madonna not only draw visitors from other villages and cities but also encourage the temporary return of former residents who have migrated to cities, to other parts of the country, or sometimes abroad. Migrants, who often help to finance the feast, enjoy the entertainment and the food that the hosting families have ready for visitors (Lara Cebada 2007). According to Vargas Cetina (pers. comm.), during the vaquería, jarana dancers take breaks at different times during the evening to eat tacos or tortas of cochinita pibil and to drink some atole.33 Outside Mérida, cochinita pibil is frequently the dish of choice to offer visitors, while Meridans often serve baked piglet to their guests, as Mérida cooks are known to excel in its preparation. In Mérida, when families host friends or relatives, it is typically the woman of the house who prepares elaborate meals for which she has earned a culinary reputation. One woman who has hosted us several times never hesitates as to which meals to cook. She knows that her papadzules and pan de cazón are widely praised by her friends and family, and she is aware that they look forward to being served either of these dishes. Many residents of Mérida are also inclined to travel to other towns, cities, or villages when relatives or friends promise to prepare a Sunday puchero. For example, a friend of ours is always ready to cook chocolomo, when asked to do so by a group of friends, even though she is an attorney and, to prepare this meal, she must visit several markets in the city or sometimes even travel to certain villages to find the ‘right’ sort of meat and offal required for an ‘authentic’ rendition of the dish. Of course, hospitality rules require that those who act as guests must later be hosts. In each case, if the host promises to cook a regional dish, she or he must choose a dish of relatively complex preparation. Pork and beans is such a routine recipe that, notwithstanding its complications (mincing, dicing, boiling, roasting, marinating, pickling), some Mérida friends have suggested that they find it to be an unacceptable meal to be invited to.34 In this manner, through the exchange of visits and foods, hospitality affords the process of repetition,

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formalization, and standardization of everyday social interactions mediated by food. At the same time, it establishes the boundaries between Yucatecans and non-Yucatecans, contributing to the naturalization of local culinary taste. In recent years, Yucatecan society and identity have been subject to a process of deterritorialization—both from within and from without—that is progressively undermining the boundaries of the group and questioning the co-extensiveness of the Yucatecan territory with Yucatecan cuisine. The ‘natural’ community, presumed to exist during the territorialization of Yucatecan peoplehood and the development of the regional culinary tradition, is now being challenged by the fragmentation of Yucatecan society into a multiplicity of assemblages that, at times, coincide with alternative forms of identity formation. There is, for example, an expanding belief in vegetarianism and naturism that undermines, from a different location, the dominant carnivorous society and the long-established forms of sociality in which the consumption of meat is important. In addition, the affirmation of women’s rights has led many women away from their kitchens, and, due to their growing participation in the labor force, women now give less attention to culinary traditions that require long hours of preparation in order to produce elaborate meals. Although they are sometimes contradictory, nutritional fads, in tandem with concerns about body images and excess weight, are leading many women and men to follow regimes that repudiate local foods since, in the local imaginary, these foods are often linked to pork, fats, and corn (Pérez García 2004).35 In this context, new social assemblages emerge in which members are included by virtue of their economic capital and/or their political, religious, sexual, or nutritional inclinations. Members organize parties, dinners, or banquets, inviting friends whom they perceive as belonging to the same ‘community of meaning’ or ‘community of lifestyle’. However, individuals do not participate exclusively in a single assemblage. A person may be gay as well as naturist, and thus move from one assemblage to another, or individuals from one assemblage (e.g., Mexicans) might host individuals identified primarily with another (e.g., Yucatecans). In the end, the culinary practices of these different assemblages contribute to the internal destabilization of Yucatecan society, culture, and identity (in their monolithic conception) and to the fracture, deterritorialization, and denaturalization of Yucatecan taste and the regional culinary field. Additionally, through time, Mérida society has received waves of immigrants from other parts of Mexico and from various countries. At different times, and in varied circumstances, newcomers are hosted by Yucatecans who, through their hospitality, introduce their guests to the values and practices of regional society and to the food of Yucatán. On this type of occasion, local people use their hospitality to assimilate outsiders into existing assemblages, encouraging visitors or newcomers to adopt Yucatecan tastes and views. In

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recent years, as their numbers have increased in Yucatán and Mérida, immigrants have begun to form their own social, political, and cultural assemblages as arenas where they can exchange visits and share favored foods from their own homelands. Yucatecans are often excluded, unless they submit to the immigrants’ social and culinary codes. These assemblages become sites where Yucatecan gastronomy is deterritorialized—that is, immigrants refuse to accept the universality of Yucatecan cuisine within the Yucatecan territory, thus challenging the co-extensiveness of regional cuisine and territory. In response, Yucatecans are deploying strategies for the reterritorialization of Yucatecan culinary traditions in which hospitality plays an important part. As territorial mobility has become more common, and since the new assemblages that individuals form are characterized by fragile social bonds, the exchange of visits and food is being turned once again by Yucatecans into a mechanism for the constitution of social relations that territorialize their assemblages, endowing them with a feeling of permanence. Quintal Ávila (2006) has illustrated how, in some cases, people of different origins exchange foods that are culturally meaningful to each of them. In other instances, they exchange culturally neutral foods (e.g., pizzas, hamburgers, cakes, sandwiches, or fried chicken), so as to recreate and re-embed their identities. Through the exchange of food between local people and outsiders, and through the maintenance of an appearance of equality and reciprocity, these new assemblages are reterritorialized and given a sense of continuity that conceals their actual fragility. Sprawling neighborhoods are sites that are continuously occupied and reoccupied by transient dwellers, whose dual role as host and guest fosters the imagination of a community. Given the heterogeneous characteristics of the population in these neighborhoods, sooner or later, friends who are members of the assemblage change residence, and their ‘communities’ dissolve, revealing their ephemerality. Even though these strategies of reterritorialization are superficial, they help to recreate and naturalize the culinary field. Despite the growing fragmentation of Yucatecan society and the challenges to the monolithic understanding of Yucatecan culture and identity, hospitality continues to bond individuals into assemblages and contributes to the re-enforcement and reterritorialization of the Yucatecan culinary field.

Discussion: The Culinary Field and the Making of a Yucatecan Cuisine Throughout this chapter, I have argued that the Yucatecan culinary field is inclusive and open to external influences. Hence, it is a field in constant change, even if sometimes it may look static to those who produce it or those who see it from the outside. The Yucatecan culinary field has emerged from a

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constant appropriation of dishes, recipes, techniques, and technologies from different cultures, but mainly from European, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern gastronomies. This history of appropriation is due to the cultural colonization of regional gastronomy through the culinary values disseminated by European culture in general and by French chefs in particular. However, Yucatecans have constructed their culinary field not simply as a result of the imposition of values from alien food cultures but, more importantly, through the willing and ingenious appropriation, recreation, and hybridization of cultural and culinary values, usually performed by regional elites and members of the middle class. An outcome of this appropriation is the distinction afforded by the adoption of gastronomic norms, whereby regional elites are legitimated as the bearers of ‘high culture’ and their cultural values are disseminated within the region. Despite its openness, the Yucatecan culinary field does not blindly copy other cultures’ recipes; rather, it appropriates and adapts dishes to conform to local tastes. This process of appropriation/adaptation is manifested in changes in ingredients and cooking techniques and in the presentation of dishes to conform to the local preferences for flavors, aromas, textures, and colors in food. At home, domestic cooks repeat in weekly and annual cycles the use of recipes appointed for different days or seasons and employ ingredients considered crucial for the preparation of certain dishes to ensure that they are ‘traditional’. In the process, Yucatecans’ taste for food is naturalized. Yucatecans bracket the historical context that makes some ingredients available (or not) for their everyday consumption; instead, they perceive the use of ingredients as inherent to regional taste and to weekly and annual traditions. Hence, through the repetitive use of ingredients, through the use of recados to marinate meats, and through the extended use of some by-products (such as leftovers of Monday’s pork and beans, which are refried and served as an accompaniment to other dishes throughout the week), flavors and aromas become embodied as part of the Yucatecans’ ‘natural’ preference for Yucatecan cuisine. Facing the arrival of immigrants from other Mexican regions and abroad, Yucatecans have deployed their hospitality as a strategy to maintain the articulation of dissimilar and assorted social assemblages, regaining the experience of order, continuity, and cultural solidity. This is how a fragmented, fissured society can sustain the self-representation of a monolithic, seamless socio-cultural body. It is through assimilation of the foreign into the regional cultural body that Yucatecans can tame the multiplicity of cultural forms, values, social groups, and viewpoints. The exchange of food among different groups serves to affirm the values of regional culture and contributes to their enforcement as natural attributes of the Yucatecan people. It is in this context that Yucatecans appropriate the food of other Mexican regions and foreign cultures, adapting them to their already naturalized taste.

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In everyday domestic consumption, Yucatecans are not normally concerned with the cultural origins of the food they eat: in their eyes, these foods are Yucatecan. In fact, the local version of mole has long been an important part of the Yucatecan urban and rural diet, as is the case with many dishes originally imported by Lebanese immigrants. Over time, these foods have become part of the Yucatecan culinary field, and, due to their incorporation into the weekly and yearly dietary cycles, they have been repeated, standardized, routinized, normalized, and naturalized as part of Yucatecan culture. The Yucatecan culinary field emerges as a particular configuration of ingredients, recipes, techniques, and technologies that have been (and are still being) territorialized through their dissemination, repetition, and standardization in the homes of urban and rural Yucatecans. Family members expect to consume specific meals on specific days of the week and established special dishes for annual religious and civic festivities. In general, Yucatecans anticipate certain aromas, flavors, textures, and colors when they are promised Yucatecan food. Dishes appropriated from other cuisines are sometimes transformed by the inclusion of ingredients familiar to the Yucatecan palate, while other times it is through the application of cooking techniques that a dish is localized. These are often dishes that mark the private consumption of food, and they are the grounds on which the most selective, exclusive gastronomic field is built. The Yucatecan culinary field, thus, is one that institutes and establishes the boundaries of Yucatecan cuisine. Although contextually and historically open, the standardization and repetition of recipes across the peninsular territory help to demarcate the boundaries that define Yucatecan gastronomy. In the next two chapters, I discuss the strategies through which the gastronomic field bifurcates from the culinary field and is constituted as a meaningful and culturally defining social institution.

4

Cookbooks and the Gastronomic Field



From Minor to Major Codes (and Back)

In this chapter I discuss, through an examination of Yucatecan cookbooks, the part that this form of minor literature plays in the construction of the Yucatecan culinary and gastronomic fields and its ties to the production of Yucatecan identities. I argue that the gastronomic field bifurcates from the culinary field without diverging or becoming an independent cultural site. The culinary and gastronomic fields remain in close relationship, sometimes refashioning each other and sometimes incorporating changes from their association with other cuisines in the global foodscape. Both fields, however, are imagined and produced according to a code that diverges from Mexican cuisine. Hence, I examine the contents of cookbooks of Yucatecan cuisine in a con/text that promotes the cuisines of central Mexico as the normative blueprint for a sole homogenizing and hegemonic national cuisine. The cookbooks of central Mexican cuisine reflect a preference for techniques, ingredients, and recipes that have been regionally naturalized on account of the local availability of ingredients in a highland environment. Also reflected are the advantages that derive from the centralized administration of national natural resources and of the international market of commodities in Mexico City, which hosts the federal bureaucracy and the national government. This complex context of culinary creation has led to the imposition of the rules of central Mexican cuisine throughout the Mexican territory. Formalized and standardized as recipes, these rules have been disseminated (along with the implementation of national integration policies) and have turned cookbooks into an important instrument for the institution of central Mexican preferences as the national taste. Although the generalization of one local taste (central Mexican) does not go unchallenged within the borders of the Mexican nation, central Mexican institutions have traditionally controlled printed and visual media, continuously engendering practices that sustain the historical process of internal cultural colonization. To illustrate this point, we will look at a cookbook by Rivero Molina (2004), which is marketed with the title Cocina Yucateca: Lo que se comía en – 153 –

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mi casa (Yucatecan Cuisine: What We Ate at Home). Instead of replicating recipes from the regional gastronomic tradition, as suggested by the title, it re-establishes the dominance of the nationally homogenizing code of central Mexican cuisine. There are omissions in this cookbook and substantial changes in the recipes that reveal the ways in which they have been adapted to the logic of central Mexican taste. This lack of cultural consonance is made more evident in later sections of this chapter when I describe, through an examination of Yucatecan cookbooks written mostly by and for Yucatecans, the elements and attributes that characterize the Yucatecan culinary and gastronomic fields. The cultural politics implicated in cookbooks such as Rivero Molina’s is reflected in the co-optation and negation of regional cultural specificities that professional and domestic cooks from different regions have taken great pains to craft ever since Yucatán achieved independence from Spain during the first half of the nineteenth century. As I will be arguing, it is through the repetition, standardization, and routinization of recipes that the multiple cookbooks of Yucatecan cuisine, along with those of Mexican cuisine that include Yucatecan recipes, in their combinative effects, provide a multi-layered, multi-axial textual space for the invention, affirmation, and defense of a distinct Yucatecan cultural code. Rivero Molina’s (2004) cookbook claims to be dedicated to Yucatecan cuisine. In the introductory text, an unidentified writer alerts the reader that the volume “contains recipes coming from the Mexican culinary traditions and habits forged throughout the history of cuisine in Mexico and other parts of the world, but prepared according to the taste [of Yucatecans] and, overall, to the Yucatecan temperament” (emphasis added). Then he or she adds that these are recipes that the author, Josefina Rivero Molina, “ate at home: they are not only from Yucatecan cuisine but rather they are the majority of the dishes she has enjoyed during her life, prepared everyday in the bosom of her family, and with them she wishes to convey the flavors that have prevailed in the palate and memory of many Mexican families, pregnant with the flavor and the warmth of its people” (ibid.: 5; emphasis added). What is striking at the outset is the patent incongruity between the book’s title and its contents. Those who purchased the book because they wanted to get acquainted with or to acquire some knowledge about how to prepare meals from Yucatecan cuisine have instead acquired a cookbook of Mexican cuisine, written by a Yucatecan who grew up in Mexico City and who has adapted her own personal taste, and the recipes she includes, to the taste of the inhabitants of the central Mexican highlands. Rivero Molina’s cookbook is divided into 10 sections containing 477 recipes, of which only 20 are clearly recognizable as belonging to the Yucatecan culinary field (see table 4.1).1 Looking at the contents of this cookbook, those who are even slightly acquainted with Yucatecan cuisine (let us not

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Table 4.1. Proportion of Yucatecan recipes in relation to the total of recipes included in the cookbook Cocina Yucateca Recipes

Soups Eggs Fish Fowl Meat Legumes Appetizers Salads Sauces Bread Dessert Total

Total

Yucatecan

Percentage

47 32 44 43 79 47 43 36 16 33 57

3 1 3 3 2 0 2 0 2 1 3

6.0 3.0 7.0 7.0 2.5 0.0 5.0 0.0 12.5 3.0 5.0

477

20

4.0

Note: Percentages have been rounded. Source: Rivero Molina (2004).

forget that the book is addressed primarily to the Mexican market) cannot help but be startled by the troubling absence of a number of dishes that are considered iconic of the Yucatecan canon. Some well-established recipes from the Yucatecan culinary and gastronomic fields that are missing include, among the soups, sopa de lima, Moors and Christians (rice and black beans), and a soup of noodles and black beans.2 Among the egg recipes, eggs motuleños and papa­ dzules are conspicuously absent, even though these Yucatecan ‘classics’ are decades old. Among the recipes for poultry, the author omits several important dishes, including turkey in black stuffing, turkey in white stuffing, and turkey or chicken in escabeche. In the meats section of the cookbook, there are only two Yucatecan dishes: pork and (black) beans and stuffed cheese. Lost from the cook’s memory are cochinita pibil, baked piglet, Valladolidstyle pork loin, and poc-chuc, all of which have been influential in shaping the Yucatecan gastronomic field. Also missing are a large number of dishes that belong to the more inclusive Yucatecan culinary field, as well as others that can be found in other Mexican states but have regional inflections. The recipe for chocolomo, a Yucatecan dish, is not present, nor are any of the multiple recipes for beef tongue, calf’s liver, and pig’s feet, which Yucatecans prepare differently from treatments in other Mexican regions. Examining the section on appetizers (which appears later in the cookbook), we can see that many iconic recipes are absent: panuchos, salbutes, papadzules, longaniza (from Valla­dolid), and sikil pak are nowhere to be found. Most of these are

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dishes that any restaurant or food stand of Yucatecan food in Mexico City or in Yucatán would necessarily include in their regular menus, as they are all viewed as indexical markers of Yucatecan cuisine and gastronomy. When we look more closely at the ingredients recommended by this cookbook, we find another revealing set of differences with respect to Yucatecan cuisine. Yucatecan dishes, in both the culinary and the gastronomic fields, are characterized by the use of some ingredients and the exclusion or the limited—almost conditioned—inclusion of others. For example, in Yucatán the preferred meats are pork, turkey, chicken, and fish, in that order, although chicken often replaces turkey at home or in some economic kitchens and restaurants. Beef is consumed in a number of regular, everyday dishes, but throughout the years Yucatecan cookbooks have shown a consistent displacement of beef in favor of poultry, fish, and pork. Despite this, Rivero Molina’s cookbook includes 43 recipes for beef compared to 34 for pork (with 6 recipes using ham as the main ingredient) and only 3 for turkey. Overall, most recipes in the meats section are borrowed from Mexican culinary traditions rather than Yucatecan. Another meaningful departure from Yucatecan gastronomy in this cookbook is the use of dairy products. Yucatecan recipes typically recommend only a limited use of cheese (usually Edam or fresh), seldom prescribe the use of sour cream, and do not call for topping dishes with shredded processed cheddar cheese (of any color).3 Yucatecan dishes are aesthetically different from Mexican ones. Most recipes iconic of Yucatecan gastronomy avoid the generous use of tomato sauces,4 favoring other types of sauces instead. While Yucatecan cuisine relies on abundant spices, in general the food is not spicy hot, in contrast to central Mexican taste. Yucatecan sauces are not made with ground or blended hot chili peppers but instead are often inspired by European sauces. Thus, k’ol, despite the Maya name, is a white sauce inspired by béchamel sauce but made without milk products; pipián is a sauce based on ground roasted squash seeds; escabeche is a stew that takes its inspiration from the combination of ingredients used in Spain to pickle vegetables and meats; black sauce is made with ground chili peppers, bay leaves, cumin, thyme, and oregano; and the tomato sauce employed to garnish some dishes is made by roasting tomatoes, garlic, and habanero peppers, which are kept whole so that they add flavor and aroma but not piquancy to the sauce. Examining Rivero Molina’s cookbook of so-called Yucatecan cuisine, one finds many recipes where the instruction is to fry in butter, to cover with sour cream sauces, or to top or mix with cheese. In addition, some of the recipes that are Yucatecan, such as codzitos (an appetizer), are prepared in ways that are foreign to Yucatecan taste, resembling more a burrito or a northern Mexican flauta. Many of the recipes in this cookbook are rich in chili peppers (serrano, jalapeño, chipotle, pasilla, guajillo) that are native to Mexican

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regions other than Yucatán, and one seldom finds ingredients listed that are proper to the region and that Yucatecans consider critical in the preparation of many regional dishes. These missing ingredients include xkat ik, habanero and max chili peppers, achiote, chaya, mac’ulam (known as hierba santa in central Mexico), sour lima, and ground squash seeds, to name a few. This cookbook can be seen as part of the global market of the ‘exotic’, whereby national and regional gastronomies are turned into commodities that allow access to the habits of—and enable one to get a taste of—the ‘Other’. In essence, it is an example of how cookbooks of national cuisine become vehicles for the cultural colonization of other groups within a society (Heldke 2001). Rivero Molina’s cookbook illustrates how the commoditization of local culinary knowledge leads to the appropriation of a group’s cultural production by members of a dominant society who assimilate it into a homogenizing national cuisine. Keeping in mind the historically unequal structure of power relations between the Mexican nation and the Yucatecan region (see chap. 1), we can understand how the misleading title Yucatecan Cuisine: What We Ate at My Home conceals the fact that this is a cookbook of Mexican cuisine that, by appropriating the name of a region, misrepresents Yucatecan gastronomy.5 Yucatecans have invented and embodied a particular taste and set of preferences for an assemblage of ingredients that are repeated, standardized, and formalized in recipes in local cookbooks, consequently resulting in a code that has become generally accepted among Yucatecans. While in the culinary field cookbooks show a cosmopolitan inclusiveness, within the gastronomic field they are normative instruments that are purified and reflect a tendency to exclude recipes, ingredients, techniques, and culinary procedures that cookbook writers and restaurateurs perceive as alien to Yucatecan culture, etiquette, and taste preferences. One implication of this strategy is that, over time, Yucatecan cookbook writers have progressively instituted—formalized and standardized—a set of rules and norms concerning what is to be eaten, and in combination with what; the appropriate techniques for food preparation and consumption; and the times when different dishes should be eaten. Cookbooks by different Yucatecan authors repeat and thus help to reinforce these rules. As normative texts, these cookbooks also contribute to establishing the boundaries of Yucatecan gastronomic culture, excluding explicit references to the sources that have informed it. Consequently, and in general, cookbooks are not always easily identifiable as belonging purely to one or another ‘tradition’ or to one or another field. After all, the Yucatecan culinary and gastronomic fields that I have identified are the cultural invention of regional domestic and professional cooks who appropriated, adopted, and adapted recipes from diverse culinary traditions and, gradually, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, invented Yucatecan cuisine.

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Yucatecan cookbooks can also be understood as containing a prescriptive constellation of recipes that lead to the naturalization of Yucatecan taste; that is, they prescribe specific techniques and technologies for cooking and limit the use of ingredients to those that are considered essential for Yucatecan cooking. This constellation mirrors the seasonal availability of ingredients, the market availability of technologies, and the regional taste, which has developed in a social, political, and environmental context that has made ingredients, their combinations, and cooking procedures and outcomes ‘naturally’ acceptable to the palate of Yucatecans.6 Thus, it is through their culinary practices that domestic and professional cooks form a bridge between the culinary and the gastronomic fields, often traversing their boundaries and leading to their constant and mutual refashioning. In this way, cookbooks reflect the dynamic and changing relationship between these fields that leads to mutual transformations, although, depending on the context, this can be a slow change. From a narrative standpoint, we can perceive different moments when, progressively, the culinary field spawned the gastronomic field and, at other times, the gastronomic brought about changes in the culinary. In this sense, Yucatecan gastronomy must be understood as a changeable field of recipes, techniques, technologies, aesthetic forms, and ethical values that, at specific historical moments, may adopt seemingly rigid forms and prescriptive rules, which, despite slow and constant changes, make it appear to be a stable field. Since external and internal processes of negotiation condition the form and content of the gastronomic field, it can be expected that, at different points in time, cookbook writers and restaurateurs become more receptive to the introduction of recipes or to changes in established ones. However, there are also times when, for political, economic, or other cultural reasons, they perceive local ‘tradition’ to be threatened and seek to defend and protect it from changes that, in their view, are damaging to its ‘identity’. In this chapter, I also argue that it is important to look at cookbooks as textual sites where Yucatecan identity is constructed. We need to pay attention to these textual apparatuses as transpositions from other cultural textual and practical strategies that are locatable, constitutive of, and constituted by an imaginary that allows and naturalizes one particular form of self-understanding of the regional, while subordinating other different, potentially competing viewpoints. In this sense, cookbooks are objects consumed in order to find or provide an everyday anchoring for regional identities (among other reasons), but they are also sites where power is exerted between groups (see, e.g., Bower 1997a). Cookbooks are texts that often take (or are assigned) a marginal position in the public sphere. There are many social and cultural vehicles that are more easily and readily recognizable as anchoring grounds for constructing identity or for conveying the sense of belonging to a group of people. Examples

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include national or regional histories, literature, theatre, and political commentary. The analysis of cookbooks faces problems that are often recognized: once written, we do not know if they were bought; if bought, whether they were read; if read, whether they were followed; and if followed, whether the moral values and political views they insinuate were shared, accepted, or rejected. Nonetheless, there is a widespread consensus regarding the value of cookbooks as indexical markers of individual or group preferences, tastes, values, and moral-ethical-political standpoints (as will be further discussed below). In disseminating recipes that contain formalized, standardized, explicit, and repetitive prescriptions (and implicit proscriptions) on what a domestic or commercial cook should employ, cookbooks ensure that a dish is coherent and consistent with the culture that it is said to represent and recreate. Cookbooks constitute a minor literary genre that dictates the use of ingredients, techniques, technologies, eating etiquettes, and aesthetic principles. Because their users are typically women, and because they are seen as commonplace items that are often hidden away in drawers, they have traditionally received little attention as cultural artifacts. Moreover, cookbooks of Yucatecan cuisine are doubly minor because they express the culture of a group that is considered subordinate to the national narrative. Cookbooks disseminate explicit and complicit assemblages of ingredients for specific dishes that are seen regionally and nationally as vehicles for the ‘Yucatecan soul’ or are considered to be illustrative of the ‘Yucatecan temperament’. However, this reading can be further complicated by the recognition that there may be competing claims as to which values constitute the Yucatecan soul and temperament. Thus, current hegemonic values can be challenged when posited as the privileged expression of Yucatecan identity. Because it encompasses different ethnic, national, economic, religious, gender, age, and cultural groups, Yucatecan society is diverse enough to prevent the creation of a long-lasting, culturally monolithic society that could be taken as a single identity formation, and this regional diversity is increasingly reflected in Yucatecan cookbooks. Yucatecans do not tend to see their cuisine as a regional variation of an all-encompassing Mexican cuisine; rather, they see it as a different cuisine that has developed in spite of the homogenizing/hegemonic force of a national gastronomy. Yucatecan cuisine is a cultural and textual form inscribed in an assemblage of shifting multiplicities.7 It is on account of this position that I find useful Deleuze and Guattari’s ([1980] 1987) understanding of the ‘minor’ and the ‘major’ as arising not from quantitative differences but from power inequalities. Mexican nationalist culture has profited from the amplifying effects provided by the control of state institutions, which remains in the hands of central Mexican elites. During the invention of the Mexican nation, the regions and the regional identities that they gave rise to have often been

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discounted as chauvinistic and parochial responses to the progressive and enlightened culture of Mexico City (Campos García 2002; Schmidt 2001). Regional cuisines have been co-opted under the swathe of the Mexican nation and are often underrepresented or misrepresented in Mexican cookbooks or in histories of Mexican cuisine when written by central Mexicans (see, e.g., Flores y Escalante 1994; Juárez López 2000; Long-Solís and Vargas 2005). However, as Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987) have argued, it is only because the major (a code, language, culture, or gastronomy) is created that the minor can arise within the social and political interstices and affirm its own legitimacy. That is, during the same process whereby Mexican culture colonized and appropriated the diversity of regional culinary traditions, Mexican cookbooks have provoked the affirmation of regional cuisines, leading to the apparently paradoxical fragmentation of Mexican national cuisine into a multiplicity of regional and local cuisines. An unintended consequence of acknowledging the diversity of Mexican cuisine is that it has provided the con/text for the assertion of regional cuisines. When writers of cookbooks of Mexican cuisine recognize the existence and importance of regional cuisines, they give visibility to and promote regional cuisines, along with their territorial attachments and cultural specificity. The minor, then, is a fractured fragment that, unhinged from the major, becomes autonomous and unfolds the potentialities of a group’s cultural codes. Along these lines, we also need to recognize that it is the process of ‘becoming’ that characterizes the internal transformations of the minor and the major, as well as their inter-relations. That is, neither the major (Mexican gastronomy) nor the minor (Yucatecan cuisine) are fixed entities, even though, at times, individual actors may see and treat them as natural, objective, and knowable products of culture and society. Both major and minor are engaged in continuous processes of revision and, consequently, of expansion and contraction, enabling cooks (domestic and professional) to appropriate and to reject elements considered proper or alien to the national or regional gastronomic traditions—and what is thought of as proper is changing all the time. We also need to take into account Deleuze and Guattari’s ([1975] 1986: 86) provision that sometimes the minor has the tendency to become major. On the one hand, the minor Yucatecan culinary field, which has derived from the regional appropriation of foodstuffs, ingredients, recipes, techniques, and technologies originating in different parts of the world, as well as including those of the indigenous people of the region, has been played against the homogenizing tendencies of a major Mexican gastronomy. On the other hand, the transformation of the Yucatecan culinary field into a major gastronomic field affirms and vindicates what is exclusive and particular about the regional food culture, yet, at the same time, it has a subordinating effect over the different regional cultural sources of its own tradition. Thus, Maya, rural

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peasant, Lebanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean influences are sometimes mis/recognized but kept subordinate to the logic of the ‘Yucatecan tradition’ and turned into a set of regional minor traditions.

Cookbooks and Everyday Life As objects with a distinct content, cookbooks are an important marker of Yucatecan homes and the culinary preferences of their members. Many women who grew up in Yucatán and learned to cook often find little use for cookbooks. While helping their mothers or directing the domestic maid, they have gradually appropriated and disseminated the techniques, rhythms, steps, and knowledge of the ingredients necessary to prepare most of the dishes in the family’s quotidian diet. Although time-consuming, the procedures for preparing pork and beans, pork loin in tomato sauce, steak casserole, breaded or fried fish, potaje, or puchero are, once learned and mastered, very straightforward, and most of these women would hardly need a cookbook to guide them through the process. Of course, there are women who, when young, refused to enter the kitchen as a form of resistance against onerous domestic rhythms and patriarchal authority and, later in life, have found themselves in the position of reciprocating their friends’ hospitality. Thus, some women have been compelled to look for textual guidance in order to be able to prepare elaborate dishes from the Yucatecan culinary tradition. Even some of those who did learn how to cook, especially if they have limited time available for kitchen endeavors, have to create their own shortcuts, or follow standard abridged versions, when cooking complex dishes that have been promised for relatives or friends. For example, if for his birthday a son has asked his mother for stuffed turkey in a chili pepper black sauce (pavo en relleno negro), the home cook finds herself facing a time-consuming, labor-intensive recipe, especially if she wishes to cook it from scratch, which would also involve preparing the recado from roasted chili peppers and other condiments that irritate the respiratory tract of those who are not used to making it. However, the mother can choose a shortcut and purchase her recado from other women who have the know-how (and the economic necessity) to prepare it at their homes, often in rural villages in the Mérida hinterland, or she can buy the industrially processed variety available in supermarkets. With this recado in hand, the cook can prepare the sauce for simmering ground pork and, later, for basting the turkey, after she has stuffed it with the ground meat and boiled eggs. Alternatively, some domestic cooks may choose to bypass the turkey altogether and prepare only the ground pork with black sauce and boiled eggs, thus cooking plain but de relleno negro (black stuffing), which they and their family or

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friends can consume with corn tortillas, tostadas, or baguettes, either as their main meal or as an appetizer. It is also common, on birthdays or other special occasions, not to cook but instead to order food to be delivered. Popular choices include ceviche and seafood cocktails; grilled meats, quesadillas, and charro beans; and Chinese food, pizzas, and seafood paella. Other options include buying and preparing chicharra (as described in chap. 3), or hiring a specialist to cook and serve baked piglet, cochinita pibil, turkey in white or black stuffing, chicken pibil, or fish tikin xik. In consequence, many contemporary Yucatecan women find that they are very seldom in need of a cookbook. When they do need one, they typically borrow a friend’s book in order to write down the recipe for a desired dish, or, more recently, they conduct an Internet search to locate a Yucatecan recipe to their liking. Hence, in visits to friends, I have found that some do not own any cookbooks of Yucatecan food; instead, they keep a notebook with recipes copied from friends’ cookbooks, other recipes dictated by friends who know how to prepare particular dishes, and printouts from recipe Web sites. In contrast, other women I know have in their possession a number of cookbooks. Some received a Yucatecan cookbook as a wedding present, while others have acquired one because they did not learn how to cook when growing up, and every so often their husbands have a craving for homemade Yucatecan meals. Among those who own cookbooks, I have found in their possession cookbook collections that include an assortment of culinary traditions, including cookbooks of Mexican, Mediterranean (particularly Italian, French, and Spanish), Chinese, Japanese, and Lebanese cuisines. All of these culinary traditions are represented in the local urban foodscape, where people find some of these cuisines to their liking and then seek to replicate favorite recipes at home. Among immigrants to the region, many have developed a taste for the local fare and purchase Yucatecan cookbooks at bookstores. Some women, who are more inclined to spend time in the kitchen, have told me that they have mastered a number of regional recipes. Others have told me that, to their husbands’ displeasure, they lack the cultural know-how— and the patience to acquire it—and have given up in their attempts to replicate the recipes that they find in regional cookbooks. In the ever-changing cultural landscape of the city, there are now Yucatecan cookbooks available that seek to satisfy a growing demand, both from residents in the city and from tourists (curious or captivated by Yucatecan flavors) who wish to cook Yucatecan recipes for their friends in their places of origin. Some cookbooks available in the market are lacking in content or details, some are more comprehensive, others are quaint and outdated,8 and some, like Rivero Molina’s, misrepresent the local culinary tradition by appealing to the taste of non-Yucatecans. However, it is clear that there has been, in the last 20 years, an increasing production of cookbooks of

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Yucatecan cuisine that seek to promote—locally, nationally, and internationally—the regional gastronomic tradition and, at the same time, highlight the particular culture of the region. It is in the face of these transformations that this chapter seeks to address the configuration and institution of the Yucatecan gastronomic field. Located in an expanding and fragmented urban foodscape, Meridans often find themselves in need of asserting, reclaiming, and promoting cultural forms to which they attach affect for their own society, culture, and identity. Given that Yucatecan cuisine has developed in a way that is markedly different from that of other Mexican regions, local entrepreneurs and middle-class families with the means and contacts to promote regional culture have embarked on a mission to defend and advance regional gastronomy. They take this field to be one of the arenas where Yucatecan culture can counter what they look on as an attack mounted by foreign cultures. In what follows, I discuss the importance of cookbooks in the invention of national cuisines and identities and illustrate the ways in which cookbooks represent Mexican national cuisine in Mexico and abroad, focusing in particular on the part played by Yucatecan cuisine in the textual representation of the nation.

Cookbooks and the Nation In contemporary Yucatán, men and women purchase cookbooks primarily in local bookstores, where they find a great variety of world cuisine recipe books. Bookstores at shopping malls display whole collections of cookbooks, many translated into Spanish by multinational publishing corporations. They find cookbooks of Spanish cuisine and tapas (often translated from English); French, Provençal, Bordeaux cuisines, and French pastries and desserts; Italian cuisine, pastas, pizzas, and salads; Greek and Mediterranean cuisines and Mediterranean salads; Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cuisines; Moroccan, Tunisian, Turkish, and Middle Eastern cuisines; Argentinean, Brazilian, Caribbean (in general), Cuban (in particular), and Mexican cuisines. As is typical in the global market, a cookbook’s cover usually depicts in colorful pictures an exotic location and/or an iconic dish to entice shoppers to buy the book—although I have found, side by side, cookbooks of French, Mexican, and Italian recipes that each feature, on their covers, the picture of a dish covered with generous amounts of melted cheese, making their differences undistinguishable at first sight. Moreover, sellers may not always be concerned with a cookbook’s accuracy. I have been at a bookstore in Mérida when a shopper asked the bookseller for a book of Yucatecan cuisine, and, probably because it was the only one available, or perhaps because of its high selling price or because the seller knew little about cooking, the customer was

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advised to purchase Rivero Molina’s cookbook. In general, the buyer of a Yucatecan cookbook expects instructions on how to prepare his or her favorite dishes from Yucatecan gastronomy, not dishes from other Mexican regions. Thus, cookbooks are texts that not only provide cooking instructions but also help to construct and reproduce a culinary code, outlining the boundaries of regional cultural food habits. It is on this account that it can be helpful for the anthropological analysis of contemporary food cultures to pay attention to the textual procedures whereby cultures are territorialized and deterritorialized. Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987) have looked into the articulation of the processes that they describe as ‘territorialization’ and ‘deterritorialization’ (see also de Landa 2006). We can identify a process of territorialization that occurs during the construction of a national gastronomy. The survival and legitimacy of this cultural invention requires that cultural producers engage in the institution of boundaries that constitute the geographical limits of their authority. These boundaries delimit the site where its rules can be enforced. During the process of invention, a territorialized Mexican national cuisine, to be representative, must encompass the culinary diversity of the large national territory, and, in so doing, it reveals (while seeking to hide) the fragmentary nature of its own cultural narrative. At the same time that the territory of a national cuisine is fixed, ‘lines of flight’ interrupt its ostensible continuity. On the one hand, Mexican national gastronomy is exported and appropriated in different Mexican regions and abroad. Along with its appropriation, Mexican food is adapted and, therefore, changed into locally palatable versions. On the other hand, in a concurrent transformation, local groups resignify the partial and fragmentary inclusion of their recipes in the national cuisine as the legitimization of their claims to cultural particularity (Ayora-Diaz 2010a). These fractures in the body of the nation create the interstices where local hybrid cultures are vindicated and promoted against the force of hegemonic and homogenizing nationalist ideologies. This latter transformation is what initiates the process of deterritorialization—that is, the process whereby a monolithic national cuisine fragments into a multiplicity of regional cuisines. Many authors have already made the argument that cookbooks are important textual sites for the expression of cultural values, identities, and sexual, cultural, and ethnic politics (Floyd and Forster 2003; Ireland 1981; Leonardi 1989; Neuhaus 1999). Cookbooks are tools with which authors not only inscribe recipes for the preparation of meals but also formalize the rules for women’s demeanor, urging women to take their place and accept their responsibilities at home, and, hence, to be ‘proper’ housewives (Neuhaus 2003; Theophano 2002). Alternatively, many women have appropriated this textual mode to express their disagreement with the values of dominant patriarchal society and to promote or endorse alternative codes of behavior for women (Forster 2003; Innes 2006; Newlyn 2003). This is exemplified by

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a recent cookbook, published in Yucatán and titled Comidas al chingadazo (Meals in a Stroke) (Arjona Martín 2006), which is addressed to ‘modern’ women with little time and interest in cooking.9 Furthermore, cookbooks have been important instruments in the construction of a sense of community. While some cookbooks were written with the intention to erase the diets of cultural minorities, replacing them with a homogeneous and homogenizing diet based on the religious and moral worldviews of the majority (see Levenstein 1988; Shapiro 1986),10 members of different ethnic groups and minorities, deprived of other means of cultural expression, have used cookbooks as a forum to present themselves in a positive light (Bardenstein 2002; Bower 1997c; Fôret 1989; Siporin 1994). However, putting themselves in a positive light has often meant to represent themselves according to the values and viewpoints that inform the dominant code; hence, these groups and minorities inadvertently contribute to their own cultural colonization. In a local sense, cookbooks are textual sites where the memory of a group is inscribed and, therefore, where gender, religious, ethnic, and social class identities are locatable. In addition, they are sites where a group’s values and identity are affirmed in the public sphere (Bower 1997b; Cotter 1997; Longone 1997). In the larger order of things, cookbooks are also tied to the imagination of national communities (Appadurai 1988; Floyd and Forster 2003). In the United States, for example, after an early use of imported cookbooks, American recipe books that recognized the particularities of the native ingredients available to settlers began to appear. After independence was obtained from Great Britain, the names of new recipes, such as, for example, Republican Cake (see Wilson 1957), attempted to reflect the newness of the nation. But in fact, these early cookbooks had a limited regional impact and did not inspire a national cuisine. The concerted efforts of social reformers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had the effect of disseminating the austere and abstemious values of the Protestant elite, resulting in a bland cooking style that, although generalized, never constituted the foundation of a ‘national’ cuisine (Levenstein 1988; Sack 2000; Shapiro 1986). From early on, this prescriptive mode was challenged by many alternative culinary projects that came up against it (Belasco [1989] 2007; Kamp 2006). There were, however, other historical experiences where the invention of a ‘modern’ nation-state involved the invention and promotion of a national cuisine. These are all experiences of creativity and cultural appropriation, despite the fact that some of these societies may for some time convey an image of closure.11 For example, from the 1960s on, Japanese cooks invented a homogeneous national cuisine that negotiated among Japanese elite and local, regional, British, and US tastes (Cwiertka 2006: 113–114). Cookbooks also played an important part in constructing a homogeneous image of the contemporary cuisine of India, both

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within the national territory and abroad (Appadurai 1988). In France, the Parisian elite forged a haute cuisine that depended on the ingredients it drew from the different French regions and colonies, and that imposed culinary standards, nationally and internationally, through the authority of a few chosen cookbook writers (Ferguson 2004; Mennell 1985; Trubek 2000). In Italy, one cookbook is said to have singlehandedly accomplished the culinary unification of the nation: Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, which was first published in 1891 (Camporesi 1970). Mexico underwent its own process of culinary unification. Early on, before the War of Independence, the Creole population of the center of Mexico distanced itself from the culinary mode of Spaniards, highlighting the indigenous roots of New Spain’s cuisine (Juárez López 2000). After independence, as Jeffrey Pilcher (1998) has shown, the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary governments of Mexico engaged in the project of changing the Mexican diet. During the nineteenth century, the diets of the urban poor, of rural peasants, and of indigenous people were perceived as being at odds with the modernization of the country. In a nationalist impulse, twentieth-century governments would later reverse this standpoint by glorifying the virtues of a rural indigenous diet. Cookbooks played an important part in the construction of a national identity. Promoting the cuisine of central Mexicans, while concealing the culinary diversity of the country, they incorporated a few regional recipes to pay lip service to the tastes of regional elites and to integrate their recipes into a national culinary tradition. In general, until recently, regional cuisines were often despised as quaint and parochial, especially when contrasted to the culinary sophistication of the inhabitants of Mexico City (se also Pilcher 2004). Despite their cultural subordination, maintained by central Mexican control of the mass media, Yucatecan cooks have devised culinary strategies to mark the gap between central and regional cultures. Cookbooks of Yucatecan cuisine repeat a selection of recipes in which a number of ingredients are always included. An immediate contrast between Mexican and Yucatecan food that the reader of cookbooks of these cuisines can detect is the distinct preference for different ingredients. Other than in recipes for stuffed cheese or pastries, Yucatecan cookbooks rarely call for dairy products, such as cheese or sour cream, and do not recommend frying foods in butter or margarine. Yucatecan meals are cooked in pork lard or in olive oil or other vegetable oils. Many Yucatecan recipes recommend marinating meats in the juice of Seville oranges, and many sauces are prepared with the juice of Seville oranges or limes instead of vinegars. Limes are often used as a condiment for one’s food. Also, before pickling in vinegar or the juice of Seville oranges, onions are usually blanched, thus reducing their tang and making them more pleasant to local tastes. Among the spices, Yucatecan recipes, like those from many other Caribbean

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cuisines, often prescribe achiote, cumin, allspice, black pepper, cloves, garlic, onions, oregano, parsley, epazote, cilantro, and chaya leaves. Yucatecan recipes call for the use of local breeds of chili pepper (xkat ik, habanero, and max) and prefer to use black lima beans. Instead of being primarily tomato-based, sauces are varied. If one is familiar with the aromas and flavors of these spices, herbs, and condiments, it is possible to imagine that Yucatecan dishes have distinct flavors, aromas, and colors that are different from Mexican dishes. In the remainder of this chapter, I will show how the Yucatecan gastronomic field derived from the regional culinary field. In this sense, the gastronomic field constitutes a narrowing and refinement of the culinary field. While the latter is inclusive and encompassing and may include some ingredients from Mexican cuisine, the gastronomic field erects firm boundaries between Mexican and Yucatecan gastronomies. Hence, as described in chapter 3, Yucatecans may find chipotle pepper to their liking and cook dishes at home with this ingredient. However, when cooking a ‘proper’ Yucatecan dish, chipotle becomes a proscribed ingredient, as it would be perceived as altering the ‘original’, ‘authentic’ flavor of a Yucatecan dish. In the following sections, I seek to illustrate the ways in which the culinary and gastronomic fields are interconnected in Yucatán and the ways in which we can conceptualize the process by which the territorialization of Yucatecan gastronomy contributes to the shaping of Yucatecan identities.

Cookbooks and the Emergence of the Yucatecan Culinary Field Yucatecan cookbooks show how the elements that constitute and define the regional culinary field shift over time, maintaining a recognizable identity that separates it from other Mexican and foreign cuisines while, at the same time, exposing the cultural difference that the nation attempts to conceal. Additionally, the gastronomic field, as a systematized, formalized, institutionalized, and (seemingly) rigidified system of cookery, strongly affirms that difference. Because of their intertwined relationship, the Yucatecan culinary and gastronomic fields share aromas, flavors, colors, and textures. The historically constructed arena of Yucatecan food is maintained through a continuous exchange between the culinary and gastronomic fields that facilitates their recognition as being related and as being Yucatecan. The regional culinary field emerged from a ‘poor’ cuisine, restricted to the use of locally grown ingredients, and evolved into a cuisine of the better-off that expanded to include ingredients obtained from the global market (mediated by Caribbean trade routes), affirming both the cosmopolitan inclination and the local roots of those who created it. This cuisine was invented, legitimated, and promoted

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by the Yucatecan elites, the literate class of Yucatán’s nineteenth-century society, even if the hands that did the cooking were those of unidentified female laborers seized from poor barrios or from rural villages in the state. Emerging from its Caribbean, European, and North American connections, this cuisine was sustained by Yucatecan elites who derived their wealth from the henequen plantations around the city of Mérida. It was female members of the middle class who wrote these cookbooks for the benefit of local families who could read and afford to buy imported ingredients. Hence, one can find recipes for oysters, mussels, and imported ingredients, some of which, the writer instructs, should be arranged on a silver platter before being served (Navarrete Arce [1889] 1910). Early-twentieth-century cookbooks corresponded to the sensibility of a growing literate middle class who had appropriated the ideals of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’. Their recipes, like those of their counterparts in other parts of the world, incorporated processed foods and artificial flavorings, and, when necessary, replaced unavailable European ingredients with cola drinks and boxed, processed cereals, contributing to the ephemeral emergence of a ‘modern’ cuisine characterized by the artificiality or the processed nature of many of its ingredients. It is, however, from the quicksand of the culinary field that Yucatecan cooks and restaurateurs have drawn the recipes for the invention of the regional gastronomic field. The recipes that have been enshrined in the pantheon of Yucatecan dishes are all the product of the hybridization of diverse culinary traditions that have been merged into a culturally specific Yucatecan cuisine.

The Nineteenth-Century Yucatecan Culinary Field The post-independence period in Yucatán and Mexico was a time when both national and regional cuisines were forged. Parallel with the development of Mexican and Yucatecan identities, there were changes in the region’s culinary field.12 To explain how the Yucatecan culinary field was born I turn to discuss the contents of three cookbooks published during the nineteenth century: Prontuario de cocina para un diario regular (Kitchen Guide for a Regular Dayto-Day) by Maria Ignacia Aguirre (1832); El sabor de Yucatán: Consejos para la comida y el buen vivir (The Flavor of Yucatán: Advice for Food and Good Living) by Manuela Navarrete Arce ([1889] 1911); and Antiguo manual de cocina yucateca: Fórmulas para condimentar los platos más usuales de la penín­ sula (Ancient Handbook of Yucatecan Cuisine: Formulae for Seasoning the Most Usual Dishes of the Peninsula) by Hortensia Rendón de García ([1898] 1938). These three cookbooks are characterized by a growing inclusiveness of recipes that stresses local-cosmopolitan connections and an expansion in the use of ingredients that would eventually characterize Yucatecan cuisine.

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El cocinero mexicano (The Mexican Cook) (Anon. [1831] 2000) was published in central Mexico one year prior to the publication in Yucatán of Kitchen Guide for a Regular Day-to-Day (Aguirre [1832] 1981), and there are striking differences between them. The first is their length. The Mexican Cook was published in three volumes and includes 1,972 recipes. In contrast, Kitchen Guide includes only 93 recipes. Second, the title The Mexican Cook, albeit deceiving in the sense that it refers primarily to Mexico City’s cuisine (and not a national Mexican cuisine), stresses that its location is Mexico, while the title Kitchen Guide does not invoke its connection to Yucatán. Third, The Mexican Cook is highly cosmopolitan, including many recipes that are borrowed from European cuisines, while Kitchen Guide reveals the poverty of ingredients available at that time on the peninsula of Yucatán. As the book cover for Kitchen Guide announces, Aguirre ([1832] 1981) was “well-known for her exquisiteness in the art [of cooking].” Her 93 recipes, on only forty pages, were written in the contemporary précis style—that is, these ‘recipes’ are basically short reminders of the ingredients necessary for a dish with no further information. For example, with regard to the recipe for pebre (ibid.: 24),13 a dish still consumed in Yucatecan homes, one reads (in the passive voice current in cookbooks of its time): “Either chicken or rooster is boiled, it is later roasted, the liver is ground with toasted bread, and it will be dissolved in wine, adding onto it roasted garlic, and ground [black] pepper, it is then fried in [pork] lard with onions, and later it is joined in a casserole with water to boil, adding cinnamon.” No measurable quantities are specified, not even in qualitative terms, such as ‘a dash’ or ‘a pinch’. The cook was expected to know how to use and adjust each of the ingredients. Still, the description of the recipes contained in this guide prefigures an inchoate Yucatecan culinary field. In the preface to the reprint of this cookbook, Renán Irigoyen, one of three Mérida chroniclers, points to the poverty of the cuisine of that time. However, reassuring his twentieth-century Yucatecan readership, he notes that, later on, the wealthy class (los pudientes) developed local cuisine in new ways, in keeping with their tastes, thanks to the economic boom supported by the henequen industry at the end of the nineteenth century (ibid.: 10). However poor this cuisine was, we still detect its particularly peninsular traits. Among the ingredients used as condiments in the cuisine of early independent Yucatán, we find allspice, cilantro, parsley, oregano, garlic, onions, sweet pimientos, cumin, cloves, black pepper, coriander seeds, cinnamon, achiote, saffron, lime, Seville oranges, wine, and vinegar. Thus, we find that since the early history of Yucatecan cooking there has been a marked preference for certain ingredients that distinguish it from those favored by central Mexicans: only 7 recipes in Kitchen Guide call for beef, while 15 are based on pork (with only 1 prescribing ham as the main ingredient). There are also 19 recipes for fish, 18 for chicken (in contrast with contemporary Yucatecan

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cooking, there are no recipes for turkey), 18 for vegetables, 4 for sea turtle, 3 for land turtle (hicotea), 3 for pigeon, 3 for eggs, 1 for rabbit, and 1 for goat. Later cookbooks from the time of the Yucatecan economic boom show an expansion in the number of recipes included, underscoring the creativity of domestic cooks and the wealth of Yucatecan families. The recipes in these latenineteenth-century Yucatecan cookbooks display frequent gestures toward cosmopolitan modern culture, as did earlier cookbooks from central Mexico (see Anon. [ca. 1800s] 2002, [1831] 2000). Many recipes in the Yucatecan cookbooks of this time period are explicitly tied to French, Italian, and Spanish culinary traditions, while recipes with an indigenous inflection are either forsaken or overwhelmed by the number of non-indigenous recipes. After the publication in 1832 of the Kitchen Guide, Manuela Navarrete Arce ([1889] 1910) published the next Yucatecan cookbook, titled The Fla­ vor of Yucatán: Advice for Food and Good Living.14 This is the first regional cookbook I have found that makes reference to its territorial/cultural inscription. In the introduction to this volume, which is clearly addressed to Yucatecans of substantial economic means, the author suggests the use of double layers of tablecloths, to be removed at different moments during dinner, so that diners can always eat on a clean surface. She also prescribes the use of an array of different plates, forks, and knives during the meal, recommending that the food be accompanied by wines, champagne, and liquors, followed by coffee and ice cream. Since she lived in Valladolid, a small city in eastern Yucatán, it is unlikely that these recipes were intended to address an audience beyond the local elite. Also important to note here is that, from the first paragraphs of this book, Navarrete Arce makes explicit suggestions that the cook and the physician should work together and that, when being served, the meats (or fish) should be accompanied by condiments in side dishes, so that certain tastes and flavors are not forced upon those who may not find their consumption agreeable. Here we can find the roots for the Yucatecan practice that we have described elsewhere (Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2005a) concerning the use of spicy hot sauces as optional garnishes and the refusal to impose on guests the consumption of aggressively hot sauces. This practice is upheld today by many Yucatecans, underlining the contrast with central Mexicans’ predilection for spicy hot foods and their tendency to disregard the taste preferences of their companions at the table. Navarrete Arce’s The Flavor of Yucatán includes 264 recipes, almost three times as many as those found in Aguirre’s 1832 précis. Among these, 128 recipes are for sauces and meals, while 136 recipes are reserved for the confection of breads, pastries, sweets, cakes, preserved fruits, ice cream, and other desserts. This cookbook illustrates a first step toward the institution and dissemination of the principles that characterize the taste values promoted by the contemporary Yucatecan culinary field. For example, in the section for

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poultry, there are 6 recipes for turkey and 38 recipes for chicken, pigeons, and quail. Also, although we cannot know when these dishes were originally created or by whom, this is the first cookbook in which some dishes that are today canonical of Yucatecan gastronomy make a written appearance: escabeche oriental (pickled turkey oriental style, with ‘oriental’ referring to Valladolid because of its location in the eastern part of the state) and pavo relleno de chile (turkey stuffed with chili peppers), which corresponds to today’s turkey in black stuffing and was included in early-twentieth-century cookbooks as ‘turkey in black stuffing Valladolid-style’. In Navarrete Arce’s cookbook we also find 36 recipes for meat, among which 13 are for pork and 6 for beef, while the remaining recipes provide instructions for various preparations of offal, rabbit, and goat. In 12 of these recipes the author does not indicate what type of meat is to be used, suggesting that the domestic cook is supposed to know what meat is being referred to when these recipes call for carne (meat). There are also 26 recipes for fish and other seafood, along with suggestions for cooking land turtle. Four of the recipes are for different types of escabeche, which is a local variation of a Spanish recipe apparently first modified in Valladolid.15 We also find an early Yucatecan recipe for cod Biscayne-style. Again, as in the other two nineteenth-century Yucatecan cookbooks, recipes are presented in the précis mode. In Navarrete Arce’s book we find a more cosmopolitan orientation converging with the presentation of regionally specific recipes (although no recipe could be said to belong to the Maya, indigenous, or peasant cultures). The ingredients recommended for the preparation of dishes reinforces the notion that the cookbook addresses those in better-off households who can afford a variety of cooking ingredients that include different wines (red, white Jerez, Malvasia, and sherry), olive oil, vanilla, butter (recommended in a couple of dishes), almonds, hazelnuts, capers, olives, raisins, saffron, cinnamon, coriander seeds, sesame seeds, nutmeg, cumin, cloves, Castile pepper, mustard, Spanish sausages, bay leaves, marjoram, oregano, cilantro, parsley, tarragon, thyme, celery, garlic, onions, radishes, citrus (including sour lima and Seville oranges), vinegars, plus a few local ingredients such as epazote, xkat ik pepper, sweet pepper, and chaya leaves. Most of the recipes that require frying recommend the use of either olive oil or pork lard. Only 4 recipes out of 128 suggest the use of butter (1 recommends that butter be used only if “good olive oil” cannot be found), 1 calls for milk, and only 2 recipes indicate the use of grated cheese to top the dish when served. The third Yucatecan cookbook published in the nineteenth century, under the authorship of Hortensia Rendón de García ([1898] 1938), was titled Ancient Handbook of Yucatecan Cuisine: Formulae for Seasoning the Most Usual Dishes of the Peninsula. As with The Flavor of Yucatán, the original has remained difficult to locate.16 This cookbook contains 790 recipes divided into

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nine sections—three times as many as in the preceding cookbook by Navarrete Arce. As with that volume, the ingredients listed in Ancient Handbook strongly suggest that, in order to follow the recipes, the household’s cook had to have sufficient disposable income. This cookbook, like many of its type and era, underscores its lateral connections to other regions of the world. Among the total of recipes, 53 have names that make reference to their European origins: 25 refer to Spain (e.g., valenciano, malagueño), 12 to France (provenzal, bor­ dalesa), 9 to Italy (milanés, parmesano), 4 to England, 2 to Germany, and 1 to Holland. Six recipes are attributed to Cuba, and 6 are called americanas, suggesting that they were probably adapted from US cookery. There are also 10 recipes named after other Mexican regions or states, and 15 dishes that have today become iconic of Yucatecan cuisine.17 In contrast to The Flavor of Yuca­ tán, Ancient Handbook includes 6 recipes with a recognizably rural, Maya, or peasant influence in the section titled pastas de maíz (corn cakes). Regarding the ingredients required to prepare these recipes, in 228 recipes the origin of the meat is explicitly mentioned, with 42 recipes naming pork and 52 naming beef. A problem in reading this ratio is that there are 134 additional recipes that do not specify the type of meat to be included; that is, these recipes instruct to boil or fry meat but give no indication as to the animal source, relying instead on the implicit, shared knowledge of housewives from that era. For example, in some recipes the author indicates to use lomo de res (beef loin) and in others lomo de cerdo (pork loin), but in the majority of the recipes she instructs only to use lomo (loin) without specifying from which animal. Partaking in local knowledge and experience, I could infer in some cases that the ingredient could be beef, while in others it could be pork, but it is impossible to ascertain what the author meant 62 years before my birth. Also, some recipes for tongue specify beef but others do not; in general, however, it is beef tongue, and not pork tongue, that is consumed in Yucatán. Other recipes indicate to cook kidneys or liver, but without mentioning the source animal. There are also 5 recipes for lamb and 3 for rabbit. The section on poultry includes 130 recipes, of which 36 are for turkey. There are no differences in the use of condiments with regard to the earlier cookbook. If anything, the richness of this cookbook allows for the identification of 55 recipes that remain current in the contemporary Yucatecan culinary field. Noteworthy is the mention of stuffed cheese in this cookbook, as it is the earliest appearance of this dish that I have found and contradicts the notion advanced by later cookbook writers who link the creation of the dish to a visit of the Dutch royalty to the archaeological site of Chichén Itzá in the 1950s (Arjona de Castro and Castro Arjona n.d., ca. 2000; Carrillo Lara 1994; Hamman 1998). Unfortunately, it is impossible to know whether this recipe was in the original edition or was added to a later one, as the seventh edition from 1938 is the only one that I had access to. Also, this is the first

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Yucatecan cookbook where domestic cooks receive instructions on how to prepare “tacos” (Rendón de García [1898] 1938: 134). The use of quotation marks in the original suggests that this food format was an innovation at the time that the book was printed. Even a later book, published by Velázquez de León (1952), provides a recipe with instructions on how to prepare tacos. Although Ancient Handbook is now hard to find, readers of the early twentieth century were able to acquire and use it to guide their cooking practices at home. On this account, this cookbook is important as a text that bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and allows us to grasp the growing inclusiveness of the regional culinary field. Ancient Handbook includes many more recipes than The Flavor of Yucatán (790 against 264). While it is also written in the précis mode, it encompasses a larger number of European, Mexican, and Yucatecan recipes, plus a variety of recipes that could be read as ‘international’. Others that are variations on a given recipe are named simply “Another”; for example, a recipe for “Rosbif” (the French term for roast beef) is followed by another recipe titled “[An]other” (i.e., another recipe for Rosbif). Also, one can find several recipes with the same name. For example, there are two different recipes for cod Biscayne-style among eight recipes for cod. There are also six recipes for mechado: two for tongue, two for “meat,” one for liver, and one for veal. This variety of recipes allows for family variations in the preparation of the dish, and all are authorized as legitimate readings of the ‘original’ text. Thus, I would suggest that Navarrete Arce’s The Flavor of Yucatán and Rendón de García’s Ancient Handbook were instrumental in the gradual and progressive codification of the Yucatecan culinary field. It is on their footsteps that later cookbook writers would codify—and refine—both the culinary and the gastronomic fields. These cookbooks also show us an instance of what Bhabha (1996) has called ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’: they engage in a local process of appropriation of cultural elements from foreign cultures that was often supported by the commercial and cultural connections and exchanges that Yucatecan elites maintained with elites of other nationalities. At the same time that this appropriation allowed for the invention and codification of Yucatecan cuisines, it imported the seeds to grow, locally, forms of cultural subordination that concealed contemporary Maya and peasant contributions to the food culture of the state, while gesturing toward the great Maya civilization of pre-conquest times.

Early-Twentieth-Century Cookbooks and the Institution of the Culinary Field Twentieth-century housewives most certainly were able to find later editions or reprints of earlier cookbooks. However, by the time that these became rare and difficult to find, other cookbooks had emerged to take their place in

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kitchen drawers. When I conducted my research, I was unable to find printed copies of late-nineteenth-century cookbooks, but more recent ones were still in circulation. In fact, from the time I was growing up, I remember seeing, at my parents’, at relatives’, and at my friends’ parents’ homes, copies of either of two volumes: Cocina Yucateca: Cocina y repostería práctica (Yucatecan Cuisine: Practical Cuisine and Pastry-Making) by Concepción Hernández Fajardo de Rodríguez (n.d., ca. 1930), or Cocina Yucateca (Yucatecan Cuisine) by Lucrecia Ruz viuda de Baqueiro ([ca. 1950] 2000). Neither of these cookbooks has a date of original publication, and the former even lacks the date of its current printing.18 Several women (friends, relatives, and acquaintances) have told me that they own Concepción Hernández’s Practical Cuisine. Some showed me their old, stained and torn copies, with missing covers and pages, and affirmed that they still consult this book whenever they need to cook something that they do not prepare very often. I have also been told that sometimes their daughters borrow the cookbooks to copy recipes into their kitchen notebooks, and some complained of losing copies that they had lent to friends or relatives. Many Yucatecan recipes can be found in different versions, and even though one may not find a recipe of her or his liking, one can always find an authoritative voice that lends support to individual taste. Other friends have shown me their worn copies of Lucrecia Ruz’s Yucate­ can Cuisine. Some inherited the copies they own, and others have kept them for many years. As with Practical Cuisine, the original publication date for Ruz’s cookbook is unknown. However, her descendants continue printing it. In a reprint dated 2000, one learns from the back cover that the author selected her recipes from her own family tradition: her father was the owner of a famous Yucatecan restaurant, Itzá (which has been out of business for a long time). One also learns that, during the 1940s, Ruz was in charge of preparing foods for presidents of Mexico during their visits to Yucatán. Other than the text on the back cover, the cookbook has no other accompanying information or narrative. Both books have appropriated the ‘modern’ format for the presentation of recipes, listing the ingredients in one column and then explaining the steps that the cook should follow to prepare the dish. Although the volumes lack any explanation about the reasons that motivated the authors to compile and publish the recipes, the title text that both books share, Yucatecan Cuisine, indicates the authors’ goal of affirming a distinct culinary tradition that deserves a name of its own. These cookbooks seek to reflect the Yucatecan food preferences, and the recipes they contain, to a large extent, mirror today’s culinary field. To my knowledge, many of the recipes contained in these books are not consumed any longer, while others have become more sophisticated and integrated into the gastronomic field. For example, these

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cookbooks, like the ones preceding them, include several recipes for beef tongue, calf’s liver, kidneys, brain, tripe, and pig’s feet. Many of these recipes were destined to disappear from more recent Yucatecan cookbooks, although one or two may be retained for the benefit of cooks who may still wish to replicate them at home. In contrast with the late-nineteenth-century Ancient Cookbook, which included 790 recipes, the cookbooks produced in the early twentieth century show a gradual purification of their contents and a reduction in the number of recipes they contain. Thus, the older of the two books discussed here, Practical Cuisine, contains 708 recipes, while the more recent volume, Yucatecan Cuisine, has cut the number down to 417, making these the last two extensive Yucatecan cookbooks that sought to reflect the culinary diversity of regional tastes and food preferences. In fact, in Practical Cuisine we find a decline in the number of references to foreign cuisines: European gastronomic cultures are referred to in only 30 recipes (11 from Spanish regions, the most favored country), and other Mexican regions in only 4 recipes (two dishes are called simply “Mexican”). In contrast, 38 recipes are clearly identifiable as belonging to either the Yucatecan culinary field or the Yucatecan gastronomic field. Interestingly, Practical Cuisine contains a long section titled “Section of everyday recipes of easy preparation for new housewives.” This section includes 90 recipes of which 28 are commonly found in contemporary everyday domestic cooking and are locally recognized as part of the Yucatecan taste.19 Practical Cuisine reflects the emerging trend to use canned products, although those listed were usually hard-to-find items (baby corn, salmon, tuna, truffles) imported from other Mexican regions or from abroad, rather than locally available produce. Along the lines of Practical Cuisine, Lucrecia Ruz’s Yucatecan Cuisine shows a similar reduction of recipes attributed to foreign cuisines. Only 29 dishes have a foreign reference: 11 are said to come from Spanish regions, 6 from French regions, 4 from Italian regions, 3 from Germany, 2 from England, and 1 each from Austria, Cuba, and the US. In reference to Mexican regions, one recipe is called “Campechana” and one “Veracruzana.” Compared to earlier efforts to organize regional cuisine, Yucatecan Cuisine could probably be seen as the most consequential attempt to codify and institute the Yucatecan culinary field. From its 417 recipes, a total of 99 can be recognized as everyday preparations among contemporary Yucatecan families. This includes a large array of pork, fish, seafood, and poultry dishes that are still being consumed at home in the present day, and 31 of these dishes are now included in the menus of different restaurants specializing in regional Yucatecan cuisine. This is the earliest cookbook in which I have found recipes for sopa de lima, green cilantro soup, baked piglet, eggs motuleños, xkat ik peppers stuffed with cazón (baby shark), and panuchos.20 Also, this cookbook

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underscores the importance of turkey in the regional diet. Published some 120 years earlier, Ignacia Aguirre’s Kitchen Guide includes no recipes for turkey. Yucatecan Cuisine, on the other hand, includes 33 recipes for turkey out of 66 poultry recipes, with the remainder being for chicken (5 duck recipes are included in the section on fish and seafood). No meaningful difference is reflected in the use of beef and pork, as the volume contains 29 recipes that use beef as the main ingredient and 31 that use pork. In 17 additional recipes, the source of meat is not mentioned at all. Yucatecan Cuisine is also generous in the number of recipes for beef tongue (seven), brain (five), and kidney (four), while it includes only two each for pig’s feet, liver, and tripe. This was probably the cookbook that inaugurated the Yucatecan appropriation of some products that were previously not associated with cookery: for example, it contains a recipe for pork marinated in cola.21 Together, Practical Cuisine and Yucatecan Cuisine can be seen as having an enormous influence on the territorialization of Yucatecan cuisine during the first half of the twentieth century. While maintaining their reference to other international cuisines, these books began to stress recipes for dishes created locally, providing clear instructions on how to prepare them. Some of the recipes had a direct relationship with the peninsular territory, especially those based on foodstuffs fished from local sea waters, including turtle,22 duck, mahi-mahi (locally called dorado), rubia (snapper), shrimp, mero (grouper), and those hunted in the cities’ hinterlands, such as wild turkey, rabbit, quail, and venison. Even in the cities, families often kept a few chickens (for both meat and eggs) or a turkey, and small rural producers made pork available to city dwellers. In recent years, the Yucatecan pork industry has grown to such an extent that Kekén, a local producer that dominates the pork market on the peninsula, produces monthly 1,000 tons of meat for export to Korea and Japan and 10,000 tons of meat for national consumption.23 In contrast, beef husbandry has, over time, been displaced from the city of Mérida, shifting toward the northeast of the peninsula in the area surrounding the town of Tizimín.24 Besides being instrumental in the gradual but progressive institution of the Yucatecan culinary field and in disseminating and promoting the recipes for a number of dishes that today are iconic of Yucatecan cuisine, these two texts can also be seen as establishing and codifying the ingredients that are defined as proper to Yucatecan cookery. In the process, the authors of cookbooks became endowed with the authority to define and codify the use of ingredients, recipes, techniques, and cooking styles that characterize Yucatecan gastronomy today, making it recognizable both in Yucatán and elsewhere. Theirs was, no doubt, a cuisine that relied heavily on the everyday presence and responsibility of women in the home’s kitchen. This was also a cuisine that preceded the discourse praising convenience foods, later popularized

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in the ‘modern’ world. Local produce could not be substituted for most imported canned products (e.g., truffles and baby corn); thus, domestic cooks were instructed to use a can of truffles to cook beef tongue in truffle sauce. Nonetheless, when domestic cooks faced shortages of imported ingredients, they were forced to replace them with other products. Particularly in Yucatecan Cuisine, we can note the introduction of processed foods, often named by their brand. Thus, Ruz recommends the use of specific brands of cola drinks to marinate the meats, the use of a US brand of powdered pimiento as a condiment (instead of the habitual Spanish paprika), a brand of a spread cheese, a particular brand of Spanish olive oil, packages of “condiment,”25 a commercially processed recado, and canned fruits, tomato paste, condensed milk, and Worcestershire sauce (salsa inglesa). As local society changed, the time available for women to work in the kitchen shrank, due to their growing participation in the workforce outside the home. While women of little economic means still had to face everyday, never-ending kitchen toil, among middle- and upper-class urban families, the housewife’s participation in the kitchen was often limited to overseeing the work of a maid, and every so often she would engage in the hands-on manufacture of a ‘fancy meal’ for friends or relatives. The advertisements distributed by national and international food corporations invited women and their families to change their tastes and promoted different aesthetic values to judge the beauty of a dish: tomatoes were redder, carrots were more orange, peas were a shinier green, and corn was yellower. Gradually, women began to favor the use of processed, canned foods in their everyday cooking. The second half of the twentieth century would be propitious for the regional expansion of the culinary field in tune with changes occurring mainly in the US but also all over the world. The transformations that took place in the Yucatecan culinary field during the 1960s and 1970s had effects that extended over the subsequent decades.

The Modernity of Convenience Foods and the Yucatecan Culinary Field When I was growing up, my family and my friends’ families hosted birthday parties for their children. I remember being served, on many occasions, jello, a variety of sandwiches, and very often either pâté cakes and/ or sandwichón. We drank reconstituted powders with a variety of flavors: orange, lime, jamaica (hibiscus), cranberry, strawberry, and grape, among many others. Sandwichón, which is still consumed in many homes, either on birthdays or celebrations such as Christmas, is a meal made by arranging layers of processed white bread stuffed with shredded chicken and a sauce made of cream cheese and sour cream blended together with canned pimientos (red sweet pepper), processed cheddar cheese, and (in Valladolid, at least) minced boiled eggs. The layers were made in the shape of a square

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cake, covered with more sauce, and adorned with canned green peas. This dish was one among those that allowed local women to display their ‘creativity’ with processed convenience foods that in Yucatán, as Inness (2006) similarly describes for the US, were advertised as liberating women from the kitchen. Cookbooks from this period were often the result of collective efforts to build class and religious solidarity. Women of the middle and upper classes of Mérida got together under the auspices of either a church or a civic association and produced cookbooks, containing recipes that each of them had contributed, as a means to raise funds for charitable purposes. At the same time that these cookbooks legitimated women’s entrance into the public sphere, they asserted the values of their social groups. These recipes included generous amounts of modernly produced goods, processed for general convenience and preserved in cans or jars—products that were to be further processed and preserved in domestic kitchens with the aid of modern kitchen appliances: blenders, mixers, refrigerators, ovens, and other instruments. Since many of these families used the services of kitchen maids and/ or cooks, it could hardly be argued that these housewives had been liberated by modern recipes and technological innovations. In fact, the stronger claim that they could make through their cookbooks and cooking was that they were ‘modern women’. Although these cookbooks constitute a reduced sample, the following titles published in Mérida are illustrative of the era and underline the cosmopolitan modernity rather than the regionalism of the authors (with the exception of one that connects Yucatán and the world): Libro de cocina: Recetas de damas yucatecas (Cookbook: Recipes by Yucatecan Ladies) (Colegio de Mérida 1959, 1977); Prepare un bufet (Fix a Buffet) (Tabernáculos de Yucatán 1970); Recetas de cocina para la mujer de hoy (Recipes for Today’s Woman) (Parroquia de Itzimná 1993); and Cocina Yucateca e Internacional (Yucatecan and International Cuisine) (Mesa Redonda Panamericana de Mérida [1976] 1992). Fix a Buffet is the most extreme among these cookbooks in totally dismissing local recipes in favor of international cuisine. It is divided into seven sections: cocktails and drinks; sandwiches and canapés; soups; poultry, hams, meats, and complements; “various dishes”; candies, cookies, and ice cream; and, finally, “regime recipes for guests on a diet.” In a similar vein, both editions of Recipes for Yucatecan Ladies include only one dish recognizable as Yucatecan, that is, turkey in escabeche Valladolid-style, while Recipes for Today’s Women contains only mucbil pollos from among all dishes in the regional culinary and gastronomic traditions. Despite the contents of these cookbooks, we cannot infer whether or not Yucatecan dishes were prepared by the domestic staff at these authors’ homes.

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These cookbooks reveal the noticeable intention of the authors, who spent their vacations in Europe, the United States, or South America, to highlight their middle-class background and cosmopolitan location. The volumes are liberal in their references to China (chop suey, king chicken), Japan (Japanese chicken), the US (Boston baked beans and jambalaya), England (rosbif a la inglesa and steak and kidney pie), France (vichyssoise, quiche Lorraine), Italy (pastas and filets), Norway, Austria, and Germany. Their recipes also rely heavily on canned and industrially processed foods; for example, Recipes for Today’s Women contains recipes for meat in Coca-Cola and corn flakes, pork in Coca-Cola, chicken in Coca-Cola and sherry, plantains in Coca-Cola, and a marshmallow dish. These recipes do not draw from the diversity of spices to which Yucatecans had grown accustomed, nor do they suggest that women need to cook from scratch, as the old Yucatecan cookbooks did. Rather, the list of ingredients and the instructions to cook them suggest speedy and expedient tasks based on boxed and canned ingredients, highlighting the favorable impression that these dishes will produce. In these cookbooks, Yucatecan taste has surrendered to the modernity of industrially pre-processed and pre-packaged food. I am unsure about the contemporary currency of most of these recipes. I have not eaten any of these dishes since I returned to Yucatán in January 2000, after living away for 14 years. Every so often I hear elderly women say that a friend invited them for dinner and the guests were served dishes derived from these recipe collections. In fact, I received as presents two of these cookbooks when I told elder friends about my interest in learning about Yucatecan food culture. Although these books are now out of print, there is still a limited circulation sponsored by the members of the different civic associations that originally published them. Nonetheless, despite the emergence of these short-lived cookbooks, it is possible to find other cookbooks that attempted, during those times of heightened cosmopolitanism, to maintain their roots in the regional soil. In contrast to the previous cookbooks, Yucatecan and International Cui­ sine includes a section on Yucatecan food that includes 42 recipes clearly recognizable as belonging within the regional culinary and gastronomic fields. Also, this cookbook is the earliest I have found to acknowledge openly the contribution of the immigrant Syrian and Lebanese populations to the regional culinary field, as it includes seven recipes with Arab names (rishta bi jalib, jrise, rishta, mshadra mdardra, quibi, roz bit-fim, and fish quibi), along with a local adaptation of a recipe for grape leave wrappers, amid recipes with Chinese, Japanese, Argentinean, Cuban, French, and American names, and others identified as having been borrowed from the cuisines of Ecuador, Italy, Spain, and England. This cookbook seeks to reflect the inclusiveness prevalent among the urban middle class, as women from other

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cultures (or those married to men from other cultures) are integrated as collaborators into the collective effort to publicize their culinary experiences. Although these cookbooks were aimed primarily at the local middle and upper classes, they circulated beyond their boundaries, highlighting these women’s intention to represent their food tastes and preferences as worldly and modern, even if, at that time, it meant strategically downplaying the locality of their values. Many of these cookbooks reveal the ways in which people wish to be seen rather than what they actually eat at home on an everyday basis. They can also be viewed as representative of middle-class attempts to put their social groups in a positive light. This is particularly the case with Yucatecan and International Cuisine, which was published by the civic organization Mesa Redonda Panamericana (Pan American Round Table). This group and similar associations have a long history in Yucatán as ‘social action leagues’ that showcased the middle- and upper-class preoccupation with the betterment of the lower classes and stood in opposition to the ‘resistance leagues’ created by the socialist government of Yucatán in the 1920s (G. Joseph 1980). The volunteer activities conducted by these civic organizations often aimed to educate the disenfranchised and to provide them with the cultural instruments necessary for the progress of regional society (Eiss 2004). These social action leagues have outlasted the resistance leagues. Through them, men and women get together periodically to organize benefits and other events, channeling donations to the urban poor or, sometimes, to poor rural communities. We can read their cookbooks as instruments that affirm their class and regional cosmopolitan-oriented identities. In middleclass homes it is possible to find books of Yucatecan cuisine as well as books such as those discussed in this section, suggesting the existence of an ethical ambivalence negotiated every day on stovetops and in ovens: these women and their families wish to display an affectation involving worldly cuisines, while attempting to maintain their cultural leadership of urban Mérida society. To achieve the latter goal, they have to display an attachment to regional dishes. Consequently, I believe that even though these cookbooks emphasize modern dishes prepared with pre-packaged and processed ingredients (e.g., pork in cola drinks, beef gelatin, breaded eggs, fried chicken covered with corn flakes, condensed milk flan, and many others), which these women and their families and friends ate at parties, we can safely assume that at home these same women continued to instruct their maids to cook regional fare to alternate with meals using processed foods, as Yucatecan dishes were favored over other cuisines. In this sense, the vernacular cosmopolitanism of these middle-class women allowed them and their social groups to forge a new space for the creation of a culturally specific gastronomy.

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The Purification of the Gastronomic Field and the Institution of Yucatecan Cuisine During the early twentieth century, Mexican cultural producers were deeply involved in the manufacture of an encompassing ‘Mexican’ national identity (Vaughan and Lewis 2006). An abundance of texts have been written on the topic, and although most scholars have chosen to discuss explicitly programmatic political texts that can be considered constitutive of a major literary genre, we need to recognize that cookbooks have also played an important part as a minor genre. It is in the context of isomorphic cultural productions that we can see the part that cookbooks play in the construction of national/ major and regional/minor identities (Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2010). Pilcher (1998: 123) contends that the work of Josefina Velázquez de León was instrumental in bringing regional diversity into a homogeneous Mexican cuisine, especially Platillos regionales de la República mexicana (Regional Dishes of the Mexican Republic) (Velázquez de León 1946). By explicitly taking regional culinary traditions into account, the author created a paradoxical effect: at the same time that she engaged in the territorializing construction of this major national gastronomic code, she also revealed the lines of flight that deterritorializing regional foods could pursue, revealing the fissures of the national project. Not long after Regional Dishes appeared, Velázquez de León (1952) published Cocina Yucateca (Yucatecan Cuisine), a short cookbook of 61 pages to accompany other volumes that were dedicated to the cuisine of the states of Veracruz and Puebla. The author’s cooking school published these and her other cookbooks, including titles on Spanish and French cuisines, on banquets, and on the preparation of Mexican dishes and appetizers. Once involved in the dissemination of regional cuisines, she celebrated their virtues. In fact, in the dedication of the volume to her Yucatecan friends and students, Velázquez de León (1952: 3) wrote: “In my endeavors, as a Mexican, to make known the good cuisine of our country, and being that Yucatecan cuisine is one of the best, because its dishes are celebrated for their elevated taste, particular condiments, and uncommonness … I have selected for this small book a series of recipes to make this exquisite cuisine known in all of the Republic and abroad.” This type of national introduction would coincide with the work of later Yucatecan cookbook writers who sought, and still seek, to affirm the identity, authenticity, and cultural specificity of their own regional cuisine—one that, for them, is on a par with other international cuisines. The importance of Velázquez de León’s (1952) Yucatecan Cuisine springs from the fact that it illustrates the template adopted by later books of Yucatecan cuisine that were written either for regional consumption or for cooks in other states of the Mexican Republic. It includes 59 recipes distributed into

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six sections on meals, plus 10 recipes in two sections titled “drinks” and “desserts.” Most of the dishes were and are current in the Yucatecan culinary and gastronomic fields, the only exceptions being 2 recipes for turtle and 2 for venison (both animals are listed among the region’s endangered species and have been banned for consumption).26 However, 19 recipes are current today in the regional gastronomic field,27 and 18 are recurrent in the culinary field. This cookbook is revealing in another way: in contrast to the contemporary global market, when all types of spices and herbs are available all over the world and, through their widespread use, have become routine ingredients, in 1952 the author felt the need to write an “[e]xplanatory table on some of the ingredients used in the preparation of recipes [included] in this book” (ibid.: 4). In this table Velázquez de León explains the characteristics and uses of 13 ingredients that she considered to be uncommon in central Mexican cuisine: achiote, epazote, xkat ik, chile dulce, oregano, espelón (fresh black beans, spelled as expelón in the book), cumin, squash seeds, sour orange (naranja agria, Seville oranges), wild turkey, cazón (baby shark), esmedregal (jackfish), and cherna (grouper). Today, central Mexicans are familiar with all of these ingredients and include them in their own regional recipes. One exception in this list may be Seville oranges, which, although grown in many cities of Mexico, are often taken to be decorative rather than suitable for human consumption. This 1952 cookbook demonstrates how authors began to detach the gastronomic field from the culinary field. If earlier cookbooks from the culinary field were all-encompassing and partly internationally oriented, even when they carried the title of Yucatecan Cuisine, Velázquez de León’s book and those that followed in its wake engaged in a process of distillation and refinement that led to the gradual exclusion of dishes that are not Yucatecan, as well as recipes from the Yucatecan culinary field that could be perceived as uncouth or, for many, as disgusting (e.g., beef tongue, tripe, pig’s feet, liver, kidneys, and brains). Contemporary cookbooks, printed during the period from the late 1980s to the present, have all been engaged in the invention of a restrictive gastronomic field that, to different degrees, acknowledges the contribution of the culinary field. Therefore, some cookbooks expand their list of recipes to include a few dishes from the culinary field while excluding others. But whatever they may choose to include from the culinary field, some of these recipes, through their repetition, have been made part of a gastronomic core of dishes that are depicted—regionally, nationally, and internationally—as representative icons of Yucatecan food culture. Hence, through repetition, formalization, and standardization, recent cookbooks have participated in patent efforts to overcodify, simplify, and homogenize the canon of Yucatecan gastronomy. It is in this context that we also need to pay attention to the part played by restaurants in the institution of the gastronomic field. Cookbooks of

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Yucatecan cuisine necessarily informed the practices of restaurateurs who opened restaurants dedicated to Yucatecan food, and writers of cookbooks later appropriated the dishes that local restaurateurs presented in their menus, including those that had been created or transformed. Velázquez de León had her own cooking academy in Mexico City where she taught the principles of Spanish and French cuisine, alongside those of Mexican cuisine. From her students, who came from all over the country, she learned regional dishes that later appeared in her cookbooks. In Yucatán, Lucrecia Ruz viuda de Baqueiro’s family owned a restaurant. Because of the breadth of her cookbook, she managed to place Yucatecan dishes in a dignified position amid recipes from Europe and the American continent. Later, other cooks would also contribute to the affirmation of the distinctiveness of Yucatecan cuisine. However, Hacienda Teya (a former henequen plantation that had been redeveloped as an upscale hotel-restaurant) was the first restaurant (and thus far the only one) to produce a cookbook of Yucatecan cuisine that is restricted to the dishes offered in the restaurant itself. In contrast to other cookbooks, in Hacienda Teya’s (1999) volume, Cocina Yucateca de la Hacienda Teya (Yucatecan Cuisine of Hacienda Teya), the authorship of the book is credited to the restaurant rather than to a chef or cook, thus implying that at Hacienda Teya there is a tradition in place—one that transcends the particular cooks who may fleetingly cook in its kitchen. Consequently, the cook, the actual producer of the dish, is erased from the creation story of Yucatecan cuisine. The introduction to the cookbook emphasizes the “traditional” roots of regional cuisine, not the ingenuity of any particular cook. The compiler of the recipes writes: “Yucatán carries the flavor of gastronomic mestizaje, because it combines the millenniums-old indigenous food customs with the European culinary tradition, one already old when it arrived to America, influenced by Arab and Oriental customs. … [Here] are included the restaurant’s ancient recipes of the century-old hacienda San Idelfonso Teya … [that] now shares with you some of the secrets of Yucatecan gastronomy, which, evidently, still has so much to offer” (ibid.: 3). The culinary contributions of local Lebanese and Syrian immigrants—as well as those of the Chinese and Korean indentured laborers who had been brought into the country precisely to work on the haciendas—are erased to recognize only Middle Eastern and Oriental influences on European cuisine, which in turn is said to have influenced Yucatecan gastronomy. In the same vein, the recognition of the Maya “food customs” pertains to the old indigenous civilization, not the contemporary one. Hacienda Teya’s cookbook is only forty-two pages long and includes 25 recipes for meals, 3 recipes for desserts, and 12 additional recipes for sauces and garnishes. These recipes are important because they constitute the most refined items that had been selected for the restaurant’s menu, and because,

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with some additions or exclusions, these are the foods that most restaurants of Yucatecan food offer today and that we find included in contemporary Yucatecan cookbooks. In Hacienda Teya’s cookbook there are two soups (lima and cilantro); six appetizers (panuchos, salbutes, grilled longaniza, codzitos, brazo de reina, and papadzules); eight meat dishes (cochinita pibil, poc-chuc, queso relleno, lomitos de Valladolid, beef steak Yucatecan-style, tzic de venado [shredded venison], pork and beans, and three-meats puchero); five poultry dishes (escabeche oriental, chicken pibil, chicken in capers sauce, chicken poc-chuc, and turkey in black stuffing); and four fish dishes (pan de cazón [baby shark pie], cazón turnovers [empanadas], xkat ik chili peppers stuffed with baby cazón, and fish tikin xic). In the following chapter, in which I discuss the menus and food offerings of Yucatecan restaurants, I will show how Hacienda Teya’s menu represents a canonical list that most Yucatecan restaurateurs play around with, including some dishes while excluding others. It is important, in this sense, to examine the relationship between restaurants and contemporary cookbooks, given that, during the last 30 years, they have been shaping each other and constituting the major code of a single Yucatecan gastronomy.

Contemporary Cookbooks Since the 1990s, several books have been dedicated to Yucatecan cuisine, furthering the affirmation of the cultural specificity of regional gastronomy: Cocina Yucateca Tradicional (Traditional Yucatecan Cuisine) by Silvia Carrillo Lara (1994); La cocina familiar en el Estado de Yucatán (Domestic Cuisine in the State of Yucatán) (CONACULTA [1988] 2000), a reprint of a cookbook edited by the National Bank of Rural Credit; Guisos y postres tradicionales de Yucatán: 20 menús completos (Meals and Traditional Desserts from Yucatán: 20 Complete Menus) by Renán Irigoyen Rosado (2000), and K’oben: Los guisos que se sirvieron y se comen en las mesas yucatecas (Kitchen: Meals Served and Eaten at Yucatecan Tables) by Atalita Arjona de Castro and Enrique Castro Arjona (n.d., ca. 2000). These cookbooks follow the trend initiated by Velázquez de León: refining the gastronomic field but gesturing toward the open culinary field. Although K’oben seems to pay more attention to the culinary field, the recipes it includes help to reinforce the distinctiveness and peculiarities of Yucatecan gastronomy. This is an important textual effect: on the one hand, the inclusion of recipes from the culinary field makes these local cookbooks marketable; on the other hand, doing so territorializes regional specialties and inscribes them as part of a culinary tradition that is specific to the inhabitants of the region. Since the goal of these authors is to gain legitimacy in the eyes of local consumers, they cannot help but recognize the vastness and richness of Yucatecan food preferences. Since it is in their repetition that some of these dishes are

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turned into iconic representatives of Yucatecan gastronomy, the dishes that appear as optional may be seen as part of the regional culinary tradition, but not necessarily as particular to Yucatecan society. Tripe may receive a Yucatecan inflection when cooked by Yucatecan cooks, for example, when they cook mondongo kabic; however, mondongo is a recipe that we can find in cookbooks from different Mexican regions. Mole, attributed to cooks from the city of Puebla, also acquires Yucatecan citizenship when adapted to local taste. Hence, some cookbook writers include the recipe, but others have chosen to exclude it. In addition, contemporary sensibilities are less in tune with the consumption of beef tongue, pig’s feet, and some animal organs (since the beginning of the mad cow disease scare, offal and brain have especially become scarce commodities in everyday markets). Some recipes from the culinary field find space in recent cookbooks as a tacit recognition that some regional groups still find pleasure in their consumption, or, in some cases, they are included as references to the quaint regional past. However, in general, writers do not particularly favor them as a means to represent local ‘cosmopolitan’ taste and sophistication. Cookbook authors coincide in praising Yucatecan cuisine as ‘sophisticated’. Carrillo Lara (1994: 7) suggests that “the new Yucatecan cuisine has emerged so sophisticated and elegant that it can compete at an international level against any other and be victorious. … [Yucatán] has a truly enviable cuisine enjoyed by many.” In a short historical narrative included in Meals and Traditional Desserts, Irigoyen Rosado (2000: 9) claims that “[w]hen Europeans still ingested their meals a bit primitively, paying more attention to the quantity (beef, pigs, sheep, fowl, all cooked whole), in Yucatán the Maya already added sauces to their food. And it is well known that a garnish is the highest expression of the ars coquinaria. As an example, we point to French cuisine, taken as one of the world’s best, which is famous for its variety of adornments … Yucatecan cuisine is now in a frank process of greater integration. During the decades that this prologue writer has lived, we have seen delicacies appear that in a short time have become famous nationwide and beyond our borders.” In the introduction to Domestic Cuisine in the State of Yucatán, the author affirms: “Greatness is overpowering, and that is why, without false modesty, it can be claimed that Yucatecan cuisine has transcended the state and international boundaries, clothed with multiple mestizajes that have made it magnificent and distinct” (CONACULTA [1988] 2000: 13). These authors strategically deploy the inclusion of recipes from the culinary and the gastronomic fields in single volumes as a means to affirm the variety, the openness of local palates, and the creativity of local cooks who continuously develop their own field of culinary knowledge and invention. These cookbooks contain an average of 100 recipes, including those from the culinary field. I have selected a number of recipes that the general

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consensus views as being particular to the Yucatecan gastronomic tradition and as iconic of Yucatecan food habits. These recipes, which are included in restaurant menus, are also chosen to represent Yucatecan cuisine abroad when the Chamber of Commerce, the Restaurateurs Association, and the government of the State of Yucatán decide to promote Yucatecan culture outside the Yucatán peninsula. Cilantro soup, enshrined by Hacienda Teya’s cookbook does not appear in these cookbooks, nor does baked piglet, which is looked on today as a breakfast meal or as appropriate dish for important family celebrations. Some cookbooks (e.g., K’oben and Domestic Cuisine) include recipes for tripe, beef tongue, and pig’s feet, thus paying tribute to the taste preferences of different social classes. It is, however, the frequency with which other dishes appear that points to the institution of the Yucatecan gastronomic field. As can be seen in table 4.2, some recipes appear in all of these cookbooks. Through their repetition in these cookbooks, a number of culinary codes are created that are complemented by other behavioral and moral codes. A first code highlights the recipes that are considered iconic of regional taste preferences and gastronomic principles. Sopa de lima, eggs motuleños, panuchos, papadzules, stuffed cheese, poc-chuc, cochinita pibil, chicken pibil, turkey with both black or white stuffing, puchero, pork and beans, fish tikin xic, and pan de cazón, among others, constitute together the core of Yucatecan gastronomy. A second code fractalizes the contents of recipes from the gastronomic field by including ingredients such as the spices, types of meat, sauces, garnishes, and accompanying dishes that are shaped into an evidently coherent cultural logic. The description of ingredients in each recipe is thus a citation of the ingredients in other recipes, albeit in different combinations. For example, the repetition of pork; the constant use of achiote, saffron, cumin, oregano, bay leaves, cilantro, cloves, garlic, and allspice; and the privileged place given to red onions, epazote leaves, chaya leaves, and habanero and xkat ik chili peppers—the use of these stand in contrast to the meats, spices, and other products associated with Mexican or other types of cuisine. By means of a third code, recipe specifications are used to privilege some cooking techniques over others, forcing their understanding as culturally specific and thus inscribing Yucatecan principles and aesthetic standards into the food. These techniques include cooking meat in pit-holes (pibil), wrapping meat and tamales with banana leaves instead of corn husks, and marinating meats in, or preparing sauces with, the juice of Seville oranges. Lastly, a fourth code prescribes when and where foods should be produced and consumed, the ingredients that are allowed in each case, and the correct etiquette for eating any dish from the Yucatecan gastronomic field. For example, papadzules and brazo de reina should be eaten with a fork and knife, but codzitos, panuchos, and salbutes should be eaten using one’s fingers; fish and seafood can be eaten wherever one wishes, but the right place is at the

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Table 4.2. Recipes from the gastronomic field included in recent Yucatecan cookbooks

Total recipes

Traditional Yucatecan Domestic Cuisine Cuisine

104

86

Meals and Traditional Desserts

138

Lima soup X X X Eggs motuleños X X X Panuchos X X X Salbutes X Papadzules X X X Brazo de reina X X X Codzitos X X Sikil pac X X Stuffed cheese X X X Poc-chuc X X Cochinita pibil X X X Grilled leg (pork) X Pork and beans X X X Pork loin Valladolid X X Turkey escabeche X X Turkey with white stuffing X Turkey with black stuffing X X X Chicken pibil X X Chicken ticuleño X X Puchero X X X Mucbil pollo X X Tikin xik (Fish) X X X Fish mac’cum X X X Pan de cazón X X X Stuffed xkat ik X Calamari in ink X Squid in ink X

K’oben

100 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

beach; and in a fish restaurant, it is seen as pretentious to ask for meat—even if it is available on account of tourist demands—and anyone who does so is often teased by friends as being dismissive of Yucatecan tradition. From the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, cookbooks can be seen as advancing and territorializing a culinary code that, from a minor text/practice has been turned, regionally, into a major one. A cultural side effect of this transformation is that the major code of Yucatecan gastronomy (i.e., on a regional scale) has now progressively silenced and/or erased other culinary traditions that co-exist within the same territory. However, as was the case with Mexican national cuisine, Yucatecan gastronomy also

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reveals its lines of flight. Some cookbooks and the menus of some restaurants (especially restaurant-bars) include dishes that can be seen as the gastronomic recognition of Middle Eastern, indigenous Maya, and rural peasant food preferences and sensibilities. Therefore, just as multiculturalism has become the framework for contemporary cultural politics and makes the affirmation of regional differences understandable, in a second stage it has made possible the affirmation of intra-regional diversity. Because of its importance as a cultural marker in the global market of exotic foods, in the next section I discuss the cultural effects of the revaluation of Maya cuisine on the culinary diversity of the peninsula and the integrity of the major code of Yucatecan gastronomy.

Nostalgia, the Quest for the Authentic, and the Emergence of Minor Cuisines Working in conjunction, transnational and internal processes have fractured Mexican society, decentering national structures of political and economic power and challenging current forms of cultural subordination. In this stage of cultural transformation, Yucatecan gastronomy and identity have been constructed both as coherent entities that stand in opposition to Mexican food customs and identity, and as textual and culinary practices with a manifest, established location within multiple systems of cultural difference—that is, any consumer of food can recognize Yucatecan food when and where she or he finds it and already knows where to look for it and what to expect from it. In adopting the monolithic and coherent form of an institutionalized gastronomic field, Yucatecan food suffers the fracturing effects of the antagonistic pulls that territorialize and deterritorialize it. From this viewpoint, the identity of Yucatecan culinary culture may be characterized as a growing homogenizing-hegemonic discursive formation that is emerging from the articulation of different cultural and social narratives tied to the local opposition to cultural colonization. Local people may invoke the particularity of their own aesthetic and expressive preferences for food, music, dance, literature, and vernacular language and merge them into what they see as the essence of the Yucatecan soul. The characteristics of local food preparation and modes of consumption underline the value of hospitality; local songs deal with longing, nostalgia, love, and the beauty of the land; local jarana dances reveal joyful forms of rural sociability; regional literature is anchored in the values and moral principles of Yucatecan society; and the vernacular language, although Castilian Spanish like that spoken in other Mexican regions, is locally inflected by an abundance of Maya words and expressions (Suárez Molina [1945] 1996). All of these are supplementary forms of self-representation that are often explicitly contrasted with central Mexican values and social practices. Because of their

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isomorphic relationship, they constitute part of what many Yucatecans believe to be their ‘nature’, the ‘essence’ of what a Yucatecan is. Food is an important ingredient in this constellation of cultural forms that Yucatecans have come to perceive as the foundation of regional identity. There are, as well, movements of deterritorialization that defy the monolithic, cultural essence of the Yucatecan soul that has emerged in opposition to the national (Mexican) soul. Within this process of dis/semi-nation, the hegemonic regional discourse that endorses the notion of a coherent Yucatecan essence cannot acknowledge that, by invoking a homogeneous Yucatecan identity, it conceals the diversity of regional society. We need to unveil those whose values characterize Yucatecan morality and whose viewpoint is reflected in the cultural norms they engender. Yucatecan society, like many others in the post-national, post-colonial world, is a class society divided along cultural lines. In addition to the educated middle class and the wealthy elites, there are thousands of manual workers inhabiting the city who make a minimum wage of less than US$4 a day, barely managing an impoverished lifestyle. People of indigenous origin join the ranks of rural and urban Mestizos, immigrants from other Mexican regions and other countries, and Yucatecans of Cuban, Korean, Chinese, Lebanese, and Syrian origin who have struggled to maintain their cultural preferences. A single homogenizing and hegemonic representation of the Yucatecan soul or temperament cannot do justice to these diverse groups of people and their need for cultural expression. Following the reshaping of Yucatecan cuisine into a minor, more or less coherent textual and cultural/vernacular code with the ability to resist and oppose the major (Mexican) national code, its transformation into Yucatecan gastronomy has solidified, formalized, standardized, and stereotyped Yucatecan recipes, reworking one system of appetites and taste preferences into one major, homogenizing regional cultural code. The gastronomic field that emerged from the culinary field has an established set of norms, rules, requirements, and expectations that provide a sense of coherence to the field. The location of each element within this field, although in actuality always shifting, is represented as fixed. Thus, for many Yucatecans, regional gastronomy is no longer a weak contender against a Mexican Goliath, but one of equal force and importance that can earn respect and generate recognition in the international arena and the market of culturally marked foods. However, for many other Yucatecans, this representation of a coherently homogeneous Yucatecan gastronomy, which contains well-defined and well-established dishes, constitutes a powerful attempt to silence their food preferences, their own values, and their aesthetic sensibility. Hence, during the bifurcation of the gastronomic field from the culinary field, Yucatecan gastronomy has been turned into a regional major code that disseminates the process of internal colonization. In the process of selecting iconic dishes, recipes, ingredients, and forms of consumption

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for the representation of what it deems to be ‘Yucatecan’, the gastronomic field displaces toward the margins of the public sphere, or into the private domain, the forms of culinary expression that are meaningful to subordinate groups. In this context, Yucatecan restaurateurs and cookbook writers inadvertently expose the fissures of the gastronomic field. As I discussed in chapter 2 and will expand in the next chapter, some restaurants, family bars, and food stands have challenged the monolithic nature of the field. In restaurants it is possible to eat botanas and appetizers that evoke the Maya culture of the region (e.g., sikil pak, codzitos, and different types of tamales). Also, dishes of Lebanese origin have gained widespread acceptance in the regional taste. As a result, in bars and cantinas one can be served tahini, baba ghanoush, hummus, kibbeh, kofta, and tabbouleh,28 along with regional botanas. Cookbooks of Yucatecan cuisine show an openness to recipes that the authors consider to be more traditional and entrenched in the Yucatecan taste: three out of the four cookbooks summarized in table 4.2 list sikil pak and mucbil pollos as dishes favored by Yucatecan taste. If contemporary cookbooks specializing in Yucatecan cuisine still exclude recipes of Lebanese origin, Yucatecan and International Cuisine declares their acceptance in Yucatecan kitchens and tables. As with national cuisines, regional foods suffer the effects of cultural fragmentation and dissolution attributable to post-national and post-colonial global conditions. The dominant global discourse on human rights and multiculturalism has deepened existing fissures that undermine the presumption of homogeneity in Yucatecan gastronomy and identity and encourage the emergence of dissenting forms of representation that affirm and defend the culture of groups subordinated to, and silenced by, the hegemonic Yucatecan elites. The culinary effects are isomorphic but not identical with other cultural transformations. However, while Yucatecan chefs and cookbook writers skillfully take advantage of these codes, restructuring their relation to the Mexican national cuisine, the cuisines of Yucatecan cultural minorities are left with a restricted space for their expression. Yucatecan gastronomy displays its cosmopolitanism and worldly connections, while the cuisines of indigenous people and other minorities (such as the Lebanese) are forced into the mold of the ‘authentic’ and the ‘exotic’. In consequence, I suggest that, rather than acting as an instrument for the empowerment of the Maya, cookbooks promoting ‘authentic’ Maya cuisine impose upon peasant and indigenous cookery, and other culturally marked cuisines, the code of the exotic.

The Post-colonial Condition: Nostalgia and the Search for the Exotic Following Young (2001), I suggested in the introduction that we need to understand the contemporary post-colonial condition not as the time after colonialism but as a global order that has taken shape after the worldwide

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completion of the processes of decolonization. The post-colonial condition encompasses the social, cultural, political, and identity transformations that occur in both formerly colonized and in former colonial societies. Among these varied phenomena, we need to pay attention to processes of neo-colonialism. The latter may involve internal colonialism, such as when policies informed by nationalist ideology seek to suppress cultural particularities in order to endorse an imagined homogeneous nation, and/or new forms of cultural colonialism exerted by, primarily, the societies of the North Atlantic over the cultures of three continents: Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Foremost among these new forms of cultural colonialism is the expansion of the creed of modernity on a global scale. As Gaonkar (1999) and Taylor (1999) have argued, the dissemination of an acultural model of modernity has encouraged the local appropriation of a universal model as if it were valueand culture-free, dislocating, in the process, the values and worldviews of local populations. Discourses that stress the supremacy of modernity and modernization have legitimated hierarchical scales of societies, whereby those ‘less modern’ are located in a time ‘behind’ modern societies. ‘Traditional’ societies are rhetorically displaced into the past, denying their coevality with urban societies (Fabian 1983; Said 1978). The ‘Western’, Orientalizing trope is applied by modernizing societies in such a way that Mexicans and Yucatecans see themselves as part of ‘Western civilization’. For central Mexicans, their ‘Others’ are the inhabitants of the states (many central Mexicans continue to refer to federal states using the anachronistic colonial term ‘provinces’); for Yucatecans, their ‘Others’ (i.e., their ‘non-Westerners’) are the indigenous and rural inhabitants of the state, often including the poor who inhabit the southern half of urban Mérida. There is general agreement on the notion that modern societies have developed a cultural sensibility that fosters feelings of nostalgia for forms of sociality and harmony naturally found in traditional societies. The perception that ‘traditional’ societies keep tight and harmonious relations among human beings and that ‘traditional’ people maintain a holistic, integrated relation with nature tends to essentialize the cultural products of these societies. As a result, members of ‘modern’ society travel (in practice or thought) into ‘traditional’ societies in order to satisfy their longing or nostalgia for lost cultural forms that are marked—and marketed—as ‘authentic’ (Ayora-Diaz 2000b; Lowenthal 1988; MacCannell 1976; Stewart 1993; Urry 1995). Lisa Heldke (2003) has argued that there is a colonial attitude and practice involved in the search for exotic foods. Here I want to show how this colonial appropriation of the ‘Other’ is to be found in cookbooks of Yucatecan food published for the Anglo-Saxon world. Cookbooks of Mexican cuisine published in English have noted the regional diversity of Mexican food culture (see, e.g., Aaron and Salom [1965] 1981; Bergeron 1973; Kennedy [1972] 1986; Milton 2001; Ortiz 1965; Quintana 1986; Tausend 2001). In the contemporary

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market of ethnic foods, whether for the affirmation of regional and local identities or for their imperialist appropriation, cookbooks have shown an inclination to underline the exotic elements of the foods they describe. On the one hand, these cookbooks have opened the doors for the global dissemination of previously unknown culinary traditions, making their recipes available for replication beyond the space of their creation. On the other hand, these foods are often misrepresented: while members of a culture may have contributed to their original creation, they have been alienated from their own cultural production when their food is reimagined and disseminated by outsiders. Looking at the global market of ethnic foods, we can see how cookbooks misrepresent Yucatecan food in the Anglo-Saxon literature. For example, we find Foods of the Maya: A Taste of the Yucatán (Gerlach and Gerlach 1994); Mayan Cooking: Recipes from the Sun Kingdoms of Mexico (Hamman 1998); and A Yucatan Kitchen: Regional Recipes from Mexico’s Mundo Maya (Miller 2003). Contrary to what I have shown throughout this book, all three examples describe this as a Maya cuisine. They list recipes and ingredients borrowed from established local cookbooks of Yucatecan cuisine, along with recipes that the authors boldly confess (or proudly announce) that they obtained from chefs or cooks in different restaurants in the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán. The recipes are not actually from a Maya culinary tradition but belong instead to a broader Yucatecan culinary tradition created by the housewives of urban middle- and upper-class families or by the Mestizo or Creole cooks of elite families of the Yucatán, with some being copied from culinary fabrications created in regional restaurants for tourist consumption. In these cookbooks, the word ‘Maya’ appears as an indexical marker that allows the placement of a commercial product (the cookbook itself) in the global market of exotic, ethnic foods. Thus, if the publishers had chosen to present the recipes not as ‘Maya’ but as Criolla (Creole), it would probably have reduced their appeal among food adventurers from affluent societies. In Foods of the Maya, Gerlach and Gerlach (1994) provide a long and varied list of recipes, including dishes that belong to central Mexican gastronomy, such as Mexican tortilla turnovers, cactus salad, Mexican salad, beefsteak in poblano chili sauce, meatballs in chipotle pepper sauce, chilaquiles, and zucchini with cheese. These dishes may be, but are not necessarily, to the liking of Yucatecans, and they are not part of well-established regional cookbooks. For example, many Yucatecan friends have told me that they dislike the sliminess of cacti, even though some Yucatecans who have lived in Mexico City, or who have friends from that area, have grown to like it. Many of their recipes are marked as having been acquired in the neighboring states on the peninsula or other Caribbean sites (e.g., “fried plantains Caribbean style”) and reflect the ludic transformation of recipes through which restaurateurs in tourism sites seek to entice tourists to consume their foods as authentic.

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Hamman (1998) collected most of her recipes for Mayan Cooking from around the city of Valladolid (where Navarrete Arce’s cookbook was originally published in 1889). The recipes that prevail in her cookbook are, again, those of Creole and Mestizo invention described earlier in this chapter. However, with a sleight of hand, she transforms them into references to an imaginary ‘Other’, rechristening the recipes with names derived from the regional Maya language.29 Thus, a stew of chicken with chili peppers becomes ts’anchack bi kash; another recipe becomes a window into the mystical world of the Maya: turkey in k’ol indio is called “Turkey simmered in a sacred broth”; and a beef stew, chocolomo, is termed “Maya jungle stew,” turning it into an exotic dish that emphasizes the Maya relationship to nature. Similarly to Foods of the Maya, Hamman’s Mayan Cooking also includes recipes for dishes from central Mexico, interspersed within a majority of Yucatecan recipes and a couple of recipes from Belize. The author even provides the names of the restaurants where she obtained different recipes that she includes in her book. Emphasizing the exoticism of Yucatecan food, she suggests the existence of some form of culinary continuity between the ancient and the modern Maya: because the Mayas ate chachalakas (a type of wild turkey)30 and pecari (a wild pig), they have been able to appropriate chicken and pork into their cooking. Thus, she transforms fairly recent culinary innovations into ancient recipes brought up to date by contemporary Maya people.31 Finally, Miller’s (2003) A Yucatan Kitchen provides a generous list of recipes from the Yucatecan culinary and gastronomic fields, including a few from central Mexico (chilaquiles are always present in these cookbooks, despite their absence in Yucatecan cookbooks and restaurants) and a couple of Lebanese recipes that are consumed in urban centers and are probably not much to the liking of Maya people (e.g., garlic cream and garlic soup). However, A Yucatan Kitchen does not deploy linguistic strategies to make Yucatecan cuisine exotic and, in general, remains faithful to the culinary and gastronomic fields of the peninsula, rather than the state of Yucatán. The volume’s subtitle (Regional Recipes from Mexico’s Mundo Maya) evokes the Maya, but as a term mediated by the tourism categorization of the region, which, together with Chiapas in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, has been encompassed under the tourism development project known as Mundo Maya (Maya World)—a world that, as D. F. Brown (1999) has already argued, has little, if anything, to do with contemporary Maya people. It is important to repeat here that identities in Yucatán can be difficult to set apart. For historical reasons, the rural Maya-speaking population of Yucatán often do not see themselves as Maya. They call themselves ‘Mayeros’, that is, people who speak Maya. In a culturally mimetic mode, rural people of the state of Yucatán, even those whose phenotype seems ‘Maya’, often say that the Maya were the people who built the pyramids, but that have already

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vanished—or that the Maya are those who live in the next village (see, e.g., Castañeda 2004; Castillo Cocom 2004; Gabbert 2001; Gutiérrez Estévez 1992; Hervik 1999a). The 1994 Zapatista movement triggered nationwide efforts to awaken, revitalize, and affirm local ethnic identities. The rural inhabitants of Yucatán have been invited to participate in diverse forums where the general objective has been to support and confirm indigenous identities, from Zapatista congresses to pan-Maya conferences held in hotels in Cancún, among other sites. A Valladolid-born man of Korean origin has been the representative of the Yucatán Mayas in the Mexican Indigenous Congress, and although most rural people of the Yucatán peninsula refuse to be called ‘indigenous’, many are beginning to appropriate the term ‘Maya’ as a category for self-representation. These events, along with the growing fragmentation of the nation and of homogenizing discourses in general, have created arenas where the manifestation of local forms of ethnic identification is legitimate and desirable.

The Reinvention of Indigenous Yucatecan Cuisine and the ‘Cage’ of Authenticity Local subjects have found, in the culinary field, a means to affirm their own identity within the multiplicity of cultural differences that constitute the present era. Food adventurers who are seeking exotic meals can turn their gaze toward ethnic cuisines as privileged sites to look for the ‘authentic’, even if it must be invented by emphasizing a dish’s radical cultural difference. The consumer of the exotic must navigate amid a chaotic multiplicity of signs to which he or she must introduce meaning in order to manage the world of food commodities. It is in this context that the words ‘purity’ and ‘authenticity’ are turned into indexical markers of indigenous cuisines. I have often been asked whether Mexican or Yucatecan cuisines, having borrowed from multiple culinary traditions, are in fact ‘authentic’ cuisines. I usually answer that since Yucatecan culinary inventions are clearly cultural hybrids, Yucatecan cooks and chefs can claim that their food is unique and that it is the result of the ingenuity and invention of local individuals. While most Yucatecans would find this answer satisfactory, food writers and food tourists tend not to share the same view. For example, the manual for tourism operators of Mundo Maya describes all food traditions within the wide geographical area encompassed by this transnational tourism project as being based on corn, squash, tomatoes, chili peppers, and beans. Also, while Long-Solís and Vargas (2005) praise Mexico City for its cosmopolitanism and the enormous variety of cuisines available for culinary adventurers, they describe the food of Yucatán with the same characteristics attributed to Mexican indigenous cultures. This characterization, I believe, is indicative of

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a cultural and political will to homogenize the food cultures of the nation into stereotypical, flattened forms. In characterizing them by their ‘essential’ cultural traits, writers and consumers produce a nostalgic, romantic, and culturally colonialist understanding that reduces diverse culinary traditions to the basic components of an imagined indigenous diet. Cookbooks produced and published in central Mexico—or in Yucatán with funding from central Mexican cultural organizations—tend to reproduce central Mexican nationalist values and viewpoints that represent Yucatecan cuisine as indigenous Maya food. These cookbooks, like the ones discussed in the previous section, illustrate the inclination to rename with exotic titles what are conventional dishes from the culinary and gastronomic Yucatecan traditions. These recipes are a minority amid large lists of recipes of ‘Maya’ dishes in which ingredients are reduced to variations of the basic ingredients of the pre-Columbian Maya diet, plus or minus some ‘Old World’ condiments. These cookbooks help to explode the recently constructed Yucatecan gastronomic field, but they do so at a high cost: they must constrain cooks and cookbook writers, in order to be ‘respectful’ of the Maya tradition, to represent their food habits as largely unchanged and as a continuation of the pre-Columbian past. Thus, these recipes tend to enforce a representation of Yucatecan Maya food as a pre-Columbian cuisine, reducing it to a minimal set of ingredients. This reduction obscures the creativity of contemporary cooks (whether of Maya origin or not), who, if they were to remain truthful to their roots, would have to reproduce their dishes within a constantly restrictive context, rather than recreate them. This fashioning of the ‘local’, as I have argued elsewhere in an examination of the problems that local healers face in Chiapas (Ayora-Diaz 2002), is a form of poisoned gift. At the same time that it allows for the affirmation and recognition of local, ethnic identities, it constrains subjects to a universal code that encloses ‘indigenous’ groups into ‘traditional’ cages, where change is not welcomed and where the expression of hybrid practices and the inclusion of foreign goods are taken as proof of treason to one’s group and culture. Thus, according to this logic, an ‘authentic’ Maya would not eat European foods or ingredients, nor would she or he eat or drink bottled or canned processed products. The earliest booklet within this cultural logic is 47 pages long and is titled El libro de los guisos del maíz (cocina jach yucateca) (The Book of Corn Dishes [Truly Yucatecan Food]) (Díaz-Bolio 1985). This cookbook may not be fully reflective of the trend discussed here, as it follows a rationale somewhat different from that of the other volumes discussed above. However, like the others, it reflects a nostalgic appraisal of indigenous culture, and it commends the indigenous aspect of Yucatecan gastronomy, which is often dismissed by middle- and upper-class writers. Thus, in the introduction to the cookbook, Díaz-Bolio (ibid.: 5; italicized in the original) writes:

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Interested [as I was], not only in anthropological and historical themes, but also in whatever is related to the culture of this land [Yucatán] … I began a conversation around something not researched until today: the uses of corn in Yucatecan cooking. As this cereal is the main alimentary source since times immemorial, it seemed strange that there was no treatise or simple cookbook to fill this void and, through the various forms in which corn is prepared, to revalue its traditional use … This cookbook will be of general interest … Moreover, this fistful of corn dishes will be helpful in preserving Yucatecan culinary tradition, a tradition that is suffering the thrust of an industrial civilization that tends to erase the uses and customs of the past.

There are 71 recipes included in this small volume. It contains many recipes that are not Maya (this was not a claim advanced by the author), but recipes with Maya names abound (20 out of 71). Not all of the dishes use corn as a basic ingredient, but the author says on the last page: “The majority of these dishes are eaten with corn tortillas. The authoress added a few dishes that are not corn-based” (Díaz-Bolio 1985: 47).32 In fact, 20 recipes are clearly identifiable as not corn-based (some are recipes where corn is not a necessary ingredient), and there are 4 recipes where corn is used only to give texture to the gravy (k’ol). For the benefit of present-day consumers, this cookbook restores dishes from the culinary field that have been forgotten in some of the contemporary recipe books. More recent are the cookbooks Recetario maya del estado de Yucatán (Maya Recipe Book from the State of Yucatán) by Maldonado Castro (2000), and U janalo’ob mayao’ob: Comidas mayas tradicionales, maya-español (Traditional Maya Foods), a Maya-Spanish bilingual collection under the editorship of Pinzón May (2004). The former was published by the National Council of Culture and Arts (CONACULTA), as part of a collection of indigenous and popular cuisine, and the latter with funding from Conaculta and PACMYC (the federal Program for the Support of the Municipality and Community Cultures), together with funding from the Institute of Culture of the State Government of Yucatán. Maya Recipe Book contains 100 recipes of which 17 have a Maya name, but there are 4 recipes for chilaquiles and one for mole, both non-Yucatecan recipes (although they may very well be eaten by Maya people). The recipes are poor and constrained by the need to privilege ingredients that have been identified as originating in the American continent, although the author includes several ingredients of Eastern, Middle Eastern, and European origin (providing a list of 48 imported ingredients considered essential to contemporary Yucatecan cuisine). There are recipes for armadillo, wild turkey, and even for roasted beehive. If the inclination to reduce recipes to their minimum pre-Columbian denominator were not enough, the cookbook includes

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recipes to prepare animals that are available only to inhabitants of rural areas where people may not feel inclined to buy this cookbook and/or may be unable to read it. However, in its quest to emphasize local ingredients, this cookbook lists max chili peppers, a small, piquant variety that is consumed in many Yucatecan homes but is absent from most other Yucatecan cookbooks. The prologue to Maya Recipe Book reflects a deep ambivalence. Esma Bazán, a local cultural broker, writes, on the one hand, of the authenticity of local food ways: “The economic, political, social, and religious organization of Maya society revolves around the milpa (corn field) and its products: Corn, squash, chili pepper, beans, among others shaping the foundation of our culture” (Maldonado Castro 2000: 11; emphasis added). This is an interesting affirmation in itself, given that Bazán is a public figure who can hardly claim to be of Maya origin. Against the authenticity of Maya food culture, he declares that “it is undeniable that [our] gastronomy has experienced very fast transformations, often due to an overwhelming modernity, the proliferation of new and different goods, the influence of mass media and … because of the presence of fast foods” (ibid.: 12). On the other hand, he recognizes that contemporary Yucatecan gastronomy is the product of cultural exchanges with many other societies and that it is thus a worthy cultural creation. Walking a thin line between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ food culture in the Yucatán, this commentator states that since the recipes for Yucatecan food contained in the cookbook are prepared with local ingredients (which, as I suggested above, is not always so), the book aims “to preserve and promote the elaboration and consumption of food [relying on] resources from the backyard and the region” (ibid.). In his introduction to this cookbook, Maldonado Castro (2000) echoes Esma Bazan’s preoccupations. He describes the environmental context that explains the presence of particular plants and animals in the Yucatecan diet and narrates how Spanish colonization changed food culture by introducing new utensils and food products. However, the changes that seem to preoccupy him more are those related with the introduction of fast foods in the urban space and the reshaping of the structure of contemporary families. Maldonado Castro (ibid.: 36–37) writes: It is necessary to make it clear that there has been of late a disconnection of young women from the preparation of food; today’s girls do not show the same interest in participating in culinary activities as in days gone by. They are more concerned with other activities, at school or at work, which lead them to acquire a different viewpoint regarding traditional cooking. In this sense, it is important to emphasize that modernity’s hurries lead to the misrepresentation of original recipes. Of course, the [economic] crisis that currently affects our country has a direct impact on the domestic economy, and sometimes it is impossible to obtain the ingredients necessary to cook

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a given dish properly. That is why we favor much more ancient recipes and preparations, for their originality and for always having present the aromas and flavors of yesteryear’s cuisine, that of [our] grandmothers.

This unmistakably nostalgic tone leaves readers with the impression that it is impossible to find homemade Yucatecan food nowadays. In consequence, if Yucatecans wish to consume ‘authentic’, ‘traditional’ food, they must rely on cooks who specialize in different regional dishes and have a well-established reputation or go to restaurants specializing in Yucatecan food. These are the places where the flavors of yesteryear can be remembered. If one looks at the recipes in this cookbook, it is possible to recognize that it depicts a form of cookery that relies primarily on mostly native homegrown produce—despite the fact that it invites readers to reclaim what Yucatecan culture has lost at the altar of modernity. Finally, Traditional Maya Foods (Pinzón May 2004) includes a greatly reduced list of recipes: only 47. This collection, much more than the previous one, is an exclusively rural, poor cuisine in which the recipes and ingredients selected are reduced to the bare minimum: corn, black beans, squash, tomatoes, chili peppers, eggs, squash seeds, chaya and epazote leaves, and plantains, although one recipe, the first one in the book, calls for onions, and in some other recipes the authors cannot avoid the use of citrus fruits.33 This cookbook emphasizes two aspects: first, a nostalgia for cultural forms in decline and, second, the appropriation of an essentializing language of identity that many indigenous people have found helpful in securing funds from governmental and non-governmental organizations. Hence, in the introduction of the book, Pinzón May (ibid.: n.p.) writes: This collection was done with the goal to preserve our Maya Yucatecan gastronomy which from their environs the Mayas seek to survive despite modernization and that this orally transmitted knowledge across generations that Mayas perform in their everyday life, be translated to future generations to value our mother tongue. We wish that this collection will be of use as recognition to our ancient culture and its resistance [to change], and as an opening toward freedom and the respect we all need to understand the diversity and the importance of our Maya gastronomy, given that they are parts that conform our future of Yucatecan Maya Women.34

These cookbooks, I contend, form part of the contemporary strategies of self-representation that involve the appropriation of the universalized code of modernity. It is in contrast to a local understanding of modernity as acultural, but turned into the universal goal, that the tradition of indigenous, local people makes sense. The nostalgic cultural colonizers’ gaze leads to an

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understanding of local, indigenous communities as the repositories of ancient natural wisdom. Thus, their deeply attached roots keep them faithful to their old ways, including their pre-conquest foods. With a natural inclination to preserve the purity of those cultures, these books aim to give us authentic Maya food, despite almost 500 years of cultural colonization and the importation of European, Asian, African, and Australian animals, fruits, vegetables, spices, and condiments. The modern imaginary demands that minor codes be integrated into the major code. This is the only way in which these forms of self-representation can be granted recognition in the global post-colonial world. They have to be reduced to a monolithic understanding of Maya identity that avoids recognizing the shifting movements, cultural displacements, forms of cultural hybridity, and political nature of identity claims in order to be part of a broader movement that can receive the sympathy of international activists or the economic support of the state (Castañeda 2004; Castillo Cocom 2004). However, at the same time that the rural people of Yucatán are led toward imprisonment into the cage of their ‘traditional’ culture, the affirmation of their voices and customs as ‘authentic’ contributes to the erosion of the seeming solidity of both Yucatecan and national Mexican identities. The Yucatecan gastronomic field, a new invention that only recently began to gain acceptance in the national and international arena as a full-fledged gastronomy, is beginning to reveal the fractures inflicted by the affirmation of Maya culture and, to a minor degree, by the cuisine of the Lebanese and other immigrant groups.

Discussion: Cookbooks and the Institutionalization of Yucatecan Cuisine As I have been arguing, in Yucatán, cookbooks can be located as part of the culinary and gastronomic fields. However, theirs is a shifting position. Sometimes these culinary artifacts reflect the cosmopolitan inclination of Yucatecan cooks, showcasing the ingenuity, creativity, and openness of Yucatecan kitchens to the gifts that other cultures and culinary traditions have to offer. Hence, nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century cookbooks showcase the elegance and sophistication of Yucatecan middle- and upper-class homes. They unabashedly recognize the integration of European and Asian spices, cooking techniques, and formal rules into the regional cuisine, while, at the same time, emphasizing its reterritorialized identity. It may be a Mestizo form, or it may be a hybrid (in current terminology), but the final culinary product is different from those produced by other Caribbean societies and, particularly, those that ‘Mexicans’ create.

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From this culinary field, through the effects of repetition and the formalization of identity rules, a number of recipes have been transformed into dishes that are considered iconic of Yucatecan gastronomy. Thus, we find a more formalized and standardized set of prescriptions that determine which dishes belong to Yucatecan gastronomy and which do not. These rules also govern the ingredients that are mandatory for the preparation of meals and those that are proscribed to avoid doing damage to the identity of Yucatecan food. For example, to cook cochinita pibil, pork must be marinated in the juice of Seville oranges. If the latter is not available, the cook is allowed to use white vinegar, although the result will be considered substandard. An unacceptable alternative would be balsamic vinegar: although it is flavorful and sophisticated, Yucatecans would find that it ‘distorts’ the flavor of the dish. Starting in the second half of the twentieth century, cookbooks of Yucatecan cuisine belong with texts in which a style of gastronomy (in the sense of a set of formal rules) is made explicit, codified, and generalized. These dictates mirror the tastes and culinary preferences of leading members of the middle and upper classes and are a key factor in the production and enforcement of a major culinary code that subordinates other culinary preferences within the region. However, cookbooks alone do not account for the generalized embodiment of culinary preferences and appetites; they hinge upon the menus offered by restaurants specializing in Yucatecan food. Through the combined, supplemental effects of both cookbooks and restaurants, the culinary, a minor code, has become the gastronomic, a major code. In the process, the food culture of Yucatán has become instrumental in defining Yucatecan identities that are rhetorically and sometimes politically opposed to the Mexican identity but also subordinate and marginalize the identities of other local cultural groups within the Yucatán semi/nation. In the following chapter, I examine the ways in which restaurants supplement, and are supplemented by, cookbooks in the institutionalization of the regional gastronomic field.

5

The Gastronomic Field



Restaurants and the Institutionalization of Yucatecan Gastronomy

My goal in this chapter is to describe the strategies deployed by Yucatecan restaurateurs to institute Yucatecan gastronomy. To reiterate, I understand Yucatecan gastronomy as a field that corresponds with, and has historically bifurcated from, the regional culinary field. It is constituted through a gradual process of purification that leads to the elimination of recipes from cookbooks and of dishes from restaurant menus that writers and restaurateurs, respectively, perceive as located outside the logic of regional cuisine. Each restaurant that specializes in the production of Yucatecan food is engaged in the territorialization of Yucatecan gastronomy—a process shaped by the repetition of dishes included in menus and cookbooks specializing in Yucatecan cuisine. Also, each restaurant may claim a single signature dish (or a number of them) and may appeal to customers with its claims to ‘authenticity’ and (paradoxically) to ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’. Each restaurateur may add a ‘secret’ ingredient to its flagship dishes so that customers with a taste for that ingredient will rank that restaurant higher in their preferences. However, at most restaurants, Yucatecan food is not cooked exclusively to satisfy Yucatecans’ palates: it must also respond to the imagination of visitors and tourists. During 2003, a couple of Canadian friends visited us in Mérida. As part of the everyday activities we scheduled with our guests, we took them to a number of restaurants that serve Yucatecan food. Our friends were amazed at the variety of dishes that they tasted in Mérida restaurants, at the haciendas around Mérida, and in Valladolid. They were surprised by the fact that these dishes were markedly different from those that they remembered eating during their previous visit. One of our friends told us that on a previous trip, in the 1980s, he stayed for over a month in the state. During that time, he searched for ‘Mexican’ food and did not know that there was a separate Yucatecan cuisine. His reaction to the differences between Yucatecan and Mexican food echoed my experiences in Calgary during the 1980s,1 when I first became aware of the dominance of (central) Mexican food in the representation of the Mexican food culture. – 201 –

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Prior to our friends’ visit, from 2000 to 2003, I had been asked to teach courses in English at the Autonomous University of Yucatán that would be directed at exchange students from colleges and universities in the states of Illinois, Michigan, and New York. During my conversations with these students, they frequently complained that in Mérida, at the restaurants located along the Paseo Montejo, cooks were unable to produce a “proper” guacamole and bartenders were unable to fix a “decent” margarita. Some expressed their disappointment at the fact that they were not finding the sort of “authentic” Mexican food that they had expected; instead, at the Yucatecan homes where they had been placed, they were served only (or mainly) Yucatecan food. Later, in early 2008, a couple of US graduate students told me in conversation at a Mérida café that they had noticed that some tourists, especially those whom they referred to as “backpackers,” were concerned with issues of “authenticity” and researched the food of the locale that they intended to visit. These tourists wish to be seen as knowledgeable, almost “native,” and engage in a quest for the “real” culinary thing. In contrast, I have found central Mexicans who reject Yucatecan foodways.2 For example, in 2001 I overheard a group of central Mexican anthropologists and archaeologists who live and work in Mérida criticizing Yucatecans for their “ignorance” regarding the consumption of avocados. One of them ridiculed Yucatecans: “They believe that when avocados turn black, they are inedible! They [Yucatecans] eat only green avocados.”3 In June 2008, a man from the central Mexican highlands told me that he had not known Yucatecan food before coming to Yucatán. He had made some culinary discoveries, but he did not like the “fatty” cochinita pibil or Mérida’s lechón al horno. That same year, a young woman from western Mexico told me that she was flabbergasted at the varieties of fruits, vegetables, and herbs that she found at local markets and supermarkets. She confessed that she was totally unfamiliar with them and had no idea about how they should be eaten. She had not liked Yucatecan food because, in addition to the fact that it was not spicy hot, she found the condiments employed too alien for her taste. Among other things, these stories suggest, first, that despite the global dissemination of Yucatecan food, foreigners’ and outsiders’ knowledge of Yucatecan cuisine remains limited. This is due in part to the fact that central and western Mexican food still dominates the menus in ‘Mexican’ restaurants located in Yucatán, Mexico, and abroad. These stories also suggest that the broader Yucatecan culinary field, wherefrom these outsiders draw their experiences, has been changing only since the second half of the twentieth century into a clearly distinguishable gastronomic field that is separate from Mexican cuisine. Lastly, they demonstrate that, in the current stage of globalization, travelers are more likely to seek out information about the food, drinks, music, and culture of a place before initiating their trip.

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The first decade of the twenty-first century is a time when Yucatecan food has continued to carve out a niche in the ethnic foodscape of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. During the early 1990s, it was possible to find restaurants of Mexican food abroad that included one or two Yucatecan recipes, sometimes identified by regional origin, sometimes not. In my travels to Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec, and Toronto in Canada and in Portland, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, in the US, I was told by local friends of the existence of this type of Mexican restaurant. In 2005, while in Phoenix, Arizona, I was referred to a restaurant that dedicated one day to Yucatecan food. In response to the demands of the thousands of Yucatecans who have migrated to the US, it is now possible to find restaurants that specialize in Yucatecan cuisine, particularly in states such as California, Arizona, and Texas, with others opening more recently in states such as New York and Michigan.4 Characteristic of this new trend are the references to cochinita pibil in Robert Rodriguez’s movie Once Upon a Time in Mexico, in which a character played by Johnny Depp orders this dish in every restaurant he visits, and in the first episode of the sitcom Moonlight, when a reporter tells a cop that he is too easy to locate as she only needs to find out which restaurant is serving cochinita pibil as the day’s special. In neither case is the dish identified as Yucatecan. Slowly but progressively, the worldwide expansion of the market of ethnic foods, along with the inexhaustible appetite for what is perceived as authentic, exotic cuisines, has promoted the recognition of different Mexican regional cuisines, both within Mexico and beyond. In this global multicultural market of difference and of post-colonial appropriation of exotic cultural productions, food has played an important part in interactions with the ‘Other’ (Heldke 2003). The global foodscape is characterized by the expansion and dissemination of fast-food franchises (which dominate the market) and by the legitimization of the claims of minor cuisines to be recognized and allowed a (culturally) valuable niche in the global foodscape (Dolphijn 2004). In the following section, I describe specific transformations in the urban foodscape as they relate to the importance of restaurants that specialize in Yucatecan cuisine. I will show how Yucatecan food, as it is presented in these restaurants, has undergone and continues to undergo gradual changes that lead to routine, almost imperceptible modifications in the preparation of Yucatecan meals.

Yucatecan Restaurants in the Global Foodscape I have previously discussed the passing, superficial references to Yucatecan food on the part both of Mexican and foreign travelers and of local writers during the nineteenth century (Le Plongeon [1889] 2001; Norman 1843;

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Ober [1883] 1887; Stephens [1843] 1963; Waldeck [1838] 1996; see also chap. 2). It is probably a reflection of the spirit of the times that a traveler such as the French nobleman Waldeck ([1838] 1996: 75) apologized for dedicating one paragraph to a description of what he considered the best of Yucatecan food: “I will be excused for having dwelled for so long upon these matters of little interest in themselves.” He then explained that he was inclined to describe the food because “a people is revealed, above all, through the customs of their intimate life” (ibid.: 76). No traveler from the nineteenth or twentieth century who wrote about his or her adventures and misadventures in Yucatán considered food to be a topic worthy of the readers’ attention. In nineteenth-century Yucatán, as in many parts of the world, restaurants were not yet established as important social institutions. The city of Mérida was expanding from a small, provincial locale into a full-fledged metropolis with ‘modern’ services and technology (Hansen and Bastarrachea M. 1984; Montejo Baqueiro 1981a; Redfield 1941). Rural and small-town migrants, many escaping from the Maya rebellion, were causing the urban population to expand, and they would have eaten, on an everyday basis, at different sorts of diners and food stands. Unfortunately, descriptions of the era are unhelpful in this regard. From written sources I have become aware that, during the first decade of the twentieth century, a downtown hotel opened a restaurant that served a French-named menu, but I have found no information on the dishes that were cooked. I have also learned that in some barrios Meridans could purchase panuchos at street food stands (Montejo Baqueiro 1981a; Richardson 1988). On the back cover of Ruz viuda de Baqueiro’s ([ca. 1950] 2000) cookbook, we learn that, during the 1940s, her family owned a restaurant that specialized in Yucatecan cuisine and catered to different presidents of the Mexican Republic during their visits to Mérida. Foreign and national travelers were interested in ancient ruins, and Yucatecans had no reason yet to represent their own cultural productions as ‘exotic’, as the time of mass tourism had not yet arrived for the peninsula of Yucatán. Historians have argued that the restaurant is a modern invention tied to transformations in France’s social structure that took place after the French Revolution (1789–1799), which in turn arose from changes spanning the decades that preceded that momentous political and social upheaval (Ferguson 2004; Mennell 1985; Spang 2000; Trubek 2000). Before the time of restaurants, European and non-European societies were equipped with local kitchens and inns that catered to the alimentary needs of laborers and travelers (Beriss and Sutton 2007a, 2007b). In France and England, for example, the market for prepared meals was controlled by guilds, and strict regulations separated the producers of different types of food, preventing the emergence of locales where patrons could select one meal from among a variety of dishes

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(Mennell 1985; Spang 2000; Spencer 2002; Trubek 2000). Transformations in the French public sphere lifted cooks from their anonymous kitchens into recognizable and authoritative personal niches, from which they established the culinary and gastronomic rules of the time, their reputations having been established due to years of service in aristocratic kitchens, either in the private homes of royalty or at elegant hotels (see Ferguson 2004; Mennell 1985). For several reasons, explored by these different authors, some French cooks were forced to migrate, while others felt compelled to do so. Motivated by the lack of French cuisine restaurants in other countries, some traveled abroad, taking with them (along with their personal charisma) the norms and standards of French gastronomy and a resolute faith in the superiority of French haute cuisine. Increasingly and worldwide, fancy hotels opened restaurants to target local elites engaged in the conspicuous consumption of elegant, ‘sophisticated’ meals and wines in countries as diverse as Argentina, Canada, England, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the United States, thus instituting and legitimating the authority of French cooks and their gastronomy (Capatti and Montanari 2003; Cwiertka 2006; de la Serna 1987; Denker 2003; Gabaccia 1998; Kamp 2006; Levenstein 1988; Pilcher 1998; Spang 2000; Spencer 2002; Trubek 2000).5 From the beginning, French gastronomy was promoted as a system of rules that colonized other cuisines: it provided different nations with a French understanding of restaurants, with restaurant chefs, and with codes that governed cooking and personal performance, and it became the universal blueprint for designing and instituting national gastronomies and identities. Clearly, the restaurant alone cannot support such large imaginaries. As Ferguson (2004), Mennell (1985), Spang (2000), and Trubek (2000) have shown, along with restaurants there was a growing production of cookbooks that appropriated the language and format of great works (by French chefs) and later gave birth to culturally specific cuisines that sought to stand on a par with French gastronomy. Great names (Carême, Escoffier, Bocuse) became tightly associated with great cookbooks. Fractalizing this strategy, in different nations, selected individuals were endowed with the authority to condense the culinary diversity of their countries into single, homogeneous national cuisines (E. Anderson 1988; Appadurai 1988; Ashkenazi and Jacob 2000; Capatti and Montanari 2003; Cwiertka 2006; Pilcher 1998; Spencer 2002). Following Trubek (2000), I suggest that the deterritorialization of French gastronomy was instrumental in the colonization of other culinary fields, thanks to a set of related renovations: (1) the professionalization of cooking and the emergence of chefs; (2) the recognition of chefs as artistic creators; (3) the establishment of kitchen hierarchies that placed the chef at the top; (4) the creation of cooking schools to disseminate the values of

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‘good’ (i.e., French) cooking standards; (5) the publication of specialized journals that focused on the profession of chefs (to which we could add the effect of contemporary magazines that include glossy pictures of dishes supported by the authority of the chefs who disseminate menus, ingredients, and cooking techniques); and (6) the re/presentation of French cuisine in culinary expositions. However, while these several factors have been important in disseminating French culinary dominance, I believe that we also need to look at the ways in which local groups appropriate and fractalize these processes, leading to the invention and legitimization of multiple national, regional, and local cuisines. In effect, local cultures have borrowed values, norms, and standards derived from French gastronomy to institute their own gastronomy as a codified cuisine that stands side by side with other highly codified culinary systems. Within this framework, the institution of a Yucatecan cuisine was made possible by the repetition and dis/semi/nation of cookbooks that highlight Yucatecan cooking preferences; by their reliance on the authority (social position) of their cooks or of the institutions (restaurants) that encompass them; by the emergence of cooking schools teaching both French techniques and Yucatecan cuisine;6 and by the proliferation of booklets, pamphlets, and Web sites in which tourism agencies (state and private), restaurateurs, and individual consumers acclaim Yucatecan food. All of these processes place Yucatecan cuisine sometimes in implicit, and sometimes in explicit, contrast with Mexican cuisine—although in recent years Mexican cultural institutions have sought to appropriate Yucatecan cuisine as a regional variation on Mexican cuisine. Most high-end restaurants proclaim the virtues of their chefs and the hygiene and orderliness of their establishments, sometimes allowing customers to see their cooks at work through windows placed in the restaurant’s kitchen.7 This public display of cooks also adds a layer of authenticity to the food, implicitly conveying that the restaurants have nothing to hide and can proudly exhibit the dexterity of their staff. For example, at the entrance of one restaurant across the Mejorada Park, near downtown Mérida, patrons find a large glass window through which visitors can witness the kitchen staff at work. At a restaurant-bar located in the barrio Itzimná, visitors can observe the whole kitchen. Next to the entrance there is a large doorway to the kitchen from where one can see the frenzied moves of a platoon of cooks preparing botanas and waiters getting their trays loaded to deliver food to the tables. At another restaurant, located in Paseo Montejo, there is a bar behind which two kitchen aides are on display while they grill tortillas and fix appetizers such as longaniza, panuchos, salbutes, and papa­ dzules. Watching their routine, patrons can see a female chef who, every so often, supervises their work and, when necessary, corrects their technique. The kitchen, where the main courses are prepared, is not visible. At still

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another restaurant, in the eastern outskirts of the city, part of the kitchen is visible: in the front, a woman can be seen, in the middle of a small hut, hand-making tortillas and grilling them on a comal (iron plate) placed on top of a coal fire. But even at restaurants where kitchen performances are not available for visual consumption, patrons can be found in conversation with chefs sporting their toques blanches (starched white hats). Although most Yucatecan restaurants hire chefs, some chefs have opened their own restaurants. In one of them, I have seen the chef personally attending to the requests of his clients, and I was able to discuss with him the reasons why he did (or did not) decide to modify a certain recipe. These displays and performances grant authority and legitimacy to the restaurants, make visible the kitchen hierarchy, and stress the influence of the chef in shaping the food that patrons consume at restaurants.8 During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Yucatecan gastronomy has been promoted in other Mexican regions and abroad. In 2005, it was included as part of the national state’s request for UNESCO to recognize Mexican cuisine as part of its Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.9 This initial request failed, but in the meantime Yucatecan cooks and food were sent to expos and festivals within Mexico and abroad as part of the Mexican campaign to achieve recognition for the nation’s food. In 2006, during this project’s campaign, Yucatecan food was taken to the city of Guanajuato’s Cervantino Festival, which is a showcase for Mexican and international artistic and cultural productions. These forms and strategies designed for obtaining global recognition are closely related to Mexican and Yucatecan efforts to promote national and regional culture as objects of tourist consumption. On the one hand, they highlight the part that restaurants play in the development of regional and national structures for catering to the needs of gastronomic tourists. On the other hand, the uplifting of regional culinary culture legitimates the role of the national state in the sponsorship and transformation of local cultures. Consequently, the imagination of the nation integrates and assimilates separate, distinguishable culinary traditions into a single Mexican cuisine. In all, the inclusion of Yucatecan cuisine in this project has had the ambivalent effect of promoting Yucatecan culinary goods while subordinating it to Mexican cuisine.10 Kirshemblatt-Gimblett (2004: xi) has suggested that “[w]here food is the focus of travel, as in gastronomic tourism, itineraries are organized around cooking schools, wineries, restaurants, and food festivals.” Until recently, it could hardly be argued that Yucatán had organized its catering services along those lines. Although Yucatecan food has received a great deal of attention from tourism entrepreneurs, there is not yet a regional gastronomic tour that would take visitors to the sites where iconic dishes were reputedly created and are prepared and served. In 2005, when I was

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involved in organizing the arrangements for the Canadian Anthropology Society’s annual meeting in Mérida, I spoke to several tourism operators and guides, looking for a gastronomic tour for the visiting anthropologists. They all thought that it would be a good idea to set up one, but in the end they were unable to deliver even a tentative package. Gradually, however, regional restaurateurs are becoming aware of the transformations in tourism practices and realize that growing numbers of tourists are turning into food adventurers, interested in exploring the global diversity of food. Consequently, they have begun directing their efforts to the transformation of their restaurants, bars, and other catering establishments, keeping an eye on the local patron and on the desires and fantasies of travelers from other Mexican regions and abroad. Gastronomic tourism has often been explored from the consumer’s viewpoint (see Long 2004a, 2004b). I suggest that, in addition, we need to explore the ways in which restaurateurs imagine foreign customers and how they transform Yucatecan food in an effort to match it to their interpretations of tourists’ tastes. Yucatecan food in restaurants and other eating locales needs to be seen in light of the development of the tourism industry on the peninsula of Yucatán. From being a partially isolated location, Mérida was turned into an early flight destination in 1928. During the 1930s, different companies established routes between Yucatán and the center of Mexico, as well as with other Mexican and Central American regions. In 1943, Yucatán became connected by air with the United States. That year, Mérida’s airport was upgraded to an international airport as it began to receive US flights. In 1970, Lufthansa inaugurated a series of connections between Mérida and Europe (Rosado Espínola 1981). Since those days, the number of tourists registered by official agencies has progressively increased. Recent statistics (which may be unreliable) suggest a small increase in tourist arrivals, from 186,146 in 2004 to 220,364 in 2006.11 While tourists, just like local people, need to eat on an everyday basis, the question is whether they are inclined to venture into local foods, and the answer must take into account the transformations in the tourist gaze/palate that have occurred since the second half of the twentieth century. During the 1970s and 1980s, anecdotes circulated about North American tourists who, at restaurants specializing in Yucatecan food, demanded hamburgers and fries.12 As other anthropologists and sociologists have shown, affluent post-industrial societies were, at that time, slowly developing a taste for the exotic: whenever food was at issue, travelers were still mostly characterized by their search for habitual, safe food.13 It was only in the 1990s that the trend for ‘authentic’ foods, initiated two decades earlier, became generalized (although not universal), and contemporary tourists began looking more frequently for ‘exotic’ foods—that is, places where local people eat—thus validating local,

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ethnic restaurants (Gabaccia 1998; Hall et al. 2003; Heldke 2003; Long 2004a; MacCannell 1976). In response to the growing demands of tourists to be fed what locals eat, restaurateurs have had to devise marketing strategies to reframe and revalue local cultural goods, placing food at the forefront of the cultural experiences that tourists can enjoy during their visit to the peninsula. Long (2004a: 11–12) has suggested that gastronomic-culinary tourism is mediated by categories of ‘otherness’ used by local people to present their food as exotic for travelers to consume. In some places, local entrepreneurs focus on the integration of the traveler into local foodways, allow them to experience the manner in which ingredients are procured and cooked. Another strategy is to develop a number of venues (restaurants, magazines, Web sites, museums, and festivals) where local food is showcased. Yet another strategy is to negotiate the definition of edible and palatable local foods, seeking to match the attributes of local cuisine with tourists’ values and expectations. With regard to this approach, Long (2004b: 37) characterizes five strategies for negotiation: framing, naming or translation, explication, menu selection, and recipe adaptation.14 As the description and discussion below illustrates, these are all strategies deployed by Yucatecan restaurateurs in their search for success and economic stability. In catering to both local consumers and tourists, restaurateurs have contributed to the establishment and institution of the Yucatecan gastronomic field. In different destinations, some strategies are more important than others.15 In Yucatán, the state government and Mérida’s City Hall have been involved in the promotion of local culture, paying particular attention to food. Their Web sites contain information on Yucatecan gastronomy and, stressing local cosmopolitism, also provide reference to the cultural heterogeneity of the city’s foodscape. Local newspapers often run columns on regional gastronomy, and every Sunday one includes a section on take-away caterers, home delivery services, and restaurants. This newspaper also runs columns on the lives of Yucatecan migrants abroad, keeping readers informed about the increase of Yucatecan restaurants along the West Coast and southern border of the US. Another newspaper has organized a (paradoxical) contest involving innovation in traditional food, and, in general, newspapers participate in the printing and diffusion of regional cookbooks. Festivals of Yucatecan food are organized in other Mexican regions and abroad. Often, the state government and the Chamber of the Gastronomic Industry combine their efforts to organize food expos at various sites in North America and in Europe. In 2006, they took Yucatecan cooks from reputed local restaurants, as well as dancers and musicians, to New York City, seeking to woo larger numbers of tourists to Yucatán. Yucatecan restaurateurs are involved in these efforts, and the strategies that they deploy can be understood as forms of ‘negotiation’ to entice consumers to try Yucatecan food.

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Restaurants and the Construction of the Yucatecan Gastronomic Field In this section I describe some of the strategies that restaurateurs have devised and deploy in order to constitute and define the Yucatecan gastronomic field. First, I deal with the framing of Yucatecan gastronomy, that is, where restaurants of Yucatecan cuisine are located, which customers they envision attracting, and how they have staged the ‘authenticity’ of their cuisine. Next, I examine the strategies of purification, repetition, and differentiation that are reflected in the menus that various restaurants design for the satisfaction of their customers’ desire for the ‘authentic’, the ‘new’, the ‘truly Yucatecan’, or the ‘homemade’. Lastly, I analyze the rhetorical constructions forged by restaurateurs to explain their adaptation of recipes, or the lack thereof, in an effort to match the local imagination with foreign tastes.

Framing Yucatecan Gastronomy The Yucatecan tourism industry, which has been forced to reorganize during the last three decades, currently underscores the value of archaeological sites (Breglia 2007; Castañeda 1996) and colonial cities. The first thrust for regional tourism came from the development of Cancún on the northeastern coast of the Yucatán peninsula, fashioned as a resort to satisfy global consumers’ desires for sea, sand, and sex. In support of this project, coastal ruins were turned into consumable settings where culture and desire could converge (Juarez 2002; Walker 2005). The next initiative was the invention of Mundo Maya (Maya World), a transnational tourism project. It did not take long to recognize that Yucatecan beaches (facing the Gulf of Mexico) were at a disadvantage compared to the fine white sands and turquoise sea of the Caribbean beaches in the state of Quintana Roo. Thus, Yucatán’s state government decided to shift its focus to cultural and convention tourism. In this context, City Hall applied to the American Capital of Culture Organization and obtained endorsement for Mérida to be selected as the American Capital of Culture for the year 2000. Throughout the year, there were public festivities, free and paid concerts, theatrical productions, movie festivals, and many other cultural events in which Yucatán’s kinship with Mexico and the Caribbean region was stressed. A bambuco festival hosted musicians and singers from Venezuela and Colombia, and marimba bands from Chiapas gave concerts. Yucatecan music was placed in a special niche: on Mondays, a street in the main plaza was turned into a stage for demonstrations of Yucatecan folk dances; on Tuesdays, concerts of regional music took place in the Olimpo Theatre at City Hall; on Wednesdays, trova concerts were scheduled for the evenings at the Museum of the Yucatecan Song in the Mejorada

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barrio; on Thursdays, in the Santa Lucia plaza, four blocks away from the main plaza, the weekly Thursday night serenade was held, with more publicity than before and a more diverse program;16 lastly, on Saturdays, a ‘Mexican Night’ was scheduled at the southern end of the Paseo Montejo, during which Yucatecan musicians and dancers shared the stage with musicians from other Mexican regions and abroad. The arrival of 2001 marked the end of Mérida’s designation as the American Capital of Culture. The only noticeable difference was a reduction in the number of scheduled events at local venues. All free public events that had pre-dated the 2000 celebration continued afterward. Mérida still offers visitors and residents an array of options for enjoying public concerts and dances throughout the week. In the late 1980s, City Hall decided to create a space for families to spend time together and to promote life in downtown Mérida, which had been gradually abandoned by residents moving to new neighborhoods and was now being occupied principally by immigrants, mostly from the US and Canada. As one of its initiatives, the city instituted an event called Mérida en Domingo (Mérida on Sunday). Since those years, a major thoroughfare and the main plaza are closed to traffic, and on Saturday evenings restaurants place their tables in the street, setting up stages so that performers can entertain diners during their meals; artisans display their crafts on the sidewalks; bookstores set up provisional stands; the Santa Lucia park hosts a small flea market; and vendors of tamales, textiles, and toys seize the corridors in the west and north sides. On corners and in parks, street vendors sell marquesitas (folded waffles stuffed with Edam cheese); others sell disposable cups filled with jícama and mango spiced up with lime juice, salt, and ground red chili pepper; and still others sell fried meat tacos, panuchos, salbutes, tamales, popcorn, or cotton candy. Every Sunday, downtown streets and parks are crowded with local residents and visitors who walk among the vendors, tables, and stages, taking part in the leisure time of the city. While enjoying regional cultural expressions, local people and visitors alike must seek out food offerings at least once a day, and, frequently, they look for Yucatecan food. Some do so because it is the food that they are familiar with, others because it is through food that they gain access to the otherness of Yucatán. Meridans navigating in downtown Mérida (as their place of residence, their workplace, or their Sunday destination) and visitors who select downtown hotels during their stay are surrounded by colonial architecture and can find relief from the hot temperatures (and, since 2006, free WiFi connectivity) under the shade of large bay leaves and flamboyant trees in the main plaza and at various parks, including Hidalgo, de la Madre, and Santa Lucia. People braving the heat in downtown Mérida can find refreshment at the ice cream parlor Colón, a landmark that has been in existence for 100 years. Colón is furnished with iron tables with marble tops, its walls display

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the patina of time, and the slow-moving pace of waiters evokes an era prior to the hustle and bustle of modern life. Friends, couples, and families sit at their tables, consuming ice cream made from tropical fruits such as coconut, guanabana, mamey, and elote. Alternatively, pedestrians (cum flâneurs) can sit in the patio of one of several restaurants or around tables placed on the sidewalks (or inside air-conditioned locales) to sip a soda, a cold beer, a chelada (a beer cocktail with lime juice and salt, on the rocks), or a michelada (beer with Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, lime juice, and salt, also served on the rocks).17 When looking for an authentic culinary experience, hungry visitors may seek the municipal market, where food sellers serve cochinita pibil, baked piglet, panuchos, salbutes, tamales, and different tortas (sandwiches), accompanied by soda drinks, horchata, or a choice of fruit drinks (papaya, watermelon, melon, pitahaya, orange, lime, and lima). Otherwise, tourists may choose any of the small Yucatecan restaurants located around the main plaza or the parks. One of these restaurants is located on the south wing of the early-twentieth-century theatre Peón Contreras. This restaurant benefits from its location along a pedestrian street where waiters place tables at night and musicians play ‘new’ trova music. The interior is decorated with old-looking wood panels and wooden tables. Another restaurant, across from the main plaza, boldly displays unkempt walls and quaint furniture—tin and wooden tables covered with plastic tablecloths. At these restaurants, one finds mainly tourists from Mexico or abroad who are unfamiliar with Yucatecan food but wish to get acquainted with it. Local people tend to avoid these eateries, seeking others far away from touristy downtown Mérida at which they can consume ‘real’ Yucatecan food.18 No matter how ‘unauthentic’ Yucatecans may find the food at these downtown restaurants, they are well-located in beautiful old buildings (see fig. 5.1), and their food sports exotic names that are presented as Yucatecan. For example, early in 2002, I found in the menu of one of these restaurants an item named filete maya (Maya steak) that was, in fact, un-Yucatecan fajitas. In downtown Mérida, three blocks away from the main plaza, a restaurant founded in 1967 offers Yucatecan and Lebanese food in an enclosed patio. Although local people also go there, this is a restaurant that attracts mostly foreign visitors. Many of these restaurants are crowded at night, when the temperature turns less hot and groups of friends look for tables in the open in order to drink beer and share snacks. For visitors and locals alike, dining in a patio or a garden located around the parks of downtown Mérida—surrounded by colonial architecture and accompanied by the sounds of trios playing trova music—fulfills the experience of immersion in the local culture and of participating in the social buzz of the city.19 There are a number of somewhat expensive restaurants in Mérida that are favored by local people and visitors looking for a culinary experience that

Photograph by the author, 2010.

Figure 5.1. Restaurant patio in downtown Mérida

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approaches the authenticity they seek. These are all restaurants where musicians perform local music at fixed times during the afternoon and evening, and where complimentary snacks are not served before the meal. According to the president of the Mérida Chamber of Restaurateurs, only three of the city’s restaurants that specialize in Yucatecan food fulfill the official criteria of a restaurant (interview, 14 June 2006). Nonetheless, local consumers refer to different eateries and diners as restaurants, and their owners advertise them as such, despite the lack of official recognition. Across the eastern side of the Mejorada plaza, Yucatecans and visitors find the main shrine of Yucatecan gastronomy. The original Los Almendros restaurant was opened in the small city of Ticul in the south of the state. From the outset, its founders’ claim was to provide an unsurpassable taste of Yucatecan food and to be the inventors of poc-chuc, a pork filet marinated in the juice of Seville oranges, garlic, and herbs, grilled over an aromatic wood fire. Opening a branch in Mérida in 1962, they provided Meridans with the opportunity to consume poc-chuc locally, avoiding the trip to Ticul. They now offer a wide menu of Yucatecan (and only Yucatecan) dishes. Located in an old colonial building, the restaurant serves customers in two air-conditioned wings that are separated by the parking lot. On one side, patrons gain entrance across the park. As customers enter the older section of the restaurant, they must pass through large wooden doors adorned with glasswork. This section is divided into two large rooms containing wooden tables that are covered with tablecloths, and through its windows one gains a view of the parking lot. From the early afternoon onward, a trio of Yucatecan performers plays music and sings songs for the enjoyment of patrons, who can request songs free of charge.20 Most visitors, as well as local people, select this area as the location to consume their meals. Although there is no difference in the food being served, middle- and upper-class Yucatecans prefer the newer section, called Gran Almendros, which has a different atmosphere. Here, the tables are located in the patio and corridors of a nineteenth-century palace. A translucent dome covers the patio, and the columns and corridors are freshly painted and well-kept. Next to the entrance, a group of elderly musicians plays jazzy ballads from the 1950s and 1960s as an accompaniment to the patrons’ meals. Most of the customers are white, middle-class Meridans, consuming their meals and drinks in an atmosphere of conviviality and respect for the private space of those at other tables (see fig. 5.2). During the 1990s, whenever we visited Mérida before moving back, our friends took us there, either for almuerzo or for supper. Now, when friends visit us from Mexico or abroad, we often take them first to this restaurant. Once, a group of Italian friends came to spend their holidays touring different Mexican states. During their stay in Mérida, we took them to this restaurant for supper on their first night. They were in awe over the variety of

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Figure 5.2. The author facing panuchos and salbutes in a downtown restaurant

Photograph courtesy of G. Vargas Cetina, 2010.

dishes and commented on how different Yucatecan food is from the food of other Mexican regions. Our four friends shared a number of dishes across the table, praising their colors, aromas, and pleasurable presentations. In contrast to Yucatecans who find their own food too ‘heavy’ to consume at night, our Italian friends found it ‘light’. Although we did not see them again during their stay in Yucatán, they told us that they continued seeking out Yucatecan food in all the places that they visited in the region. The lobby of a hotel in Paseo Montejo is the location of another restaurant that is important in local gastronomy. In 2002, this restaurant, Los Almendros, replaced another restaurant of Yucatecan food, El Mural, called so because one of the walls features a mural depicting historical and contemporary world celebrities (among many, Fidel Castro, Mahatma Gandhi, Luciano Pavarotti, and Marilyn Monroe), who are dancing, walking, or sitting with Yucatecan celebrities in Mérida’s main plaza. Most of the characters are depicted in Yucatecan dress: the women in hipils (loose, brocaded blouses) and the men in guayaberas (traditional pleated shirts). At Los Almendros’s entrance, there is a bar displaying national and international spirits. Inside,

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there is a semi-private room with a large table for seating several people. Local or visiting politicians and/or entrepreneurs often reserve this room to entertain their guests. Alternatively, some customers choose to sit at a table in the large room with windows facing the lobby, or they sit at tables outside the restaurant in the ample and elegant lobby of the hotel. A trio of young musicians stands discreetly in one corner, performing Yucatecan songs, and then moves to sing in the lobby, where the smoking section is located. The majority of patrons in this restaurant are tourists, both national and foreign. However, due to its propitious location at the crossing of important avenues, it is also common for local friends to meet at this restaurant. The food is sometimes prepared respecting local standards and is arranged in a sophisticated manner, taking note of current dietary concerns (i.e., goodquality ingredients, careful cooking procedures, and fat-free pork). However, the cooks have surrendered to tourists’ demands, and since 2008 they have included a number of vegetarian dishes and a selection of wakax dishes (vaca, beef), appending to each dish the name of a Yucatecan town in an effort to add an aura of authenticity. Some restaurants that were recognized as important markers of the Yucatecan gastronomic field have either suffered significant changes or have closed down. These changes occurred when the original proprietors retired or passed away, or when there were no relatives to give continuity to the restaurant, or when the inheritors changed the food in ways that displeased local consumers. Modifications in the distribution of the population may also have helped to reduce the number of clients, forcing old restaurants to move to cheaper, downscaled locations. Demographic changes have transformed the composition of different neighborhoods in recent decades. Some of the old barrios have been largely deserted, and buildings that were formerly homes are currently occupied by small businesses. In the past, Yucatecans inhabited the city’s northern neighborhoods (fraccionamientos and colonias). Today, these areas also house a growing number of immigrants from other Mexican regions who prefer restaurants of Mexican rather than Yucatecan food. Besieged for a couple of decades by restaurants of tacos and Mexican meats, and with a waning clientele, the restaurant Los Flamboyanes in the extension of the Paseo Montejo was forced to close its doors. In 2005, the restaurant Cantamayec, which had been founded in 1971 and was previously located in the west of the city, moved into a downscaled establishment near a shopping mall in the east of the city. It still survives, offering a limited menu to a decreasing number of patrons. Some restaurants have been forced to change their specialty in order to address the effects of changing demographics. The restaurant Colonos in the Colonia Alemán, for example, was originally established as a restaurant of Yucatecan food, was later changed into a restaurant-bar that provided

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complimentary botanas and charged for some meals, and was recently turned into a fish and seafood restaurant-bar. Sac-Luum, another restaurant, was inaugurated in 2004 as an alternative for consumers of Yucatecan food. Its menu was rather short, and it failed soon after. It was then turned into a fish and seafood restaurant, Tikin-Fish, which also failed. In 2007, it became a branch of the restaurant-bar El Tucho, and it now features variety shows and serves Yucatecan foods along with beer. Similarly to its downtown headquarters, and like the oldest one in its genre, La Prosperidad (also in downtown Mérida), these restaurant-bars are locally famous, and many visitors also seek them out as places where they can consume beer, along with Yucatecan food, and enjoy the performances of local singers, dancers, and comedians, as well as regional theatre sketches. Many of these restaurant-bars are located in palapas (palm-roofed buildings), and although they give customers the choice of sitting in an air-conditioned room, most patrons prefer to sit under electric fans that somewhat ameliorate the heat, enjoying their food and drinks while watching regional comedians and listening to live music. A new sort of restaurant emerged during the 1990s. Investors bought and renovated former hacienda plantations in Mérida’s hinterland and in other strategic locations (e.g., along the roads to the archaeological sites of Dzibichlatún, Uxmal, and Chichén Itzá), profiting from the flow of tourists. Some of these former haciendas have been turned into grand or boutique hotels, with rates that can reach US$500 a night. Their restaurants serve food that ranges from ‘traditional’ menus (Hacienda Teya) to nouveau Yucatecan cuisine (Hacienda Xcanatún). Since they are located outside the city, only local people who own a car or visitors who rent them are likely to visit these restaurants. One of them, Hacienda Temozón, which is located along the road to Uxmal, has, since its founding in 1997, been a preferred destination for Meridans. Different people have told me that they have visited this restaurant to celebrate someone’s birthday, a graduation, or a wedding. On weekends, Meridans get together and drive to this restaurant, which, like the other old haciendas, was built as far back as the seventeenth or early eighteenth century.21 After parking their cars between late-model European, Japanese, and US cars, visitors can choose to stroll through the hacienda garden or go directly into the restaurant, where the tables are arranged in large rooms separated by thick walls. Some tables have been placed at windows or in corridors overlooking the manicured gardens, fountains, and swimming pools. From this position, one can watch the ‘peons’ (gardeners, janitors) performing daily maintenance work, dressed in the attire that indentured laborers were forced to wear during the nineteenth century. At Hacienda Teya, whose restaurant was inaugurated in 1995,22 the former engine room has been turned into an indoor swimming pool surrounded by corridors and adorned columns and walls. This room is opened for formal

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receptions, weddings, and upper-class dance parties. From this building, the visitor can gain access to the hotel or may choose to walk through its spice garden or to the restaurant. The restaurant is air-conditioned and divided into different rooms labeled with the names of Yucatecan cities. Their wide windows face the hacienda’s garden, where trees now considered iconic of the Yucatecan ‘natural’ regional landscape are planted: bougainvilleas, flamboyant trees, roses and orchids, ceibas, and henequen plants. At the entrance of Hacienda Ochil, on the road to and from Uxmal, visitors first come across replicas of peasants’ homes. On their way to the main building, they walk along a small railroad adorned with a pump trolley and pass by small huts where artisans produce different handicrafts. The old building is not airconditioned, and the furniture is rustic, but the scenery replicates northern Yucatán’s landscape, allowing visitors to take a nostalgic and romantic trip into the past. Restaurants at the former haciendas often play recorded background music that is alternated with the live performance of trios dressed in ‘traditional’ Yucatecan guayaberas. Different haciendas privilege different patrons. Some are, as already suggested, directed at consumers of the upper crust, both local and foreign. Others cater to Yucatecans and visitors seeking dishes that are part of the regional culinary field but have been marginalized in restaurants that claim to represent Yucatecan ‘traditional’ gastronomy (e.g., one of these restaurants displays a menu with a wide array of rabbit dishes that cannot be found in any other Yucatecan restaurant). Still others, recognizing their mixed clientele, include Yucatecan and Mexican dishes to satisfy the diversity of customers en route from Mérida to the different archaeological sites. For example, the Ochil restaurant targets customers of heterogeneous tastes who have less disposable income than those sought by Temozón, which is along the same road. Ochil’s menu includes Yucatecan dishes and generic Mexican recipes, such as guacamole and fajitas. All of the haciendas and restaurants, however, appeal to recognizable icons of the Yucatecan landscape and culture to frame the food that they serve and, hence, to validate its ‘authenticity’. Even the humblest Yucatecan restaurant displays paintings or photographs of the local forests, peasant huts, sunsets in the Mérida cathedral, the beaches of the north of the peninsula, stylized Maya icons (the Maya calendar, the head of King Pakal, the Chaac Mool, images of pyramids carved in limestone), or photographs of Mérida at the turn of the twentieth century. Some restaurants plant local and naturalized trees to provide shade for cars and buildings or to help harvest herbs and spices or simply for decor. One restaurateur informed me that he had planted around the palapa some bushes that the local Maya told him act as a mosquito and fly repellent (not very successfully, as any visitor could feel and see). In addition to these visual icons, local music and dances commonly accompany the consumption of Yucatecan meals. These visual and

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auditory icons seek to feed both the romantic search for authenticity and the nostalgia for past times and lost flavors.23 The non-edible cultural productions help to frame and to anchor the experience of the meal in Yucatecan culture, thus furthering the inscription and territorialization of Yucatecan gastronomy. As I will now discuss, the repetition of menus provides a sensory structure to Yucatecan gastronomy and, hence, makes Yucatecan food a ‘natural’ attribute of Yucatecan peoples and society.

Menus, Repetition, and Difference In 2003, a couple of friends from Italy visited Yucatán. After spending one week in Cuba, they came to pay us a visit, and I took them to several places in Yucatán. On our way back from the archaeological site of Uxmal, we stopped for almuerzo at one of the haciendas. My two female friends were impressed by the luxury of the hacienda-hotel and the set-up of the restaurant. A fountain kept water running continuously into a small channel all along the front of the building. We walked up the stairs of carved stone to reach the front corridor, and the maître d’hôtel led us to a table in one of the corridors facing the inner U-shaped garden of the building, which had a long pool in its middle. There were guests at only one other table. We looked at the menu and ordered, as our first dish (entrada), tamales with black stuffing au gratin. My friends asked me to suggest dishes for them, and I recommended that one try stuffed cheese and the other poc-chuc. They praised the elegance of the service when the waiter brought the plates covered with a steel bell. The tamale was served with melted cheese on top, a treatment that is alien to the way that this dish is served in Yucatecan restaurants and homes. Later on, when one friend was served stuffed cheese, I saw that her plate contained two melted slices of mozzarella cheese stuffed with ground meat. Our other friend was served poc-chuc in its usual presentation, with the pork filet being accompanied by pickled red onions, a slice of Seville orange, a sauce of roasted tomatoes with cilantro, and a bowl of blended black beans. Judging the meal from the standpoint of Italian cooking, she complained that the spices in the marinade did not allow her to get the “real” flavor of the meat.24 However, both friends happily ate their meals and commented favorably on the elegance of the place, the sobriety of the waiters’ demeanor, and the good (although “strange”) flavors of poc-chuc. They also praised the delicate flavor of the stuffed cheese. The next day we visited Chichén Itzá, and, after a walk through the site, I drove them to Valladolid, 40 kilometers to the east. We topped at a cenote,25 located near the downtown area, on one side of which there is a restaurant. They found the scenery beautiful, and after walking along the path around the cenote, some 10 meters above the surface of the water, we took a table at

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the restaurant. Since my friends had planned to stay only a couple of days in Yucatán, they decided to order a number of dishes to share. The restaurant offered complimentary botanas: sikil pak (a dip of roasted tomato and ground squash seed); refried black beans with epazote; pickled potatoes with onions, black pepper, and the juice of Seville oranges; and pork crackling on a fried green tomato sauce, with Seville orange juice, cilantro, and habanero pepper. We ordered papadzules as our entrada. They complimented the delicate combination of flavors of the dish (boiled eggs, ground squash seed, epazote, and fried tomato). Next they got the stuffed cheese. This time it came as a slice of Edam cheese stuffed with ground meat, capers, olives, tomatoes, and onions, covered with k’ol (a béchamel-like sauce), and fried tomato sauce. I found it odd that the k’ol contained shreds of roasted turkey but did not mention it to my friends. Next we got lomitos de Valladolid: diced pork in a thick tomato sauce sprinkled with minced hard-boiled eggs and accompanied by a bowl of blended black beans.26 They also tried a plate of cochinita pibil prepared with lean meat (not the usual presentation).27 My friends said that they enjoyed the food and compared it to the dishes eaten at the hacienda. They agreed that at the cenote restaurant the service and the presentation of dishes were less refined and more “homely” than at the hacienda; however, they liked the combination of flavors and aromas better. On a different occasion, we took a friend from Mexico City to another former hacienda that specializes in Yucatecan food. She had been to Yucatán before and was acquainted with a number of Yucatecan dishes, but she had never been to the hacienda. She was struck by the elegance of the place, and when the time came to order her food, she asked for a poc-chuc. When she was served her dish, she praised the richness of its flavors and its colors, which combined green, yellow, red, dark red, purple, and black. We could all smell the aromas emanating from her plate: epazote, garlic, onion, orange, allspice, and wood. She compared it favorably to the versions of the same dish that she eats in Mexico City restaurants. I have also had the opportunity, several times, to try Yucatecan food outside Yucatán, in other Mexican regions. From 1995 to the end of 1999, I had to travel frequently to Mexico City. On different occasions, our friends Teresa Rojas Rabiela, a historian, and the late Victor Franco Pellotier, a linguist, took my wife and me to several restaurants to eat Yucatecan food. One restaurant of Yucatecan food in Tlalpan (a neighborhood in the south of Mexico City) had a varied menu, and although the dishes looked similar to those prepared on the Yucatán peninsula, the flavors were different, most likely because substitutions were made for those Yucatecan ingredients that were unavailable in Mexico City. Also, at another restaurant, we were treated with panuchos of cochinita pibil. Although the panuchos were very similar to those in Yucatán, instead of their usual topping from a choice of slices of

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hard-boiled eggs or minced meat or poultry, they were topped with cochinita pibil. This mode of serving panuchos has only recently become more common in Yucatán in response to requests from the growing numbers of central Mexicans in the state, both visitors and immigrants.28 During the mid-1990s, a restaurant of Yucatecan food opened in San Cristóbal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas. It did not last long, and I visited it only once before it closed down. The menu listed dishes with names taken from the Yucatecan gastronomic field. However, when we were served our meals, we were unable to recognize the dishes that they were supposed to be. I asked to talk to the cook/chef. He said that he was surprised by my response to the dishes, as that is the way he learned to prepare them at school (he did not mention which culinary school or where it was located). During my travels within Chiapas and in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, Villahermosa, and Chetumal, I began to order eggs motuleños whenever I found it in the menu. This dish, as I have already mentioned, is prepared with two tostadas lightly spread with refried black beans, onto which two fried eggs are placed. The eggs are then garnished with small dices of cooked ham, green peas, a sauce of blended roasted tomatoes and cilantro, and a sprinkle of fresh cheese. The eggs may be also accompanied by slices of fried plantain. Outside Yucatán, however, the discrepancy of presentations I encountered was bewildering. For example, at a restaurant in Mexico City I was served a version where the only visible ingredient was melted cheese covering the entire contents of the plate. After cutting through the cheese, I found two fried tortillas floating in sour cream, each topped with one fried egg. Regionally, Yucatecan food has been established as such in part through a process of repetition, of copying the menus from one restaurant to another. This process of repetition makes possible the dissemination, territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization of a common code, a set of rules, an array of colors, flavors, aromas, and techniques that have become standardized, routinized, instituted, and constituted as the essence of Yucatecan gastronomy. This gastronomic field develops the grounds wherein the iconicity of certain dishes as Yucatecan is established. However, as the previous examples suggest, repetition does not imply the identical reproduction of the same form. It is the same code that is reproduced, and, in each restaurant, cooks have some degree of flexibility to improvise, to innovate, and to express the culinary preferences that they have acquired as a result of their own experiences within their family, social class, or place of origin. Hence, cochinita pibil may differ from one restaurant to another, or from one city to another, even when Yucatecans agree that it was done “as it should be.” The cook has the freedom to add a bit more or a bit less of any ingredient, maintaining the identity of the meal while making a slightly different, personal interpretation. For example, one cook may use vinegar in the marinade, another may use

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Seville oranges, and still another may use a blend of the two; one cook may use more achiote than another; another may use a different color of onion or add a secret ingredient. Eggs motuleños will still be recognized as such if the cook uses fried tortillas instead of a tostada or replaces the cooked ham with prosciutto.29 A change in the type of beans will give the dish an odd but acceptable flavor (as would the lack of epazote in the beans), and the use of cheddar instead of fresh cheese or Edam may be an unusual but acceptable choice. As a result of this system of identity and difference, consumers can choose their restaurants based on the correspondence between the flavors, aromas, and textures that the cook imparts to the dish and what the consumer is familiar with and thus expects from her or his meal.30 Through the repetition of some dishes in their menus and the omission of others, Yucatecan restaurants have contributed to the institution and constitution of the field of Yucatecan gastronomy. In examining the contents of the menus, we can see that the diversity and heterogeneity of recipes found in the culinary field is not reflected in the menus of restaurants that specialize in Yucatecan food. In fact, their menus, which could hardly aspire to provide 100 recipes to be included in a short cookbook (much less than the 700 recipes found in some of the earlier cookbooks), are turned into instruments of cultural purification. Restaurateurs have engaged in a process of selection of dishes that they see as iconic of Yucatecan food and that they anticipate will match the expectations of consumers when they go to their favorite restaurants to eat Yucatecan food; that is, they are certain that their local and foreign consumers will accept these dishes as representative of Yucatecan food culture. Hence, in effect, restaurant menus select and purify the field of the culinary in order to further refine the field of regional gastronomy. Similarly to the gradual condensation of cookbooks of Yucatecan cuisine, menus can become extremely selective, and when restaurateurs claim that their restaurants are the standard-bearers of Yucatecan culture—and when consumers accept them as such—the dishes that they select are circularly confirmed in their iconicity. In the paragraphs that follow, I briefly compare the menus of some of the main Yucatecan restaurants and some of the minor ones. My goal is to illustrate the consistencies and repetitions that are present, as well as the range of variations. Some restaurants seek to cater to consumers in search of the authentic, the exotic, the ‘truly Yucatecan’, while others recognize a more diversified market and respond with a wider selection of recipes from Yucatecan culture, including Lebanese dishes. Still others locate the authentic in the culinary field instead of the gastronomic field and include in their menus locally accepted dishes that use ingredients (e.g., pig’s feet, offal, and odd cuts) that many tourists would consider to be inedible and unpalatable. I suggest that it is this culinary arena where the interplay between repetition

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and exclusion best highlights the part that restaurants play in the invention and institution of the Yucatecan gastronomic field. When eating out, many consumers look for botanas. These are substantial snacks that restaurant-bars provide as a complement to the drinks that customers purchase, and, for many Yucatecans they are an important part of the experience of dining at a restaurant. In fact, at most restaurants of Yucatecan cuisine (but not in restaurants of other cuisines), customers expect to receive small portions of food as botanas while examining the menu. In contrast to restaurant-bars that provide tacos and other meats as botanas, some restaurants of Yucatecan cuisine provide patrons with reduced portions of sikil pak, tjine (tahini), and/or hummus. Most of the high-end restaurants do not provide any botanas, as they are doubtless aware that the snacks will reduce the appetites of their patrons, who consequently will order less (paid-for) food. This conclusion is not difficult to reach. I have gone with friends to some restaurants that provide generous amounts of botanas (fried squash, pork crackling in sauce, sausages, sikil pak, refried black beans, tahini), and, following the consumption of botanas, some friends order only one dish to split, while others are quite content with the botanas and refuse to order any additional food. Since this is becoming a common practice, some restaurateurs have excluded botanas from their service. Consequently, when Yucatecan friends discuss which restaurant to visit, they find it important to evaluate whether at any given place they will be served botanas, how much, and of what quality.31 Although the lack of botanas may be a deterrent for some Yucatecans when choosing a restaurant, restaurateurs expect that if clients wish to start with botanas, they will pay for them. The range of appetizers offered by restaurants varies, but each restaurant’s selection is from a choice of Yucatecan ‘light’ finger foods or meals that can be eaten as tacos that the guests themselves prepare.32 For example, in many restaurants one may order a ration of longanizas (sausages) from Valladolid. This dish is usually served with pickled red onions, roasted tomato sauce with cilantro, quarters of Seville oranges, and refried black beans. The longanizas are served whole (after grilling they shrink to a length of about 30 centimeters).33 Guests chop the longanizas, spread refried beans on their tortillas, add pieces of longaniza, pickled red onions and tomato sauce, and squeeze drops of Seville orange onto the tacos. Most other botanas are served as individual pieces, and each guest takes one from a center plate that is shared. Other common choices are panuchos, salbutes, tostadas topped with shredded venison, brazo de reina,34 and papadzules. It is in restaurant-bars, frequented very often by resident non-Yucatecans, that the selection of botanas has begun to expand. Now customers can be served flautas or mole enchiladas, along with Yucatecan botanas. However, Yucatecan restaurants that include a selection of appetizers try to restrict themselves to properly Yucatecan dishes and, on

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account of the importance of Lebanese cuisine in the Yucatecan culinary field, some Lebanese dips. Examining a sample of menus from Yucatecan restaurants, we find that the list of botanas (as entradas) ranges from four to seven choices (see table 5.1). From among these restaurants, only two (Cantamayec and Pakal) serve hummus, but it is not included in the menu. In contrast, El Truk provides a large choice of botanas, but they are not complimentary. Table 5.1 shows the systematic repetition of longaniza, panuchos, salbutes, and papadzules, which are found in most restaurants of Yucatecan food. Some of the exceptions can be explained by the fact that, for example, El Truk specializes in food baked in an underground pit oven (comida enterrada), while the Hacienda Ochil addresses the needs of tourists, who may seek alternatives to Yucatecan food.

Table 5.1. Entradas (first dishes) in restaurants of Yucatecan food Entradas

Almen- dros 1

Almen- dros 2

Canta- mayec

Tradi- ición Pakal Truk Ochil Teya

Longaniza

×

×

×

×

×

Panuchos

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

Salbutes

×

×

×

×

×

×

Papadzules

×

×

×

×

×

×

Yucatecan combo*

×

×

Chicken and chaya tamale Dzotobichay Venison tostada

×

×

×

×

Tacos cochinita

×

Tacos with black stuffing

×

×

×

Cazón empanadas

×

Codzitos Sikil pak

×

×

×

Guacamole

×

Cantina-like botanas†

×

×

×

×

* A sample of cochinita pibil, roasted longaniza, escabeche Valladolid-style, and poc-chuc. † May include one or more of cucumber with lime and chili pepper, beets with cilantro, fried squash, potato with tomato sauce, pork crackling with sauce, refried black beans, and hummus.

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Soups are marginal in the field of Yucatecan gastronomy, despite their abundance in the culinary field. Different cookbooks of Yucatecan cuisine include lists (of varying length) of soups and non-dairy creams. In everyday domestic meals one can find, for example, what in Yucatán are called ‘dry soups’ (rice, pasta, and refried beans);35 the quotidian Yucatecan diet also includes several stews. Hence, several meals are accompanied by broth, gravy, or sauce and make of soups, in general terms, a redundant part of everyday eating. Beans (blended or refried) in broth are often consumed along with the main dish and are not a sequential course. The most common practice is to eat a small portion of the meat along with a spoon of broth. One soup, however, has been made iconic of Yucatecan cuisine: sopa de lima. Lima is an aromatic type of lime with a sour-sweet flavor and a distinctive aroma. Different cookbooks provide various renditions of sopa de lima, and restaurants mirror that plasticity. However, some ingredients are obligatory with this dish: lima limes, tomatoes, onions, shredded turkey and broth, and fried strips of tortilla. Hacienda Teya features a cilantro cream, and the dish has enjoyed such a favorable reception that cilantro cream is now found on the menus of different restaurants in the city. Some restaurants have included variations on rice soup, which is often served as a small portion of rice adorned with slices of fried plantain and/or slices of pimiento. The menus of Yucatecan restaurants list a variety of dishes that reflect and represent the local preference for some meats: pork, turkey, chicken, and, to a (much) lesser extent, beef. Additionally, a couple of fish or seafood dishes have recently made their appearance in the menus of some Yucatecan restaurants, probably due to requests from foreign visitors and Yucatecans alike who want alternatives to meat. Yucatecans, in general, believe it is safer to consume fish and other seafood in restaurants that specialize in this cuisine. These restaurants, they reason, would have a quick rotation of ingredients, so the seafood is more likely to be cooked at its freshest. Friends have questioned my choice to eat fish in restaurants of Yucatecan cuisine, commenting, “We don’t know how old the fish is.” Stuffed cheese, a long-standing, iconic Yucatecan dish, has recently evolved to include a new version that is stuffed with shrimp instead of ground meat. It is available at most restaurants only on abstinence Fridays, the fasting day of every week.36 Los Almendros (in Paseo Montejo), serves pan de cazón (baby shark cake) and what the menu describes as “Maya fish” (grouper in a sauce of ground squash seeds and epazote), while Teya offers pan de cazón and cheese stuffed with cazón. Both restaurants list xkat ik peppers stuffed with cazón. Other than these two establishments, it is uncommon to find fish at Yucatecan restaurants. Restaurant menus show some other variations. The more keen that restaurants are to advertise their ‘authenticity’ and their proximity to homemade cooking, the more likely they are to offer dishes that include offal, mondongo

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(tripe), and chocolomo (a beef stew that includes brain, tongue, kidneys, and liver), or dishes from Lebanese cuisine (e.g., kibbeh). To attract local patrons who have little time to cook at home, some restaurants offer dishes exclusively on the days that have been established as being ‘proper’ in the culinary field (see chap. 3): pork and beans on Mondays, cheese stuffed with shrimp on Fridays, puchero on Sundays. Some restaurants include venison recipes, a Yucatecan specialty (Yucatán is still called “The Land of the Deer and the Pheasant,” despite the fact that both animals are near extinction), or, like Los Almendros, once a year they schedule a one-week festival of venison dishes. The venison is often imported from New Zealand, although one Yucatecan ranch is attempting to breed deer to market the meat to local restaurants. Table 5.2 illustrates how the repetition of certain main dishes helps to establish the gastronomic field. Some of the ‘new’ dishes lacking repetition are in fact variations on other more established dishes. For example, cheese stuffed with shrimp is not yet a fully established variation among Yucatecans, nor is wakax (beef), a dish that responds to outsiders’ preference for beef instead of pork.37 Often, the beef is marinated similar to a roasted filet of pork or to poc-chuc, depending on the restaurant. Baked piglet is seldom included in restaurant menus as it is preferably purchased at street food stands; plus, although it is an urban dish that Meridans enjoy, it is not yet included among those dishes considered iconic of Yucatecan gastronomy. To my knowledge, El Truk is the only restaurant to include in its menu, on a daily basis, baked piglet and venison dishes: shredded venison, venison in pipián sauce, and venison with caper sauce. This is also the only restaurant claiming to specialize in Yucatecan food that sells fried kibbeh. It has a weekday list of dishes of the day that includes pork and beans on Mondays, chirmole on Tuesdays,38 lentil stew (potaje) on Wednesdays, choc­ olomo on Thursdays, and pork with white beans (ibes) on Fridays. The menu of the restaurant Pakal includes chocolomo on Wednesdays and, on Fridays, mondongo Andalusia-style.39 Table 5.2 makes it clear that certain dishes are repeated in the menus of some restaurants, both new and established. Poc-chuc and turkey in black stuffing appear in all menus. Stuffed cheese, chicken pibil, cochinita pibil, turkey in escabeche Valladolid-style, and lomitos de Valladolid appear in most menus. These dishes form the core of Yucatecan gastronomy. Yucatecans expect to find them in the menus of restaurants advertised as ‘Yucatecan’, and their absence may be a reason not to select a restaurant. The relationship between, on the one hand, the expectation that consumers have about the presence of dishes in the menu and, on the other hand, the choices that restaurateurs have made about the food that they consider worthy enough to be served by their restaurants helps to institute the perception of what Yucatecan cuisine is and what it is not. The inclusion of dishes from the

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Table 5.2. Main courses in restaurants of Yucatecan food Main Course

Almen- dros 1

Almen- dros 2

Canta- mayec

Tradi- ición Pakal Truk Ochil

Teya

Roasted chicken Yucatecan-style

×

×

Chicken pibil

×

×

Chicken with rice

×

Chicken ticuleño

×

×

Cochinita pibil

×

×

×

×

×

×*

Stuffed cheese

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

× ×

× ×

×

Roasted pork leg Yucatecan-style

×

×

×

×

Poc-chuc

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

Lomitos de Valladolid

×

×

×

×

×

×

Turkey escabeche Valladolid-style

×

×

×

×

×

×

Turkey in capers sauce

×

Turkey in k’ol

×

Turkey in villagestyle escabeche

×

Turkey with black stuffing

×

×

Turkey with white stuffing

×

×

Sunday puchero

×

×

Monday pork and beans

×

×

Wakax (beef filet)

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

×

Fajitas

×

×

Smoked meat

×

Beef lomito

×

Beef strips with xkat ik

×

* Only in orders of tacos.

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Yucatecan culinary field (e.g., chocolomo, mondongo, potaje) pays recognition to that field, expands consumers’ choices at a given restaurant, and appeals to customers who seek dishes that they find too elaborate and time-consuming to prepare at home but wish to eat every so often. Finally, restaurateurs who adjust to the gastronomic canon, both recognizing its legitimacy and thereby validating it, contribute to the establishment through repetition of the gastronomic field. As I have already suggested, the repetition of dishes in cookbooks does not preclude authors from introducing changes to the recipes. These changes are often related to the tastes that are prevalent in families from different social classes. Hence, for some dishes the author might prescribe more or less onion and garlic, may roast them or not, may add some spices of his or her liking or exclude others, or may introduce an ingredient into a recipe that does not generally ask for it. Despite these variations, the consumer can recognize an iconic dish such as lomitos de Valladolid. She or he may prefer this or that version, but the fact that it is made with pork diced into small pieces, that it is served in thick tomato sauce, that it is garnished with minced hard-boiled eggs, and that it is accompanied by beans—all of this allows for the recognition of the dish. Hence, repetition and the identity of the dish do not require that the recipes be identical; their recognition hinges upon the repetition of what Yucatecans identify as their core components. In this same sense, cooks and consumers recognize cochinita pibil, whether it was marinated in the juice of Seville oranges or vinegar, whether it was baked in a pit-hole or in an oven (or in some cases in a pressure cooker), and whether it is served with or without refried beans. If it was marinated with achiote, wrapped in banana leaves, and served with pickled red onions, ground chili, or minced habanero pepper, it is still recognizable as cochinita pibil. Hence, by duplicating the core attributes, cooks all over Yucatán have established cochinita pibil as an iconic dish of Yucatecan gastronomy. To sum up, restaurant menus exclude, purify, repeat, and disseminate certain recipes and dishes, thus establishing a gastronomic code that both restaurateurs and consumers take to be iconic of Yucatecan culture and society. This iconicity converges with values that consumers attach to food, such as authenticity and the evocation of a past that their consumption recreates. Yucatecans may find a dish to be tasty, but they may still complain that it is missing key ingredients, or that it has the right ingredients but the wrong taste (“tomatoes don’t taste today the way they used to do”), or that the cooking technique was not followed correctly (many dishes must be cooked slowly, some for up to eight hours). As a result of their faithfulness to the ‘old’ cooking ways, some restaurants have been able to succeed and to survive for 30 or more years. In contrast, others have failed after restaurateurs, believing that they had to appeal to the tourists’ taste/gaze, compromised their recipes and lost their local clientele (who, as it is often pointed out,

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legitimate the authenticity of a restaurant in the eyes of foreigners). In the next section I illustrate the views of the restaurateurs on the need to negotiate and compromise their cooking in their search for acceptance from the growing numbers of tourists.

Mimicry and Resistance: Redrawing the Gastronomic Field When Yucatecans go to a Yucatecan restaurant, they use the culinary field as their main point of reference. They seek food that domestic cooks are less inclined to cook at home, be it because these dishes are too time-consuming and elaborate, because they require specialized knowledge, because they are too expensive, because too large an amount of food has to be cooked to achieve the ‘right’ flavor, or because cooking some ingredients (e.g., tripe or squid) fills the house with strong, unpleasant odors. In choosing a restaurant, patrons take into account how successful the cooks are in reproducing the aromas and flavors that they favor. Even if restaurants have become instrumental in the institutionalization, standardization, and formalization of Yucatecan gastronomy, among them, local patrons find a wide range of variations. Dishes must be recognizable as those listed on the menu: papadzules must be prepared the way that they are supposed to be. But some diners prefer the stronger epazote scent provided by one restaurant, while others favor the texture of the sauce or the tortilla used in another restaurant. Some like the tomato sauce better here, while others like it better there, and so on. However, an important consideration in choosing a restaurant is whether or not it is perceived as having compromised the integrity of Yucatecan food in order to please outsiders (tourists or immigrants). In 2005, I was told about a restaurant in Mérida that specialized in the food of Valladolid, the city where I was born. Yucatecan food has already gone through a process of standardization, and a number of iconic dishes in Yucatecan gastronomy are said to have originated (or been perfected) in Valladolid.40 Some dishes are prepared in Valladolid in ways that are slightly different from their conventional preparations in Mérida, so I was intrigued by the promise of food in Valladolid’s style. When I visited the restaurant, I found a small, air-conditioned locale with a telephone number printed on the wall so that customers could call and order food to go (the restaurant did not have home delivery and functioned partly as an economic kitchen). My first order was lomitos de Valladolid, a dish that I had learned to cook, dicing the meat into small pieces (no larger than 2 centimeters), in a sauce of tomatoes, whole habanero peppers (to lend flavor but not piquancy), a touch of ground red pepper, and salt. In Valladolid, the dish is garnished with minced hard-boiled eggs and accompanied by a side dish of refried white beans (ibes). To tenderize the meat, it is cooked slowly on a low fire. At this restaurant I was given larger cubes of

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meat (at least double the size) that had been fried before being added to the sauce. I noticed the addition of other spices but could not identify them. The meat was tough, and the sauce was slightly piquant and very fatty. When I told my friends about my disappointment with the dish, the waiter overheard my complaint and informed the chef, who quickly came out to speak to me. He asked why was I unhappy with the meal. I told him that, being from Valladolid myself, I was expecting a dish that was different from what I got. He said that he was from Valladolid as well and that he had gone to culinary school in Mexico City to become a chef. Furthermore, he said, his family has, for three generations, owned famous restaurants. He claimed that he follows a recipe he received from his family. I replied that this is not the way I learned it, nor the way that I find it at the stands of reputed cooks in the Valladolid market. He then confided to me that he had added a chili pepper from the center of Mexico as his secret ingredient and that he was forced to change the cooking procedure to satisfy his customers from Mérida. He acknowledged that the meat should be tender, but, to excuse himself, he said, that in his experience, when he served tender lomitos, Meridans complained that the food was not fresh. He said that, unfortunately, he has had to compromise what he knows to be the ‘authentic’ cooking style of Valladolid so as to gain the favor of Meridans, who are the majority of his clients. This restaurant did not target foreign visitors. It was located in a middle-class neighborhood in the northeast of the city and, in 2006, moved into an older middle-class neighborhood in the north of the city on a street with higher traffic, thus gaining greater visibility. This example illustrates the regional variation (the difference within the repetition) of Yucatecan gastronomy. Even if this chef’s food is Yucatecan (and it is mostly consumed by Yucatecans), he has had to adapt his cooking to the tastes of Meridans, who expect textures, aromas, and flavors that are somewhat different from those expected by people in Valladolid in a dish that is attributed to Valla­dolid cooks. Congruently with his perception, I have found many Meridans who seem to be happy with his food and rate it as excellent Yucatecan food. If cooks of Yucatecan food who cook for Yucatecans have to adapt their food to the tastes demanded by customers in a region different from the cook’s origin, restaurants addressing the gastronomic desires and imagination of visitors from other Mexican regions and abroad find themselves in the paradoxical situation of, on the one hand, claiming to be guardians of Yucatecan gastronomy while, on the other, seeking to please the palate of consumers unfamiliar with Yucatecan flavors. In conversations with managers of some of the important restaurants in and outside the city, I found out how they saw their restaurants in the context of demographic change. Restaurateurs told me that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, they were tired of customers demanding radical changes in their dishes. Once

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the 2000 elections were over and the centralist party (Partido de Acción Nacional) took over the government of the state, these feelings were slowly silenced but not eradicated. In a recorded conversation, the manager of a restaurant told me that, the way he sees it, Yucatecan cuisine has the same degree of flexibility that other cuisines have. For example, he said, pizza is Italian, and in Italy it must be prepared with certain ingredients. However, once it travels, it may undergo variations. For example, in Mexico, Mexican ingredients may be added, and it might be called ‘pizza Mexicana’—but it would still be recognized as a variation on pizza.41 His restaurant has been long acknowledged as a bastion of Yucatecan cuisine, and he and its owners zealously protect their recipes. He explained that their cooks are almost all Yucatecan (one cook was from Veracruz at the time of the interview), but in the past they have hired cooks from Mexico City, Oaxaca, and other Mexican states. The condition for their employment, he said, is that they have to abandon the food preferences they grew up with and adopt the Yucatecan values regarding flavor, aroma, color, and texture of food. He added: “The Chilango who comes and cannot think as a Yucatecan cannot work in this restaurant” (taped conversation, 9 December 2000). The food has to correspond with the Yucatecan sensibility, he explained. I told him that once, at one of the haciendas, I found that the menu included tamales of turkey in black stuffing with melted cheese on top. He was disgusted by the image that the description evoked and at first attempted to explain away the dish, saying that when people do not have the money to buy the right ingredients, they replace them with others. But this is cooking of the people (el pueblo): it does not affect Yucatecan gastronomy because it does not become a widespread recipe. Later in our conversation he returned to the topic and said, “Whoever made a tamale au gratin is not a Yucatecan. People who are inclined to introduce these sorts of changes are Chilangos. They make tamales by stuffing them with whatever they find. They have sweet tamales, mole tamales, and so on.” When I pushed the question of surrendering to visitors’ requests, the manager said that Yucatecan dishes are resistant. People can add different things to their panuchos, like an Italian to a pizza, and it will still be a panucho. Thus, if a Mexican or a foreigner requests vegetables or cheese on a panucho, they are willing to prepare it that way, since, after all, “the customer is always right.” I had the opportunity to witness this openness to customers’ petitions. In 2005, we took a large group of foreign friends to this restaurant, and one of them, a vegetarian, who could not find anything vegetarian in the menu, ordered panuchos with cheese melted on top. The waiter acquiesced, and she was served her panuchos as ordered. The way that the manager of the restaurant explains it, altering any dish to suit a tourist’s request does not compromise the integrity of the restaurant’s cuisine or of Yucatecan food in general. He added: “We have even once filled papadzules with turkey for a

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customer who requested it. Who had ever heard of papadzules with turkey? But we did it. To start with, though, we do not offer Yucatecan food other than as it is traditionally cooked.” He was aware of the variations in recipes for different dishes and said that even among Yucatecans it would be debatable as to whether a dish should contain a certain ingredient or not, since some cookbooks include it while others do not. Once they find a recipe that will please the majority of their Yucatecan patrons, they stick to it. However, they are forced to make some concessions for foreigners. He said that they have had to reduce the piquancy of the turkey in black stuffing: “We Mexicans eat lots of chili peppers, but foreigners don’t. So we have had to compromise, and we make it with less chili pepper. Now, even we Yucatecans enjoy it more.” In general, he said, his cooking staff is willing to accommodate unusual requests from their clients. At one hacienda I spoke to the restaurant manager, who was born in Mexico City of Yucatecan parents. He acknowledged that the hacienda in his charge is not ranked high among the haciendas owned by the same corporation. In fact, it is categorized as a parador turístico, a tourist stopover. His restaurant includes Yucatecan and non-Yucatecan (i.e., Mexican) food in its menu. He said that the main goal of the restaurant is to provide cheap meals to visitors coming from or going to the archaeological sites, making sure that they eat a satisfying meal for about 100 Mexican pesos (less than US$10 at the time). He described the food in the restaurant as Yucatecan fast-food style and added that the majority of their clients order poc-chuc, panuchos, sopa de lima, and tacos of turkey in black stuffing. He suggested that if I was interested in gastronomy, I should visit another hacienda along the same road, owned by the same corporation, where I was more likely to find better food than at his restaurant. At the other hacienda I found the manager, who was also born in Mexico City but of Mexican parents. He and his wife are in charge of the administration of different aspects of the hotel and restaurant. He said that when he was very young, he acquired experience in the kitchen, and now, as a manager, he is in charge of recommending changes in the menu, as well as of tasting and testing dishes before adding them to the menu. He suggested that the majority of their customers come from Europe, although they also host some guests from the United States and Mexico. He noted that their guests must be in a high-income bracket as the room rates range from US$350 to $750 per night. The restaurant, in contrast, attracts numbers of Meridans who, on Saturdays and Sundays, typically eat out for almuerzo. His guests, even foreigners, are all seeking the local flavors, and they ask for local food and Mexican wines. He said that his restaurant had adapted local dishes to the foreigners’ palates, and that is why they have added cheese or sour cream to Yucatecan dishes that are usually never cooked that way. Similarly to other restaurants, they

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also decided to diminish the piquancy of turkey in black stuffing, since, as he put it, foreigners are not used to the full flavor of the meal. However, the manager claimed that most innovations are introduced in the presentation of a dish, not in its elaboration. They modify only an ingredient—say, by adding some extra garlic—when their guests find a dish too insipid. This restaurant hired a chef born in a small village near the hacienda. He was in charge of supervising the quality of the meals, and he cooked, everyday, cochinita pibil and chicken pibil in a pit-hole, “the traditional way.”42 However, given the class of the restaurant’s guests, the manager and chef have devised a menu that includes Yucatecan and ‘international’ cuisine—meaning that they have added pastas, beef cuts, and salads (another uncommon feature in the Yucatecan culinary and gastronomic fields).43 In 2004, another restaurant opened for business, outside the main tourist routes, but along the road to the north coast of Yucatán. It was located in a large palapa surrounded by flamboyant trees, bougainvilleas, cashew trees (with marañón fruits), and a garden with herbs that the cooks employ in the preparation of the food. The manager told me that he had a lot of experience working in tourism in the region, managing different establishments in Cancún and the Maya Riviera. He explained that, given the diversity of its guests, 80 percent of the items listed in this restaurant’s menu are Yucatecan and 20 percent are international dishes. Acknowledging the diversity of the customers, the waiters serve garlic mayonnaise as a gesture toward the cosmopolitan (“It is an international botana”), and sikil pak and xkat ik cream (in fact, a flavored mayonnaise) as local botanas. He said that he included in his menu a dish of their own creation—chicken breast stuffed with cheese. I told him that the dish does not sound very Yucatecan, and while he admitted that this was true, he was proud that his restaurant was the only one to serve it. Hence, if people want to eat this dish, they must come to his restaurant. When I asked him about changes in the food to accommodate requests from clients not accustomed to Yucatecan food, he said that his food is “authentically” Yucatecan and that they specialize in food baked in a pit oven. However, for those who are afraid to try Yucatecan food, they offer beef cuts, and, for vegetarians, they have introduced fettuccini with a cream of chaya, served with a Caesar salad. He acknowledged that fettuccini is the least requested dish on the menu (with poc-chuc, stuffed cheese, panuchos, and salbutes being the most requested ones), but they keep it as an alternative for vegetarian and health-conscious customers. Seeking to please a wider range of customers, he said that they are considering introducing Maya fish in the menu. In fact, they plan to expand their menu with a number of dishes: fish tikin xik, fish stuffed with seafood, grilled fish, and fish in a garlic sauce. He said that he expects his restaurant to be an alternative to the more expensive haciendas, as its food is more “authentic” than what customers are served in those places.44

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The responses of these restaurateurs suggest the everyday negotiation between their self-attributed role as guardians of a local tradition (and therefore their need to keep Yucatecan cuisine as a distinguishable field) and their perception of outsiders’ responses to Yucatecan food. This negotiation is encompassed by the general transformation of the Mérida foodscape in which restaurateurs must secure a niche for Yucatecan food amid the growing diversity of restaurants specializing in world cuisines. Since ‘ethnic’ is a term locally understood to make reference to indigenous culture, restaurateurs would not accept a definition of Yucatecan cuisine as ‘ethnic cuisine’. In my conversations with them, they often highlighted the Mestizo, Criollo (Creole), and cosmopolitan aspects of local cuisine. The food of the Maya, as one of them put it, no longer exists: “That food is pre-Columbian food based on corn, maize, and beans.” In his view, it has been displaced by Spanish, Italian, and French cuisines. Yucatecan food, he asserted, is a food that combines the local with the European, but it is not Maya. Restaurateurs are clear about the importance of standardizing recipes and formalizing a system of culinary rules. For them, even if it is flexible, the food should preserve defining attributes that validate its re/presentation as Yucatecan—wherever it may be consumed. For one of these restaurateurs, several ingredients are characteristic of Yucatecan food, but paramount among them is the achiote recado, in which the ground seed is mixed with allspice, garlic, vinegar, and black pepper. He recognized that in other places in Mexico people eat achiote, but it is the mix of these spices and flavors that makes Yucatecan food unique. For another restaurateur, the defining ingredients are red onions and Seville oranges. However, they all agree that Yucatecan food consists mainly of pork and poultry dishes, with beef being a rare option, reserved primarily for domestic cooking. These restaurateurs think of themselves as cosmopolitan entrepreneurs. They see themselves not only as the guardians of local traditions, but also as brokers who can facilitate the deterritorialization and dissemination of Yucatecan food within Mexico and abroad.

Discussion: Restaurants and the Invention of Yucatecan Cuisine While cookbooks are important in grounding the gastronomic code in the domestic sphere, restaurants and restaurateurs have rooted the gastronomic field in the public sphere, the dominant space of the twenty-first-century urban foodscape. Local elites, like those in hegemonic societies, engaged in the appropriation of rules of distinction to mark and identify people as members of different social classes. These practices translated into the fractalization of the strategies deployed in the invention and institution of French

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haute cuisine (and, following suit, other national cuisines). The regional restaurant industry proved itself up to the task of inventing and instituting the framing of a recognizable Yucatecan cuisine around a group of selected dishes that have been turned into iconic representations of Yucatecan gastronomy. Cookbooks authors and restaurant chefs became authoritative voices, endowing certain recipes with the power to represent regional cuisine. The establishment of a series of dishes and their dissemination, repetition, standardization, formalization, and routinization helped to territorialize Yucatecan gastronomy. Restaurants and diners in Mérida, Ticul, Motul, Valladolid, and Izamal repeated and inscribed the taste for Yucatecan gastronomy in the inhabitants of the state of Yucatán. This series of dishes received recognition from the inhabitants of Yucatán as being ‘their’ food. Gradually, Mexicans from other regions also recognized these recipes as the offspring of peninsular culture.45 The early dislocation of Yucatecan food, transplanted from the territory of Yucatán into other regions, encouraged the recognition of Yucatecan food as different from Mexican cuisine. However, restaurateurs have placed the emphasis on the resourcefulness, creativity, and innovation of Yucatecan cooks who blended European cuisines with local flavors. Restaurateurs, in effect, have instituted a number of dishes as iconic of Yucatecan food. Their repetition ensures their meaning and their correspondence with Yucatecan taste. Sikil pak, panuchos, salbutes, longaniza de Valla­ dolid, sopa de lima, papadzules, eggs motuleños, pork and beans, cochinita pibil, poc-chuc, lomitos de Valladolid, turkey in escabeche Valladolid-style, turkey with white stuffing, turkey with black stuffing, chicken pibil, chicken ticuleño, stuffed cheese, and puchero are the standard, repetitive fare that Yucatecans and visitors can find in restaurants in Mérida and all over the state of Yucatán. Bifurcating from the Yucatecan culinary field, Yucatecan gastronomy developed in cookbooks and restaurants and finds in the latter the source of its legitimacy and cultural significance. The gastronomic field can be understood as the result of a process of purification that has eliminated the ‘foreign’ and the ‘archaic’ in order to seek its place in the global market of national foods. Although Yucatecan chefs have not been granted great fame, Yucatecan restaurants have been turned into cultural institutions, bastions of Yucatecan taste, and guardians of its authenticity. It is restaurants that introduce visitors to Yucatecan food, but these are also the spaces where local people expect to find their culinary tradition safeguarded. If, in the past, restaurants were chosen because they replicated the flavors imprinted in the childhood memories of Yucatecans, today they are placed in a paradoxical position in which they are both the place where the ‘real taste’ of Yucatecan food is established and a space for the negotiation of flavors—between those expected by outsiders, those that restaurateurs imagine visitors desire, and those that can ensure the Yucatecan identity of the food they serve. Nowadays, many Yucatecan families

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have given up cooking complex Yucatecan dishes at home, and, very often, they base their perception of the authenticity of a meal on their previous experiences of restaurant food. Thus, an ‘authentic’ puchero must resemble the one that they are served at a certain restaurant, while an ‘authentic’ pocchuc must be like the one that they eat in another restaurant, and so on. In other cases, the ‘authentic’ dish is the one that was found, in years past, at a restaurant that is now closed, or could be had during the lifetime of a certain cook. In everyday experience, the gastronomic field is thus experienced as an already established, unchanging field—one that is kept under the tutelage of experts on Yucatecan food, the Yucatecan restaurateurs. I have suggested throughout the previous three chapters that the gastronomic field invokes images of timeless endurance and resistance to change. In actuality, restaurateurs gradually negotiate changes in flavors and ingredients with their customers (local and foreign alike), and, inevitably, recipes and dishes change. Immigration from other Mexican regions and from abroad and the growing number of tourists from different parts of the world have forced the introduction of changes in Yucatecan meals and have contributed to the reshaping of local preferences. These changes, of course, are bound to find reflection in cookbooks, the second prong of the gastronomic field. At this post-colonial and post-national stage, new forms of cultural domination arise, together with complex social and cultural formations. Thus, at the same time, restaurants of Yucatecan food can be seen as places where a gastronomic tradition is assembled to oppose the homogenization of culinary tastes fostered by a national cuisine (thus affirming a regional identity), as vehicles for marketing Yucatecan culinary traditions in the market of global foods, and as sites where Yucatecan identity is itself homogenized, silencing the diversity of culinary traditions that have in/formed the constitution of Yucatecan gastronomy. Hence, we can see the dissemination of Yucatecan food having a multiplicity of effects that spring from its definition as unique and separate from ‘Mexican’ food. This would be the ‘dis’ of dis/semination—the result of the tense relationship of contextual, historical opposition to Mexican cooking. Also, as dis/semi/nation, we can see that while Yucatecan restaurants and restaurateurs seek to promote an understanding of Yucatecan food as a distinct gastronomic tradition, there exist concurrent efforts, on the part of central Mexican culinary intellectuals, to integrate it into a national (Mexican) cuisine. Hence, according to the context, it may be defined as a ‘regional’ cuisine, part of a ‘Mexican’ gastronomy, or, at other times (and in different political contexts), as a gastronomy of its own, part and parcel of Yucatecan culture.



Conclusion



Food and Identities in Post-national Times

Throughout this book I have shown that the relationship between food and identity in Yucatán is highly political. To speak of a single Yucatecan identity, as is often done, is to conceal the diversity of ways in which the subjective feeling of belonging has been constructed in Yucatán. Individuals who belong to different ethnic, religious, social, economic, political, and gender groups see themselves in ways that are not homogeneous or exclusive and that do not necessarily correspond to the views of Yucatecan elites on Yucatecan society and values. Besides the presumption of ontological, dichotomous identities, to write of Yucatecan identities, as opposed to a Mexican national identity, betrays the fractures that already exist in the hegemonic nationalist discourse that has been forged and disseminated since the 1800s, following the independence of Mexico from Spain. If the Mexican nation-state endorsed a monolithic, homogenizing imagination of the nation, it did so in order to join the international constellation of ‘modern’ nation-states. Today’s postnational condition instead evokes processes of fragmentation and decentering that can be attributed to a ‘postmodern’ stage of social change.

Post-colonialism, Post-nationalism, and Yucatecan Identities To take these transformations into account, I have supported my analysis with two interrelated bodies of scholarly literature, both informed (but not entirely shaped) by post-structural theory: post-colonialism and post-nationalism. The first body has contributed, among other things, concepts that enable us to see how the articulation of a single history of decolonization, following independence from European empires, has spawned new forms of cultural, political, and economic colonialism. Those who centralize power in a new post-colonial nation are able to define its ‘nature’ and to devise strategies to ensure that their vision becomes the national subjects’ vision, – 237 –

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regardless of where people may live within the territory of the state and what their local histories have been. The second body describes and explains the structural transformations that have reshaped the imagination of the ‘nation’. If the modern nation-state could initially imagine the co-extensiveness of ‘nation’ and ‘state’, today the hyphen, rather than joining these two concepts, “has morphed into a symbol of displacement and disjuncture” (Sparke 2005: xiii). On the one hand, transnational and international formations have undermined the power of the state, whose rule is now subordinated to them. These formations include the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, numerous transnational non-governmental organizations, and a vast array of transnational corporations. On the other hand, the cultural politics of multiculturalism, disseminated through massive migration (both within and outside the borders of the nation-state), the effect of printed, visual, and auditory media, and the fragmentation and redistribution of economic forces fed by financial capital flows have all contributed to challenging the co-extensiveness of one single imagined nation with the state. Nonetheless, in Mexico we do not find, thus far, a multiplicity of nations voicing their existence within the Mexican territory. Rather, we find that the movements of ethnic groups (like the Zapatista uprising that catalyzed indigenous demands throughout Mexico), peasant organizations (some organized into guerrilla groups in Oaxaca and Guerrero), rural and urban entrepreneurs affected by neo-liberal policies (such as El Barzón, a movement of creditors in western Mexico), and regional elites subordinated to national ones (as in Yucatán) all expose the growing fractures between the nation and the state. This context is favorable to the re-emergence of voices affirming difference against the sameness of the nation and thus to the creation of spaces where and when forms of peoplehood can be rebuilt. Yucatecan identity is not a recent invention. As I have discussed (especially in chapter 1), the story of the relationship between Yucatán and Mexico is that of an uneasy alliance, which, during the nineteenth century, resulted in movements for, and periods of, Yucatecan independence. However, in the end, centralist positions prevailed (in Mexico and in Yucatán), leading to the progressive political, economic, and cultural subordination of the region to the elites of central Mexico. Yucatecans did not adopt the national Mexican identity as a blueprint for forging their regional identity. On the contrary, Yucatecan elites preferred to travel to European and US metropolises and to important Caribbean cities—where they studied, enlightened themselves, and established commercial ties—rather than to Mexico City (although many went there, too). Yucatecan schools adopted the political and social thought of French, British, and German philosophers, as did members of the Mexican elites. Hence, the creation of a nationalist ideology in Yucatán ran parallel to

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similar processes in central Mexico, but it did not mimic them. In fact, as I have argued, Yucatecan identity emerged as the offspring of the intercourse of Yucatecan society with societies in the Caribbean, the US, and Europe. In this sense, my argument departs from those that explain Yucatecan exceptionalism on the grounds of climate differences, the peculiar topography of the peninsula (flat against mountainous Mexico), or the social isolation of the peninsular population. I have maintained that Yucatecan regionalism is a form of resistance to the ideology that generated the Mexican nation. My argument has been that Yucatecan identity, mediated by regional food culture, as it is commonly understood in anthropology, is relational and oppositional. If Yucatecan nationalism was built upon the same social theories as those of Mexicans, it was not because the former copied the latter, but because Yucatecans drew from the same or similar philosophical and political sources. In addition, the creation of a Yucatecan identity was a means to unite quarreling elites within the peninsula against the power of central Mexican elites. In the long run, historical circumstances conspired against the institution of a Yucatecan nation independent from Mexico. However, the intellectual efforts of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century leaders spawned a homogenizing/hegemonic construction of regional Yucatecan culture and society that was founded on the values, interests, and worldview of successive ruling elites, who often found themselves in the position of defending local interests against the effects of central Mexican colonial interests. Within this context, Yucatecan intellectuals were able to compose a Yucatecan culture that dwelled on the idiosyncratic geographical ground of Yucatecan society, arguing that the Yucatecan ‘temperament’ was different from the Mexican one since it was fashioned under different geographical and historical circumstances and had the historical precedent of a great Maya civilization. Particular forms of music, dance, literature, theatre, language, dress, architecture, food, and religiosity were deemed to represent cultural manifestations of the Yucatecan temperament and, therefore, to be specific to the region and different from those of central Mexico. However, as was the case with similar constructs in modern nations all over the world, the general effect of this identity construct was a homogenizing one. Yucatecan identity encompassed, and therefore silenced, the various elites (with different political and economic interests) in Mérida, Campeche, and Valladolid. It also assimilated and cloaked different ethnic/national groups (Spanish, Creole, Maya, Mestizo, and Yaqui) co-existing within the peninsula of Yucatán, as well as the growing number of immigrants from European, Caribbean, Asian, and Middle Eastern nations. Moreover, this construct obliterated class differences, as ‘Yucatecan’ was an identity imagined from the standpoint of the elites, not from that of peasants, indigenous people, manual laborers, or other minority groups. In the long run, Yucatecan ‘culture’ and ‘identity’

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would assimilate immigrants from other Mexican, American, and European regions and silence the voices of individuals with alternative views and sexual orientations. Although from the 1920s women have been recognized as full citizens of the state, it can be argued that Yucatecan identity was, and still is, a male intellectual invention that has preserved women in positions that are now relatively improved but still subordinate to those of male elites. In the context of contemporary transformations, as I have suggested in previous chapters, the fragmentation of the foodscape, the multiplication of cookbooks with different cultural agendas, and the divergence in the offerings of ‘Yucatecan food’ in restaurants all point to the gradual dissolution of Yucatecan identity as a monolithic and homogeneous construct. This trend is leading to a rapid deterritorialization of a slowly territorialized culture, gastronomic ‘tradition’, and identity.

Foodfields: The Dissemination of Culinary and Gastronomic Identities The constitution and institution of a clearly distinguishable Yucatecan cuisine are the outcome of the combinative processes encompassed by the notion of dis/semi/nation. I have further unpacked Derrida’s concept of ‘dissemination’ to underscore the complex transformations that have occurred in Yucatán. With the term ‘dis/semi/nation’, I have sought to underline, first, the difficulties (using ‘dis-’ to express negation) of disseminating the ‘nation’ form. That is, Mexican and Yucatecan elites alike sought to forge distinct national identities that were not fully achieved. Hence, tensions and ambivalence emerged between the Mexican project to advance its homogenizing/ hegemonic views and the resistance of the Yucatecan elites to accept that project. Secondly, this has led to the discomforts of the ‘semi/nation’ for both Mexican and Yucatecan ideologues. In the former case, this is so because centrifugal forces, represented by the demands for autonomy advanced by different regions, are always threatening the co-extensiveness of the nation and the state (Yucatán being the example examined in this book). In the latter case, it is because Yucatecan identity has been challenged, in the past and the present, by Mexican attempts to assimilate the region within the nation. An additional factor is the increasing cultural fragmentation of the Yucatecan region that continuously undermines the integrity of the Yucatecan project. Thus, in both cases we find unfulfilled national projects, resulting in forms of ‘semi/Nation’. Lastly, I have also unveiled the ‘dis-’ (using ‘dis-’ to express the difficulty) in the ‘semination’ of these regional and national identities. Cooks and restaurateurs have devised different mechanisms to use Yucatecan gastronomy (like its Mexican counterpart) as the instrument and vehicle

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for the ‘semination’ (i.e., spread) of cultural values and taste preferences. Through repetition and routinization, recados, cookbooks, and culinary practices have sought to naturalize culinary preferences associated with images of a particular cultural identity. However, repetition has also been linked to the introduction of difference, and underneath the mantle of culinary homogeneity we can always discover the presence of diversity. In this book, I have been writing about the expansion and fragmentation of the urban and regional foodscape. The efforts of chefs and cooks to carve out a niche and to differentiate Yucatecan from other grand cuisines highlight the ‘dis-’ of the global process of culinary institution and recognition, the ‘dis-’ of the ‘semination’ of hautes cuisines, and the ‘semi/Nation’ of a regional gastronomy that is pitted against a dominant national cuisine. Reviewing local, regional, and global transformations, I have analyzed the expansion of the foodscape through an examination of new and different meals, derived from imported culinary traditions, and how this has increased the local availability of different cuisines. This expansion has had the effect of allowing Yucatecan consumers to affirm their cosmopolitan inclinations. However, during the process, there has also been a progressive fragmentation of the foodscape along economic and ethnic lines. There are cheap and expensive versions of Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and Yucatecan food. Moreover, Yucatecan food has further diverged along these lines: dishes belonging to the Yucatecan gastronomic field—that is, those resulting from the refinement of the culinary field—are found in expensive restaurants, where foods that are marked as Lebanese or peasant (Maya or not) are excluded from the menus. In cheap cantinas, restaurant-bars, and smaller restaurants, restaurateurs have fewer reservations and include in their menus items such as codzitos, tamales, hummus, baba ghanoush, quibis, pool kanes, and other less ‘elegant’ or ‘refined’ dishes. Also, in recent years, the spread of values associated with vegetarianism and naturism has challenged the hegemony of a meat-oriented culinary tradition. The expansion and fragmentation of the foodscape point to the fact that the market for foods is a plural space, resulting from local-global interactions in which Yucatecan food, in order to survive, must establish its own niche. The location of Yucatecan food must underscore its specificities and, at the same time, its relational identity; that is, Yucatecan food must set out its own contours by marking its distance from central Mexican and other national and international cuisines. This objective is partly achieved by accepting, adopting, and endorsing the codes, rules, and norms that allow a cuisine to be recognized as being on a par with other recognizable cuisines. The culinary field is the result of these local-global connections. It is because, from the beginning, Yucatecan cooks (domestic and professional) had to cook on an everyday basis—drawing from what was available in the market—that, in

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culinary practice, individuals had to articulate local products and whatever was available from the international market, seeking to replicate the food models generated by the French and Spanish sources of haute cuisine. Since the 1500s, different groups coming from Maya, European, Middle Eastern, Asian, and American regions have converged in the territory of the peninsula of Yucatán and have been forced to interact in the space of domestic kitchens, improvising and experimenting with ingredients. In copying one another, they have dis/seminated the local taste for determinate flavors, aromas, colors, textures, and culinary techniques and technologies, instituting a culinary system of preferences. Through the generalized acceptance of recados, Yucatecan cooks have played an important part in the process of territorializing a culinary set of practices and turning it into a specifically Yucatecan culinary form. Hence, the culinary field is understood as the result of a long process of ‘semination’ of culinary preferences that standardized, repeated, and routinized procedures and, in the course of doing so, naturalized the Yucatecan taste for particular ingredients and their combinations. The culinary field has spawned a culturally specific configuration that marks Yucatecan food preferences as different from the food preferences of central Mexicans and other regions of the world and that, simultaneously, affirms a local, generalized identity. It is from this culinary field that the gastronomic field emerged. In the gastronomic field, the informality of the culinary field is replaced by stricter rules and a code that specifies which ingredients should (or should not) be included when cooking a Yucatecan meal. This code also explicitly establishes which recipes can be taken into account in defining the contours of Yucatecan gastronomy and, by the same token, excludes recipes that are clearly related to other gastronomic codes. Yucatecans share a common knowledge about the cooking procedures and eating etiquette involved in a particular regional meal. Gastronomy is, therefore, a field of practices in which cooks, both domestic and professional, standardize the preparation of Yucatecan meals considered to be integral to the field, while actively excluding recipes, ingredients, and cooking techniques that characterize other cuisines. It is through this reiteration of flavors and attached taste memories that the Yucatecan semi/Nation is constructed and re-enacted everyday at the table. Despite this formalization and standardization, as I have argued in chapters 3 and 4, the local repetition of recipes introduces variations that result in a range of differences, from town to town, from home to home. However, those divergences are silenced, contained, and managed by the authoritative figures of the gastronomic field (i.e., cookbook authors and restaurateurs). The coherence and consistency of this field is of important political value in the structure of oppositional relationships between central Mexican and Yucatecan institutions. It is in the context of internal colonialism—that is, the drive to colonize, conquer, and homogenize cultural diversity through the dis-semination of national icons,

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including a national Mexican cuisine—that strategies are devised to resist forms of neo-colonialism and to affirm local difference against national homogeneity. Hence, Yucatecan gastronomy, forged in Yucatecan kitchens, is dis/seminated throughout the Yucatecan territory by the mediation of cookbooks and restaurants and by the collective affirmation of Yucatecan food as an offspring of the regional temperament and character, as a cultural production of the ‘people’. In this context, the spread of Yucatecan food, along with other isomorphic cultural inventions, helps to sustain and affirm the nature of the Yucatecan dis/ semi/nation, which now stands in contrast but also in affirmation against the horizon of a Mexican nation. I believe that it is in the context of these transformations that the mode of analysis developed in this book can help to explain the part that regional peoplehood plays in the constitution and institution of local, regional, and ethnic gastronomies. At the regional level, we find subjects who must negotiate between global and local transformations of the foodscape. Institutions that have embodied the right to become universal codes of practice and discourse (such as French gastronomy and US and transnational fast-food corporations) possess the cultural/colonial power to mediate local and regional changes in food choices and habits. This power is normally accompanied by an increased flow of goods into regional societies and by enforced changes in local and regional culinary traditions, which facilitate their subordination to the ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘national’ traditions of others. Within this changing foodscape, and in an active negotiation of local tastes and cosmopolitan influences, regional cooks have been able to devise the general contours of a culinary field that is flexible and all-encompassing. It is from this culinary field that the regional gastronomic field bifurcates, in opposition to national culture and gastronomy, becoming restrictive and normative and thereby affirming a regional identity that is deployed against the dominant cultural code. Regional gastronomies, like that of Yucatán, can be better understood by taking into account the processes of post-colonial and post-national transformations that make possible the imagination of a regional society that is different from the homogenizing/hegemonic national society.

Post-colonialism and the Fractalization of Power Yucatecan gastronomy and identity, in their unifying forms, have emerged in response and resistance to the colonial expansionism of central Mexican elites since the first half of the nineteenth century. After achieving independence from Spain, central Mexican institutions began the process of appropriation and centralization of national resources. While instituting the co-extensiveness of the nation and the state, Mexican intellectuals forged an ideology

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that aimed at erasing the ethnic, religious, political, and cultural diversity of a vast territory. Hence, the process of decolonization—including the new outline of national borders, the dissemination of national icons, the linguistic unification, and the delegitimization of regional interests in favor of central Mexican ones—laid the groundwork for a post-colonial process of internal cultural, political, social, and economic colonialism. This was not an evil design imagined and enacted ex nihilo by central Mexican elites. In reality, this process followed universal guidelines to assist with the birth of a modern nation—guidelines that had been already scripted, tested, and reproduced in European countries such as England (Colley 1992; Hechter 1973), France (Weber 1976), and Italy (Duggan 1994). All of these countries implemented measures to assimilate diverse linguistic and cultural groups into a single nation, thereby attempting to erase existing differences. Adopting the same set of strategies, Mexican intellectuals disseminated the ideology of a unified, modern nation at the expense of cultural regional diversity (for a discussion on the assimilation of peasants into Mexican society, see Mallon 1995). However, the Yucatecan elites took advantage of the peninsula’s geographical location and the difficulty of communicating with the rest of Mexico (until the second half of the twentieth century there were no functional roads connecting Yucatán to the rest of Mexico). Underscoring the natural environmental differences between the plateau of the central highlands and the peninsular lowlands, Yucatecan elites formulated differences in cultural temperament. On these grounds, and inspired by European thinkers, they articulated the contours of a Yucatecan identity that, in their view, differed markedly from the homogenizing national identity promoted by the central Mexicans. By the end of the nineteenth century, regional elites had managed to accumulate and control enormous economic and political power, derived from the boom in the international market of henequen fibers. Although the market was controlled by the US firm International Harvester, regional elites grew rich and could stand counter, at least for a while, the colonial power exerted from central Mexican institutions. Although the influence and political power of the Yucatecan elites would later be undermined, for at least four decades they were able to implant in the regional consciousness the certainty of a radical difference between the inhabitants of the Yucatecan peninsula and those of the rest of Mexico. However, forging an all-encompassing Yucatecan identity also had the fractalizing effect of expanding the reach of cultural colonialism. The notion of a ‘Yucatecan identity’ was to silence, until the end of the twentieth century, the multiplicity of groups that exist within the territory of the state of Yucatán. As I have shown, food has contributed, on the one hand, to distinguishing Yucatecan culinary formations and marking their distance from those of central Mexicans and, on the other hand, to enforcing new forms of cultural

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colonialism within the state itself. Culinary diversity, like cultural diversity, stopped being subordinated to the Mexican homogenizing culture, only to be silenced and homogenized by the construction of a Yucatecan gastronomy overseen by regional elites. Like identity, the Yucatecan gastronomic field is a set of standardized culinary practices shaped by blending the culinary preferences of a multiplicity of groups. In assimilating this diversity of sources, it also accomplished, for some time, the erasure of difference. The recent global shift toward multiculturalism has accelerated the deterritorialization of both national and regional gastronomies. Although this is not, and may never be, a complete process, it is now more difficult to sustain homogeneous cultural constructs, as they are progressively undermined and displaced by the cuisines of different groups, including local residents and immigrants from other Mexican regions and abroad. To conclude, a great deal of ambivalence is inscribed in the new postcolonial and post-national formations. There is much to be celebrated in the invention of a regional gastronomic code, as it is a vehicle for the expression of diverse cultural values and preferences against homogenizing culinary forms. The creativity of cooks has been an essential factor in the creation of a new cuisine that, despite (or because of) its hybridity, brings to the fore its originality and its newness in the global constellation of national, ethnic, and cultural cuisines. However, this same construct has revealed an isomorphic relation with other political strategies of cultural colonization by disregarding the importance of other cuisines in the Yucatecan culinary field. Like Yucatecan culture, Yucatecan gastronomy has silenced, to a large extent, the participation of peasant and poor urban groups, as well as that of the Syrian-Lebanese population. All three have been very important in the con/figuration of Yucatecan taste. Yucatecan gastronomy is neither Maya nor Lebanese. It is certainly ‘Yucatecan’, but to its creators and defenders, it is less culturally damaging to pay token recognition to the culinary cultures that have helped fashion Yucatecan cuisine than to accept and embrace their contributions. This conundrum, however, puts the finger again on the inescapable tie between culinary cultures and cultures of power and domination. The concepts of the culinary and gastronomic fields, in showing the arbitrariness of their constructs, highlight the ways in which power is inscribed in our ability to obtain (cultural, political, affective) satisfaction through our meals, however fabulous they may be.

Notes

Introduction 1. In contrast to Mexican food, Yucatecan food is not yet widely known abroad. As I argue throughout this book, Yucatecan cuisine is not a regional variation of Mexican food; rather, it is a culinary tradition that has developed apart from Mexican cuisine. The status of Yucatecan gastronomy may change in the future, as the state of Yucatán and the Mexican government are now at an early stage in promoting the food of Yucatán in Mexico and abroad, thereby assimilating it into mainstream Mexican cooking (see Ayora-Diaz 2007c, 2010a). 2. Chilango/a is the term used to designate the inhabitants of Mexico City. The Ortografía de la Lengua Española supports its use (Real Academia de la Lengua Española 1999: 126). See also Lahuerta Galán (2002: 401). Some inhabitants of Mexico City find the term offensive, but many have appropriated it. In addition, a beer and a magazine have both been named Chilango in Mexico City. In English, ‘Mexican’ is the term used to designate the inhabitants of the United Mexican States (a federal constitutional republic), the state of Mexico, and Mexico City. However, in recent decades, Mexicans distinguish (in Spanish) among deefeño/a (a recently coined term) as an inhabitant of Mexico City, Mexi­ quense as an inhabitant of the state of Mexico, and Mexicano/a as an inhabitant of the Mexican Republic. 3. The concepts of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization that I am using here derive from the work of Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987) and de Landa (2006). Their relationship is complex: they do not correspond to a lineal process but rather co-exist. In this context, by territorialization I mean the process of making a cultural form (Mexican cuisine) co-extensive with the territory of the nation-state; deterritorialization makes reference to the external and internal processes that challenge this co-extension (e.g., the affirmation of Yucatecan cuisine undermines the co-extensiveness of Mexican food with the Mexican territory); and reterritorialization makes reference to the strategies deployed to affirm the co-extensiveness that deterritorialization processes challenge (e.g., the efforts from those who advance a national cuisine to redefine regional cuisines as part of the same tradition, despite their differences). Adding further complexity, Yucatecan cuisine depends on its territorialization in order to become established

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as a coherent and culturally consistent praxis. During this process, it also erases the heterogeneity of culinary practices that co-exist in the Yucatecan territory and that challenge these practices. In consequence, deterritorialization triggers the affirmation of a solid Yucatecan gastronomic ‘tradition’. 4. Thus far, my research on contemporary regionalism has enabled me to identify regions within modern Latin American nation-states that are internally associated with indigenous or other ethnic groups, but I have not found cases similar to the Yucatecan one that I describe in this book. 5. I thank G. Vargas Cetina for helping me to disentangle the different layers of meaning that I have been unpacking throughout this text and in other writings. 6. For an examination of Bologna food, see Harper and Faccioli (2009). 7. Although so far there is a paucity of literature describing or analyzing regional cuisines vis-à-vis national, homogenizing cuisines, it is possible to find a proliferation of Web sites produced by interested parties in which regional cuisines are being affirmed against or along the lines of national cuisines in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, and Peru. I believe that these sites may be the harbingers of academic studies and discussions on this topic in other Latin American countries. 8. I have found some misunderstanding regarding the use of the term ‘Yucatecan’ in the sense that it is an adjective applied to designate either people of Maya origin or speakers of Maya language. While linguists have classified the Maya language spoken in the peninsula of Yucatán as ‘Yucatecan Maya’, anthropologists and historians use the local term ‘Yucatecan’ to make reference to individuals who, regardless of their language (they may be monolinguals of Spanish or Maya or bilinguals) and ethnic origin, were born in Yucatán within families locally recognized as Yucatecan. The Spanish spoken in Yucatán (‘Yucatecan Spanish’) is inflected by the Maya language, just as the Spanish spoken in the central Mexican highlands is inflected by an abundance of Nahuatlan words. Ethnic identity in Yucatán is a difficult issue to settle on narrow linguistic grounds, given that local terms such as ‘Maya’ and ‘Mestizo’ have meanings and moral/political values attached to them that differ from the ones they have in other parts of Mexico (see Castillo Cocom 2004; Gabbert 2001; Gutiérrez Estévez 1992; Hervik 1999a). Throughout this book, by ‘Yucatecans’ I mean individuals born in the state of Yucatán, whether in cities or villages, regardless of the language they speak or where they live. This is not an ‘objective’ form, an essential identification; rather, it is one possible form of subjectivity that is activated and motivated by political events and processes. 9. Anthropologists have long looked into the institution and characteristics of elites in different societies (Marcus 1983). Although there are different ways of understanding what an elite group is, in the context of the present discussion, I find the general definition proposed by Pina-Cabral (2000: 2) convenient, that is, that elites are “groups that control specific resources by means of which they acquire power and material advantage.” As I will show throughout this volume, Mexican and Yucatecan elites have been involved in an long-standing dispute over the control of the pedagogic means for the invention of national and regional senses of peoplehood.

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10. Here I am drawing on Bhabha’s distinction between the pedagogical and the performative in the invention of ‘modern’ peoples. Bhabha (1994: 208–209) argues: “We then have a contested conceptual territory where the nation’s people must be thought in double-time; the people are the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pregiven or constituted historical origin in the past; the people are also the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principles of the people as contemporaneity: as that sign of the present through which national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproductive process.” Thus, there is a split in the relationship between these two forms: one invokes continuity and accumulation, while the repetition involved in the latter calls for the deployment of strategies that in their practical replication introduce ambivalence in the writing of the nation. 11. I do not wish to overstate the part that the gastronomic field plays in the construction of Yucatecan identities. The affirmation of a regional gastronomic culture is comparable to the affirmation of the importance of music and dance, religious manifestations, ways of dressing, literary production, and other culturally expressive forms that Yucatecans and outsiders define as ‘characteristic’ of peninsular culture (see Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2010). 12. Thus, Yucatecan restaurants now offer panuchos topped with cochinita pibil, which was not, until recently, a common choice in Yucatán but is favored in Mexico City and by central Mexican visitors to the state. In my travels in Mexico and abroad, I have found many different versions of Motuleño eggs that do not resemble the local version at all. In the 1980s, a local food vendor created a hybrid, pizzanucho, that failed to grab the urban culinary imagination and seems to have remained confined, to this day, to the creator’s diner. 13. There is a growing socio-cultural literature on taste. Some authors have been concerned with identifying the basic taste terms used in different cultures, so as to advance a biological disposition and aversion to certain flavors (Bartoshuk and Duffy 2005). However, there is an alternative approach that takes into account the cultural, social, and political significance of the taste one finds in the food that one is served (Holtzman 2009; Howes 2005; Korsmeyer 2005; Stoller 1989). Although it has become commonplace to say that humans have a ‘natural’ disposition to sweet flavors, Mintz (1986) has unpacked the political, economic, and historical forces that have shaped the global availability of sugar and the inclination of consumers to include it in their diet. In addition, ‘taste’ tends to conflate the meaning of flavor and markers of social distinction (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Gronow 1997). Here I am discussing its first meaning. It is unquestionable that, in social practice, the preference for some flavors marks the social position of individuals and their groups. For example, it is more common in Yucatán to find a preference for spicy foods among low-income people than among the more ‘sophisticated’ upper-class consumers. Also, it is more likely to find abhorrence to sushi (as a raw food) among the former and a greater inclination toward it among the latter. Social classes may also relate in the same way to offal (entrails and internal organs), despised in ‘sophisticated’ cooking but perceived as an essential ingredient of several ‘traditional’ recipes.

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14. In Mérida, so-called economic kitchens (cocinas económicas) are take-out establishments that sprouted during the second half of the twentieth century as a result of the growing involvement of women in the workforce. They came into being because many Yucatecan dishes are too time-consuming for working women to prepare at home on an everyday basis. Other meals are the preserve of local specialists, while some are cheaper to buy in bulk for a numerous family than to cook at home. I describe these economic kitchens in more detail in chapter 2. 15. Although informed by the same source (Bourdieu 1993), my understanding of the gastronomic field differs from that of Ferguson (2004: 108), who distinguishes between the restaurant world (focused on production), the culinary culture (focused on consumption), and the gastronomic field as the textual field that provides a bridge between production and consumption practices and values. 16. In recent years, the different supermarket chains and liquor stores have provided a diversified supply of wines: French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish wines from Europe; Argentinean, Chilean, Mexican, and US (Californian) wines from the American continent; and a few South African, New Zealand, and Australian wines. Their supply, however, is unreliable, and there does not appear to be a reason why some brands disappear from the market and others replace them. 17. Based on the ingredients, foods, and drinks that I am naming, it may be evident that I am describing the behavior of middle-class urban professionals or semi-professionals with an income high enough to allow for dining in restaurants and the purchase of foodstuffs for special meals. Yucatecan families with less disposable income sometimes eat, for their Christmas dinner, any of a variety of Yucatecan tamales or escabeche de pavo (pickled turkey) or a cake that is known locally as sandwichón. Poor families, too, reserve their special recipes for important occasions, such as Christmas Eve dinner. 18. Starting at a point in the twentieth century that I have been unable to trace, Yucatecan families became attached to a specific brand of Spanish refined olive oil that (they still believe) adds a pleasant taste to fish, refried black beans, and cod Biscayne-style, among other dishes. In recent years, due to marketing campaigns in the media and choices made by supermarket suppliers, this particular brand has been partially displaced by several brands of Italian extra virgin olive oil. 19. Although I have not found this family’s version to be cooked in other homes, a cookbook by Hernández de Fajardo (n.d., ca. 1930) includes two recipes. That of my friend’s mother corresponds to one of them, although it seems to be the less popular variant. On learning about the differences among Yucatecan recipes for this dish, a friend from San Sebastian, in the Biscay Bay, decided to enlighten us by cooking her own ‘authentic’ version of cod Biscayne-style. She prepared it with abundant fried onions and paprika, but with no tomatoes, olives, capers, or potatoes. It was very different from what Mexicans and Yucatecans eat under that denomination. This seems to be a common consequence when cuisines leave their places of origin and are disseminated worldwide. In each new setting, the recipe is believed to be an ‘authentic’ reproduction, although it has been adapted to accord with the dominant taste preferences in the local culture that adopts it (see, e.g., Denker 2003; Gabaccia 1998; Helstosky 2008; La Cecla 2007).

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20. According to the franchise’s Web site, La Cochinita is a Mexican chain of fast food restaurants that specialize in Japanese dishes. Cochinita pibil as the sole Mexican dish on the menu. See http://www.lacochinita.com.mx/. 21. This view is held not only among Yucatecans. When conducting a search for cochinita pibil on the Internet, it is possible to find Mexican, Yucatecan, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Japanese sites where it is described as a Yucatecan dish—even a Maya dish, which it is not. (I will return to this issue later in the book.) 22. Rosello (2001) has convincingly argued that, in post-colonial societies, the terms ‘host’ and ‘guest’ have been perpetuated and extended beyond their original meanings, spawning paradoxes and ambiguities such as the design of special policies and measures for the surveillance of the movements of guests (immigrants) in ways that undermine the moral significance of hospitality. Sassen (2000), Löfgren (2002), and Benhabib (2004) have, in turn, discussed the postnational, post-colonial political consequences of this border crossing, demanding renewed understandings of citizenship. 23. By controlling the printed and audiovisual media of the region, interest groups (local elites) can promote and define Yucatecan-ness. However, being Yucatecan is lived differently by different groups of people who may accept or refuse (or vacillate about) the categorization advanced by the media. At the same time, whether this identity is accepted or not, or whether its terms are in dispute, as B. Anderson (1983) has suggested, the media play an important part in fashioning a consciousness of the regional community of Yucatecans and an encompassing sense of Yucatecan identity (Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2010). 24. Just how far ‘apart’ is a matter of contention that depends on the aspect of Yucatecan society one looks at. As suggested by the description of Yucatecan food, it is a gastronomic tradition made possible by the Yucatecans’ international connections. The antagonism between Yucatecans and Mexicans has led to an emphasis being placed on the relative isolation of the peninsula from the rest of Mexico (see Wells and Joseph 1992), rather than on their commonalities. 25. Also, before the partition of the state of Yucatán into three different states (a Mexican strategy to fracture the Yucatecan independence movement), the city of Campeche, in the state of the same name, contributed to the enrichment of Yucatán’s gastronomic field with several recipes for fish and other seafood.

Chapter 1: The Story of Two Peoples 1. The author of this mock prayer, Covo Torres (2008: 8–9), was born in Colombia but is now a long-time resident of Mérida. Horchata is a non-alcoholic drink made from rice and coconut; xtabentún is a type of liquor distilled from honey gleaned by bees from xtabentún flowers (Turbina corymbosa, a species of morning glory); Xibalbá is the underworld of Maya religion; and Hanal Pixán is the celebration of the Day of the Dead and All Saints. 2. On its Web site, Slow Food states that its mission is “to counter the rise of fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling

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interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.” See http://www.slowfood.com/.
 3. It was at the end of Ernesto Zedillo’s government, and in preparation for the National Action Party takeover of the Mexican presidency, that the flags were erected in places deemed to be historically significant in Mexican history. The message of these giant flags seems to be the same all over Mexico. In 2006, an editorial in a Mexican newspaper reported the cost of US$20,000 to erect one of these flags in the city of Tuxpan in Michoacán, a state that sends thousands of migrants to the US. The municipal president was quoted as saying: “My administration has spent a sum of $20,000 on a giant Mexican flag that we will plant at the highest place of Tuxpan. It will be sending a message to all of those who are now living in the north [the US] so that they can feel proud of being Mexican. Furthermore, it will let them know that Tuxpan will always receive them with open arms” (Sara Sefchovich, El Universal, 9 March 2006, http:// www.el-universal.com.mx/). 4. Many qualified historians have told these stories in more detail. Here I limit my discussion to highlighting the sources of Yucatecan difference and opposition to the Mexican nation. Some of these stories may or may not be accurate. My interest lies not in their truth but in showing how they weave into the Yucatecan consciousness of difference and identity and how, through their anchoring in time, these stories become the foundation of an invented people. 5. At that time, the province of Yucatán was divided into five different departments and encompassed the whole of the peninsula of Yucatán plus portions of what today are the states of Tabasco and Chiapas in Mexico and the countries of Guatemala and Belize in Central America. 6. The existence of this cultural mosaic, however, cannot be read as suggesting that in Yucatán all groups co-exist in equal conditions. There are important structural, social, economic, and political inequalities among the different groups. However, as Gabbert (2004) has discussed, these are not translated into an openly racist discourse, even though it is not difficult to detect discriminatory figures of speech and practices in everyday parlance and social interaction. 7. As recently as 2005, the National Action Party in power sought to modify the teaching of history in elementary schools, suggesting that students begin with the conquest of the Americas, bypassing the history of the indigenous past. This proposal was not ratified at that time. 8. Florescano ([2002] 2006: 292) underscores two virtues of México a través de los siglos that made it ideologically important: first, it tells the story of the evolutionary transformation of Mexico as dictated by the laws of progress; second, the language and imagery employed by the authors were clear enough to make the five volumes accessible for widespread consumption. 9. For hybridity and mestizaje as social evils, see Young (1995). 10. José Vasconcelos was another Mexican intellectual linked to the state. A proponent of the unification and homogenization of Mexican society and culture, he played an important part in the design of state programs when he was appointed minister of education during the post-revolutionary period. In La raza

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cósmica (The Cosmic Race), José Vasconcelos ([1925] 1992) argues that the Mestizo is called on to dominate the future worldwide. 11. The preface to the 2004 reprint announced that, in its different editions in Spanish alone, The Labyrinth of Solitude had reached 1,056,000 copies. 12. In his review of theories of nationalism, Chatterjee ([1986] 2004) identifies a liberal understanding of nationalism that equates industrialization, capitalism, modernity, and cultural homogeneity. 13. In Yucatán, wiro is used as a derogatory term to disparage people of indigenous origin or those from economically marginal groups. Although naco now competes with wiro in popular parlance, due to the immigration of central Mexicans and the influence of soap operas on national television, it has not yet succeeded in totally displacing the local term. 14. Although Benito Juárez was born in the southern state of Oaxaca, as the president of Mexico, he identified with the central Mexican political agenda of modernization and nation-building. 15. See, for example, the texts by local historians such as Ancona ([1881] 1987), López de Cogolludo ([1688] 1956), and Sierra O’Reilly ([1857] 1994). 16. The University of Yucatán contributed to the invention of a specifically Yucatecan culture with the publication of 18 volumes dedicated to the history of Yucatecan literature (Esquivel Pren 1975). 17. In fact, until the 1950s, contact with the rest of Mexico was conducted primarily by boat, as there were neither functional roads nor railroads connecting Yucatán with the center of Mexico. 18. There are, however, reminders of the colonial power of central Mexico. The first public sports stadium built in Mérida still carries the name of Salvador Alvarado. The new baseball park is called Kukulkan, the Yucatecan Maya name for the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl. The crossroads to middle-class neighborhoods in the east of the city displays a monument to Venustiano Carranza, who also lends his name to a fraccionamiento (suburban neighborhood). New suburban districts are given names such as Mexico, Emiliano Zapata, and Francisco Villa, despite the fact that there is no shortage of regional heroes and political figures. 19. In fact, Gaztambide-Géigel’s (1996) paper was published in the Revista Mexicana del Caribe, an academic journal published in Chetumal, the capital city of the state of Quintana Roo. 20. Simpson (1962) recognizes the historical ties between Mexico and the Caribbean, while Augelli (1962) drew a map of the Caribbean that extended northeast to British Honduras (now Belize) and then jumped to Cuba, skipping the Yucatán peninsula. 21. For the Venezuelan claim to this dish, see http://www.analitica.com/ art/ 1999.06/culinaria. Hudson (2005: 112) highlights its Caribbean Dutch Antillean origin, where it is prepared stuffed with shrimp (keshy yena coe cabar­ one). A variation on this dish has been recently incorporated into the menus of Yucatecan restaurants, although Yucatecan restaurateurs declare that it is their own particular creation.

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22. In fact, as one of the chroniclers of the city of Mérida, Juan Francisco Peón Ancona, points out, the Diccionario de mejicanismos (Dictionary of Mexican Terms) defines antojitos as a word used in Mexico City to designate the “typical popular foods of the province, almost always in the plural and diminutive” (Por Esto! 4 February 2008, Yucatán section, electronic edition). For the Diccionario de mejicanismos, see Santamaría ([1959] 2000: 69). 23. I cannot claim to be representative of a general Yucatecan experience of the transformations in the regional foodscape. However, in conversations with friends, relatives, and acquaintances of different ages and social classes, I have found similar accounts of the unfolding of the urban foodscape and experiences of its navigation. 24. Nonetheless, today a Web site includes sopes among dishes belonging to Yucatecan gastronomy. See http://www.mexicanmercados.com/food/states/ yucatan.htm (accessed on 20 February 2009). Hardly any Yucatecan would agree with this inclusion. 25. This is the sort of experience that immigrants share in other places. For example, Pontecorvo and Fasulo (1999) describe the deliberations of an Italian family, in Austria, seeking to select Italian dishes that they believe their guests expect to eat for dinner. They carefully choose dishes that probably would not be eaten together in Italy, but they thought would satisfy their guests’ fantasies and expectations about Italian culture and cuisine. 26. Although this viewpoint can be found in the many strata that make up Yucatecan society, it is far from unanimous. Based on their gender, ethnicity, and/or class, different sectors in society may attach different meanings to things ‘Yucatecan’. Some Yucatecans even reject the value of such a sentiment and dismiss the notion of cultural heritage as the outcome of either political manipulation or parochial attachments. 27. R. Smith (2003) pays particular attention to the political aspects of peoplehood. He calls it a political people or community “when it is a potential adversary of other forms of human association, because its proponents are generally understood to assert that its obligations legitimately trump many of the demands made on its members in the name of other associations” (ibid.: 20). For the Yucatecan people, these demands would be represented by nationalist rhetoric and by the claims of ethnic minorities within the region. 28. Pilcher (1998) has pointed out that Mexican cooks appropriated and transformed European dishes. Nonetheless, as he also shows, the notion remains in the social imaginary that authentic Mexican food is rooted in Mexican indigenous and peasant cultures. This view has been greatly shaped by the development of nationalist discourses that have sought to distinguish Mexican gastronomy from other cuisines and to reduce the diversity within Mexican cuisine. 29. To a non-Yucatecan, the differences may seem insignificant. However, beans of different colors have a different taste, and, furthermore, in Yucatán, black beans are always cooked with a generous amount of epazote leaves, a herb (until recently left primarily to medical uses in central Mexico) that confers a bitter anise flavor to beans and to dishes garnished with or accompanied by them. Also, Yucatecans would hardly expect the sauce of their eggs motuleños to be

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spicy hot. Last but not least, the aesthetic of the colors and presentation of the dish is very important. 30. Like a sandwich, a torta is bread stuffed with food. The main difference is that in Yucatán sandwiches are made with Wonder Bread, whereas tortas are made with baguette-style bread. 31. ‘Acultural modernity’ is thought of as a cultural, economic, and political condition that is the product of North Atlantic societies and that presumes the superiority of modern over traditional cultural practices and forms of social, economic, and political organization that pre-date the Other. Understood as the universal final station of all societies, modernity has been appropriated by colonized societies. Worldwide, modernizers have attempted to enforce a homogenizing form of modernity that presumes (and demands) the homogeneity of the nation and, in consequence, legitimates policies of cultural assimilation that we now recognize as internal forms of colonialism (Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2005b, 2006). It is in this sense that writing on the post-colonial does not presuppose the ‘after’ of colonialism but rather examines the new forms that colonialism adopts, once a nation-state has broken away from an imperial, colonial government. 32. Sopes and huaraches vary in form and are the central Mexican alternative to panuchos. The former are pieces of corn dough that are shaped with their edges raised. After being fried, they are topped with beans and a choice of fried vegetables or meat, then garnished with a sprinkling of sour cream and/or fresh cheese. 33. At the present time, many Yucatecans, having grown accustomed to these changes, see the addition of these ingredients as ‘improvements’ or, minimally, as harmless additions to Yucatecan dishes. 34. Botanas are foods that Yucatecan cantinas offer gratis to their patrons when they order drinks (see Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2005a). These bota­ nas are often tacos of different Yucatecan dishes, as well as tahini, hummus, baba ghanoush, and kibbeh that Syrian and Lebanese immigrants imported to the Yucatán and made popular during the early twentieth century. Cantinas charge more or less for their beers, depending on the quality of the botanas they serve and the strata of the population they seek to attract. 35. Some local colleagues are uneasy about our interpretation (presented in Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2005a) regarding the extent of this sentiment in the Yucatecan society and have pointed out that regionalism is limited to elites and is not found in the population at large. However, in weekly street events organized by the municipality, Meridans and tourists alike can find street vendors selling license plates, key chains, T-shirts, small flags, and pamphlets about the history of the Yucatecan flag, the Yucatecan anthem, or Yucatecan secessionism (these items were still available in 2010). Although these manifestations are often dismissed as an elitist ‘manipulation’ of the masses, I have found in conversations with an array of Yucatecans, including middle-class white collar workers, entrepreneurs, and manual laborers, that, in different contexts, they affirm their Yucatecan identity over their identification with the Mexican nation. It is in pedagogical contexts in Bhabha’s (1994) sense—such as the celebration of the triumphs (rather than the defeat) of the Mexican national soccer team or

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of the gold medals won in international competitions or national feasts that commemorate independence and the Mexican Revolution—that the Mexicanness of Yucatecans is mobilized. 36. Sandwichón is a popular dish served in middle-class and poor families. It consists of layers of white bread interspersed with layers of a mix prepared with double cream, sour cream, cream cheese, shredded chicken, and pimiento, decorated with canned green peas and slices of canned pimiento. For this party, instead of a sandwichón, our host prepared sandwiches filled with the mix. In the past, this dish was cooked for birthdays and different family parties, but now it is possible to purchase slices of sandwichón from street vendors and in local markets and supermarkets. In Yucatán, as in many other places in Latin America, pasta is often boiled until overcooked. Afterward, it is very common to place it in a glass casserole dish, baking it with tomato sauce and processed Parmesanlike cheese flakes. 37. This stereotype of Mexican food is so ubiquitous, nationally and worldwide, that Fernando del Paso, a Mexican author, and his wife, Socorro del Paso, wrote a small book on Mexican cooking titled, in French, Douceur et passion de la cuisine mexicaine (Gentleness and Passion of Mexican Cooking) to counter, in the France of the 1980s, the prevalent view of Mexican food as spicy and piquant. See del Paso and del Paso ([1991] 2008). 38. In the geo-political imagination promoted by the Mexican nation-state, Yucatán is always located in the southeast, despite the fact that in maps one can easily see that the peninsula of Yucatán is located in the northeast of Mexico and that Mérida, the capital city of Yucatán, is located at a latitude north of Mexico City. This geo-political subordination is still widely accepted, even within circles of local social scientists. 39. As Florescano ([2002] 2006, 2005) and Gruzinski (2001) have explained, the story of miraculous apparitions of this virgin saint was a matter of political and religious significance in the Mexican central highlands. Following the declaration of Mexican independence, this icon was added to the flag of the insurgent movement. Since then, schoolbooks distributed gratuitously throughout the states have dis-seminated the importance of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a national symbol. 40. However, there have been times when the Syrian-Lebanese immigrants and their descendants have been marginalized, despised, frowned upon, or resented.

Chapter 2: Mérida and the Contemporary Foodscape 1. See, for example, how the rhetoric of female ‘care’ has been deployed to foster the domestic consumption of processed foodstuffs (Parkin 2006). In 2008, advertisements from transnational milk corporations depicted children at playgrounds who, on contact with objects or persons, broke into pieces. Then a voice told/warned parents that it was their responsibility to make sure that their children drank three glasses of milk a day. Another company advertised bottled water as a dieting strategy, claiming that “the more water you drink, the less hungry you get.”

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2. I am following here Appadurai’s (1996) distinction of ‘fantasy’, ‘imagination’, and the ‘imaginary’ as related but different ideational constructs. It has often been argued that the consumption of goods has the capacity to mark other goods with which they are related, as well as the consumers of those goods. These are marks that signify the location of the individual and her or his group within society at large (see, e.g., Baudrillard [1970] 1998, [1978] 2006; Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Lash [1990] 1997). 3. Although the examples that follow in this chapter illustrate more clearly age and economic differences in the individual’s relation to the foodscape in Mérida, one can also find that religious, ethnic, national, or regional identities and alternative lifestyles give shape to different navigational strategies of the urban foodscape. Some local friends with an alternative sexual lifestyle have told me that there are bars, restaurants, nightclubs, discos, and cafés that cater to a mainly ‘gay’ clientele. However, I did not examine those spaces during my research. 4. Los Almendros has its headquarters in the municipality of Ticul (the original restaurant having been founded in the city of Ticul) and franchises in Mérida, Cancún, and Mexico City. A restaurant in Mexico City still keeps the name, although, according to the Mérida manager, they are no longer related, as central Mexicans refused to follow Yucatecan standards in the preparation of Yucatecan food. In 1973, Príncipe Tutul-Xiu opened its original restaurant in Maní (also located in the south of Yucatán) and only recently established a franchise in Mérida. During the explosion of fast-food chains, a group of young local entrepreneurs decided to venture into a fast-food version of Yucatecan food. In 2003, they set up their first food stand (called Maare Linda!) at a shopping mall located in the west side of the city. When interviewed and congratulated by the local media, they voiced their goal to expand as quickly as possible, opening franchises in other shopping malls in Mérida. Their original food stand did not survive a complete year. 5. There is a literary portrayal of the effects of this process in the novel Balada de la Mérida antigua (Ballad of Ancient Mérida) by Bestard Vázquez (2000). In it, the author narrates the tensions located in the relationship between the central character Escolástico, who re/presents a present anchored in the past (the abandoned territory of downtown Mérida); his mother Sara, who represents the past as a former member of an upper class that has lost its economic ground; and their rural servant, x’Pet, who represents a culture that is dis/located in the temporal fractures of the city. 6. I thank one of the anonymous readers for leading me to this source. 7. From local archives, Miranda Ojeda and Negroe Sierra (2007) have sought to document the food commodities that constituted Meridans’ diet at the turn of the twentieth century. 8. With help from my assistant Mariana Martín Yañez, I have been able to locate a list of foods served during a previous visit to the state. It has confirmed my suspicion that, due to Porfirio Díaz’s predilection, the menu was a French one. The dishes served during the second banquet on that occasion included the following: “Hors d’oeuvres, potage. Bon nuit.—Bisque d’écrevisses. Hors doeu­ vres chaud. Cromesquis de Volaille á la polonaise. Relevés. Huachinango sauce aux

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câpres.—Turban de filets de sotes à la Joinville. Entrées. Cotelettes d’agneau á la Napolitaine.—Filets de Boeuf á l’africaine.—Gigot de chevreuil sauce poivrade.— Aspic de foie gras en belle vue. Punch au rum. Rots. Faisan noir truffé—Perdreau gris. Salade. Entreméts. Asperges sauce.—Cardons á la preigneux. Entreméts sucrés. Pudding Diplomate.—Pyramid panachée.—Cômpotte de pommes à la Gelée.— Petit fours.—Bavaroise à la vanille.—Pièces montées.—Fraise Anannas.—Corbeilles de fruits.—Fromage.—Gateau viennois. Thé.—Liqueurs.—Café. VINS. Xérés—Oporto—Chateau Content—Chateau Margaux—Chateau Laffitte— Champagne Heidsiecx—Tokay—Chypre” (La Razón del Pueblo: Periódico oficial del estado libre y soberano de Yucatán, no. 154 [1880]: 3). Inconsistencies and errors in the use of accent marks are found in the original. 9. There is, however, a caveat for reading this text: Hansen did not publish his doctoral thesis. It was published instead by Bastarrachea M., a Yucatecan anthropologist who took care of Hansen’s diaries, manuscript, and notes in order to produce the book in Spanish. Since the material underwent this process of mediation, and since the Spanish publication is at some points very critical of Hansen’s approach, it is difficult to know what was or was not included in Hansen’s original text. 10. An important exception is the chapter by Montejo Baqueiro in the Enci­ clopedia Yucatanense. In his contribution, “La colonia sirio-libanesa en Mérida” (The Syrian-Lebanese Colony in Yucatán), Montejo Baqueiro (1981b: 481–482) mentions the different culinary traditions imported by these people from the Middle East and lists some of their most popular dishes (roast lamb, raw kibbeh, kofta, xixbarak, enxiadra, and other dishes), but he does not describe them as contributions to Yucatecan cuisine. 11. The novel by Bestard Vázquez (2000), mentioned before, takes the food consumed in a middle-class household as unmarked and undeserving of attention in his description of domestic meals. Throughout the novel, he mentions only marked food—the food of peasants, the Maya, and low-income groups, who consume fried beans and chicharra (fried pork skin) at urban cantinas or tacos of cochinita pibil at the market. In each case, he contrasts the exoticism of these dishes to the main character’s middle-class habitual foods. 12. The Paseo Montejo is a wide boulevard that was constructed at the end of the nineteenth century but officially inaugurated in 1906. The wealthy elite of Mérida built large palaces (in the French style that was dominant at the time) to live in along these avenues. Following the growth of the city and the multiplication of middle- and upper-class colonias and fraccionamientos in the north of the city, the boulevard was extended in 1981 to provide faster transit between these neighborhoods and downtown Mérida (Ovando Grajales 1995). 13. The popularity of this type of meat has increased over the years. In 2007, a colleague told me that it has become fashionable for parents to celebrate their children’s birthdays by hiring a taco vendor, who brings his grill to the family’s home, where he roasts, chops, and serves tacos to the guests. 14. Nowadays, a number of brands of powdered MSG are available in local supermarkets, promoted in the guise of ‘flavor enhancers’.

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15. ‘International’ is the designation given to restaurant food that is often covered in creamy sauces. This homogenizes the flavor, reassuring customers that the food will not be offensively spicy or strong-tasting in any manner to their palates. 16. Some markets in Mérida were founded in colonial times. The markets listed here were all rebuilt in the nineteenth century and have been ‘modernized’ and reorganized, each a number of times, during the twentieth century (Casares G. Cantón 1998). 17. The small supermarkets have not yet totally disappeared. Also, in 2008, after lapsing for some years, a couple of delis opened. 18. As described by Fuentes Gómez (2005), many supermarkets have been located, along with other stores and businesses, within urban shopping malls. These have fostered new forms of consumerism but also of self-expression and self-consciousness. The first mall to emerge in the city, in 1980, was Plaza Oriente. This and all subsequent malls have been the initiative of a group of entrepreneurs of Lebanese origin. In Mérida, there are now two large malls in the north, two in the east, and two in the west. In addition, there are many small malls (plaza comercial) located in the colonias and fraccionamientos of the city. 19. A regional newspaper, Diario de Yucatán, follows this same logic. The content of the newspaper differs according to the section of the city or the region of the state where it is delivered. Consequently, even among those whose source of news is the same newspaper, there is varying information and quality of news. 20. Fuentes Gómez (2003, 2005) echoes the administrative division of the city into eight districts, clearly demarcated by avenues and streets. This division is reflected in the economic worth of real estate, the different prices of public services, and differential taxes. Here I follow the cognitive, everyday understanding of the city that Meridans use to describe their navigation of the urban space. 21. In contrast, I have found that lower-income Meridans value quantity over quality since, with less money to spend, they have to make sure that all of their family members and/or friends are able to eat. I do not mean that lower-income Meridans cannot appreciate or do not care at all about the quality of the tortillas or the meat or the other ingredients they consume. Nonetheless, I have found that an important criterion in choosing a venue is the price/quantity ratio of food. Throughout this volume, I follow an intersubjective classification of the urban social hierarchy. Hence, my use of the terms ‘elite’, ‘upper class’, ‘middle class’, and ‘higher income’ makes reference to urbanites who are in possession of disposable income, who have accumulated the cultural capital that enables them to judge their food in a broader context, and who seek to distinguish themselves from other Meridans. I use the terms ‘working class’ or ‘lower class’ to signify urbanites, such as manual laborers and clerks, who have been excluded from access to a university education and who, with low salaries and insufficient funds, must make do on an everyday basis. Although they can enjoy the pleasures of life and certainly have their own criteria of classification that allows them to see themselves in a good light—that is, the reserve of rules, norms, and criteria that allow meaningful distinctions among citizens (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; de la Serna 1987)—they are less concerned about what is globally known as ‘gastronomy’.

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22. In recent years, a growing number of retirees from the US and Canada have purchased and restored old colonial homes in downtown Mérida as their residences. 23. In an as yet unsolved legal controversy, two relatives are contesting the proprietary rights over the use of the restaurant’s name. 24. Haciendas were plantations where, during the nineteenth century, indentured laborers were forced to work under forms of exploitation often compared to slavery (Brannon and Baklanoff 1986; G. Joseph 1986; Villanueva Mukul et al. 1990). When the production of henequen fiber came to an end, most of these elegant palaces were abandoned and fell into ruin. Since the end of the 1990s, private investment has renovated these buildings, marketing them as ‘grand tourism’ hotels and restaurants, while concealing their dark past. 25. Older acquaintances have told me that, before the time of La Prosperidad, most bars and cantinas used to offer their patrons varied but sparse finger food and dips. However, they never served tacos, meat, or traditional Yucatecan food in the fashion inaugurated by La Prosperidad, first in Valladolid and later, to great success, in Mérida. 26. City Hall issues special permits to vendors, allowing them to place their stalls on the street. Sometimes, one vendor told me, it is necessary to bribe health inspectors, who, every so often, visit the stands and threaten to shut them down because they lack running water. On other occasions, he added, city inspectors ask for additional money to allow vendors to put out tables and chairs at their stalls. 27. In Yucatán, local people distinguish between a sandwich and a torta. A sandwich is made with slices of industrially processed white or whole wheat bread, while a torta is made using half a baguette or, in some cases, a variation of the baguette—an oblong white bread (about 20 centimeters long) called bolillo. 28. Although there are exceptions to this view, in conversations with friends in different neighborhoods of Mérida, especially if they were born in other villages, towns, or cities in the state, there seems to be an ethnocentric consensus that considers Mérida’s cochinita to be of inferior quality when compared to that cooked in any other town or city in Yucatán. However, these same people tend to regard favorably the baked piglet, which they recognize as a Mérida specialty. Of course, my friends who were born and grew up in Mérida rate the local cochinita as excellent and have their favorite vendors, whom they visit at least once a week. 29. This practice of women going out to eat together is so well-established in Mérida that some restaurants at high-end hotels have begun promoting special membership deals exclusively for women. With them, women can get substantial discounts, provided that they dine between certain hours of the morning or the afternoon. These are often times when the restaurants are less crowded but also when women have more time available, as they are more likely to have left their children at school and to have issued orders to their maids for the main meal of the day. 30. Many Meridans with clerical jobs have a work schedule of eight straight hours but are allowed to go out and have a quick light meal at different times of the morning or early afternoon. Men and women who work independently can

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arrange their activities to allow for a couple of hours in the afternoon, when they have their almuerzo. The former look on supper as their main meal of the day during the workweek. 31. Customers choose an economic kitchen on the grounds of the match between the quality of the food and their expectations regarding the flavor, aroma, and texture of the dish. They reject some venues because, despite their replication of Yucatecan meals, the eateries fall short of these expectations. For example, a friend told me that she always buys pork and beans at only one economic kitchen, because other such establishments have disappointed her. 32. Possibly in correspondence with changes resulting in Yucatecans’ present-day work schedules, contemporary homes at most working-class and some middle-class fraccionamientos or casas de interés social (i.e., low-income housing, financed by the Instituto del Fondo Nacional para la Vivienda de los Trabajadores, a government agency) have very small kitchens (sometimes with a walking space that is only 1.5 meters wide and 3 meters long), as if they were not designed for cooking but only for reheating food. Household owners with larger incomes possess bigger, fancier kitchens with most of the modern appliances that are available: freezers, refrigerators, stoves, ovens, microwave ovens, dishwashers, toasters, coffee makers, blenders, mixers, and whatever else these domestic cooks desire to include in their cooking space. However, some friends have told us that their kitchens are too beautiful to be used for cooking, and they continue to buy food from economic kitchens. 33. There is even a popular phrase: “tres como la gente,” that is, “three [beers] like [decent] people.” 34. There used to be a Yucatecan brewery, Cervecería Yucateca, which had been founded in 1899. The Mexican firm Modelo bought the plant and later closed it down, moving the production to the state of Oaxaca, where they still brew beer with the original names used to designate Yucatecan beer. The owners are not Yucatecan, nor do they live in Yucatán. The beers are produced in another state with flavors that differ from those familiar to Yucatecans. Although the new bottles do not describe them as such, I still hear waiters offering them as Yucatecan beer. 35. For example, on 27 July 2008, the local newspapers reported that 100,000 Meridans had flocked to the beaches of Progreso during the previous day. Daily numbers such as these are common during summer weekends and during Semana Santa (Holy Week) and Semana de Pascua (Easter). 36. One of my former graduate students conducted fieldwork in Progreso for her MSc thesis. In it, she describes and discusses the varieties of, and differences among, fish and seafood restaurants in this coastal city of Yucatán (see Viera Hernández 2007). 37. Although the plural form in Maya of kan (snake) would be kanoob, in Yucatecan Spanish, the food name is pluralized like a Castilian word: pool kanes. 38. The taste for Chinese food is so widespread that there are, all over the city, take-outs and home delivery services for this food. It is not unusual, today, to see people with an Asian phenotype peddling Styrofoam boxes of fried rice, spring rolls, and other Chinese dishes on corners around downtown Mérida.

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39. The names in this paragraph are pseudonyms for restaurants located on the northern side of the city—at the northern end of the Paseo Montejo, in its immediate extension, or on perpendicular streets connected to it—all a short distance from each other. 40. This custom is changing, too. On occasion, friends may now pick up the bill and not allow the birthday person to pay. 41. In 2007, the government in Mexico City passed a decree banning smoking in restaurants, and the government in Yucatán followed suit in 2008. However, restaurateurs were fast to detect loopholes in the edict. They complied by posting ‘no smoking’ signs, but provided tables with ashtrays and stretched the definition of ‘open space’. For example, by opening its large windows to a terrace and thus purportedly making the whole space ‘open’, a restaurant may be permitted to allow smoking. 42. In my own neighborhood, an economic kitchen opened, announcing its specialization in ‘Chilango food’ (cocina chilanga). In June 2007, they added the sale of Hidalgo-style barbecue on Saturdays and Sundays. Thus far, I have seen very few people at their locale, while the cochinita pibil and baked piglet street vendor across the corner serves to long lines of people every day of the week. 43. Although none of these restaurants has an exclusionary policy, it is obvious that the prices they charge and the clientele they attract would discourage any impulse to visit them that laborers and bureaucrats might feel. A woman employee in one such restaurant confided in a conversation that she regularly eats at fast-food establishments with her friends, since she cannot afford to eat at the restaurant where she works. 44. An Italian chef told me that he was dissatisfied with the restaurant where he was working because the owner’s preferred clientele was the US expatriate population in the neighborhood where the restaurant was located. The chef preferred to cater to local people, as well as to foreigners, since he saw local people as more inclined to be faithful to the food of a place. He has since moved on to work at another restaurant. 45. Some Meridans consume aged tequilas with their margaritas and other cocktails. Friends from Jalisco, the state of Mexico where tequila is produced, have told me that aged tequilas should be consumed straight, and it is only white tequila that should be combined in cocktails. However, reflecting local demand, expensive bars and restaurants in Mérida use aged tequilas and rums for their cocktails.

Chapter 3: The Yucatecan Culinary Field and the Naturalization of Taste 1. During the development of the field of food studies, authors have tended to privilege European culinary traditions. The institution of French gastronomy has received special attention, as it became the first highly codified culinary system and was turned into the universal blueprint for all other cuisines aspiring for recognition as haute cuisine (Ferguson 2004; Mennell 1985; Pitte 2002; Trubek 2000). Mennell’s (1985) investigation, in particular, provided the background

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for understanding the rise of a French tradition and the reasons why British cooking diverged from it, despite the fact that many cooks in England were of French origin. It is of particular relevance here to note that Mennell demonstrates how cooking evolved into an art, thanks to the association of cooks with the households of the French and British nobility. These cooks dedicated their cookbooks to their patrons, since it was the latter who endorsed and gave validity and legitimacy to claims regarding a cook’s ingenuity, sophistication, and expertise. Mennell’s account also shows that, after the decline of the nobility, resulting from the French Revolution, cooks/chefs were constrained to join the public sphere of restaurants. These cooks and chefs often achieved notoriety due to the publication and dissemination of their cooking manuals. In this context, the cooking of male chefs was set apart from (female) domestic cooking, which they addressed authoritatively. Through chefs like Carême, cooks affirmed their place within the high arts, and their skills (which became associated with Frenchness) were the object of nationalist pride, heralded by authors such as Jean Anthelme BrillatSavarin (in his gastronomic meditations published in 1825 as Physiologie du goût [The Physiology of Taste]) and Marcel Rouff (in his 1924 literary depiction of the greatness of French cuisine, dedicated to Brillat-Savarin, which was translated into English as The Passionate Epicure). It is from this angle that we can look at Ferguson’s (2004) contribution. Her book, Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine, discusses the ways in which writing about cooking, the pleasures of eating, and the rules that legislate good and sophisticated cooking and dining have promoted French cuisine, French cookbooks, and French food—first, as the food of the nation, and, second, as the universal model for any aspiring culinary tradition. Within Ferguson’s argument, it makes sense to distinguish the ‘culinary’ as the realm of cooking, and the ‘gastronomic’ as the sphere of writing about food. It was due to the authority of the cookbooks produced by renowned French chefs, and to the authority of philosophers who wrote about good eating, that the gastronomic became distinguishable from the culinary. As I have been arguing, in this book I am following a different axis to distinguish between the culinary and gastronomic fields. We can find Yucatecan cookbooks that pertain to either field: those that are part of the culinary field can be seen as encompassing and cosmopolitan-oriented, while those in the gastronomic field have adopted restrictive, normative values that establish, once and for all, the ‘right’ way to cook Yucatecan dishes. Despite their appearance as static and unalterable, these fields do in fact change—sometimes more rapidly, sometimes rather slowly. 2. Elsewhere (Ayora-Diaz 2010b) I contrast Yucatecan to other culinary traditions, showing that the culinary and gastronomic fields may encompass different phenomena in different contexts. Hence, while in Yucatán it is the gastronomic (public) field that becomes rigid and the culinary (private, domestic) field that is more flexible, in the Basque Country, according to different authors, the domestic (culinary) field seems more rigid, privileging local products, while the public (gastronomic) field is more open to fusion and creativity (see Haramburu Altuna 2000; MacClancy 2007). In each place, gastronomy can be defined differently: in Yucatán, it is represented by a restrictive, region-bound collection of recipes,

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while in the Basque Country, in France, and elsewhere, it can be seen as the ability to create and fuse different culinary traditions. 3. As I discuss in chapter 4, in Yucatán, since the turn of the new millennium, there has also been a gradual process of recuperation of Maya ‘indigenous’ cooking that draws, primarily, from locally produced ingredients. This effort seeks to reinvent and institute a form of cookery that has been displaced by nearly 500 years of European colonization and hybridization. 4. Some examples of the erosion and fragmentation of the nation include the political struggles developing in Chiapas (Benjamin 1989; Harvey 1998) and in Oaxaca (Rubin 1997), as well as the economic challenge to the supremacy of Mexico by states such as Jalisco and Nuevo León, among others (Cerutti 1985, 1992; de la Peña 1992). See also Béjar and Rosales (2002), Joseph and Nugent (1994), and Vazquez Parada and de la O Castellanos (2002). 5. I am not writing here about individual preferences, but rather about socially and culturally sanctioned codes for the production and consumption of food. 6. Outside of Yucatán, adobo refers to an altogether different blend of spices. 7. The older cookbooks, on which the preparation of these recados is based, restricted the recipe to the list of spices necessary for their elaboration, without any instructions as to the proportion of each spice necessary for each recado. This gave ample room for personal and micro-regional variation and for a process of negotiation of flavors between producers and consumers of recado (see, e.g., Hernández Fajardo de Rodríguez n.d., ca. 1930; Ruz viuda de Baqueiro [ca. 1950] 2000). 8. Despite the large number of recipes, these two volumes do not list all the locally made recados. Some recados included in other cookbooks dedicated to Yucatecan cuisine are missing here. 9. There are, evidently, Yucatecans who perceive the all-encompassing image of the Yucatecan as misrepresenting themselves and are skeptical about the assumptions and the benefits that they can supposedly draw from being Yucatecan. 10. This is true, but not to the extent that I found in Chiapas, where indigenous people were accepted into the public sphere so long as they remained marked as always already ‘indigenous’ (Ayora-Diaz 2002). In Yucatán, non-Mayas learn Maya language as part of their regional cultural heritage, and non-indigenous women dress in fancy and expensive hipiles (ternos) to attend different gala. From 1976 to 1982, Francisco Luna Kan, a medical doctor of Maya ancestry, was governor of Yucatán, and there are prominent lawyers, doctors, musicians, researchers, politicians, and other public personalities with Maya last names and phenotype, although their ethnic origin is seldom noted. Despite these cases, however, Yucatecan society continues to marginalize, at large, native speakers of Maya, who are generally of rural origins. This suggests that, although Yucatecans are also racist, the shape that their racism takes is different from that of other Mexican regions: it cannot be subsumed under a general national form of racism but needs to be understood in different terms. For a recent discussion of this issue, see Castillo Cocom (2004), Gabbert (2004), Hervik (1999a), and Iturriaga (2010). 11. It is often suggested that the Caste War of Yucatán (1847–1901) resulted in, among other outcomes, the blurring of categories currently used to designate

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different individuals. Hence, indio is seldom used, and Mestizo is often used to designate people of mixed Maya and European ancestors, white Yucatecans who subscribe to the Mestizo nationalist ideology, and people whom one would phenotypically recognize as indigenous. During the Caste War, many Mayas sided with the non-indigenous population and were granted citizenship. Following the Caste War and the socialist revolution of the state, ethnic terms were replaced with class-based terminology, restricting the use of the term indio to the private domain. Regarding the complex historical processes leading to and stemming from the Caste War, see, among many sources, K. Caplan (2010), Iturriaga (2010), Rugeley (1996, 2009), Sullivan (1989), and Wells and Joseph (1996). 12. Cochinita pibil, besides being a pork dish, calls for the juice of Seville oranges, red onions, and herbs and spices brought from the Old World. Despite many Yucatecan friends’ assertion that this dish is truly of Maya origin, the majority of its ingredients are in fact European and Middle Eastern. 13. One can also find similar views elsewhere. For example, in Italy I have been told that tomatoes, corn, and potatoes are recent substitutions for previous ingredients that are now in disuse. 14. Searching on the World Wide Web I have been able to find many different recipes for stuffed cheese (in Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, the Dutch Antilles, and Venezuela, for example). However, in each place the recipe reveals distinct local preferences for ingredients, making it different from the others. 15. I will show in chapter 4 how Yucatecan recipes also call for marinating meats in white and fruit vinegars, as well as in sherry, white and red wines, and, occasionally, Porto wine. 16. In the past (until the 1980s), butters of Danish, Dutch, and Norwegian origins were smuggled into Yucatán from Belize. The use of butter was limited to baking pastries and to giving flavor to breads that families would consume with a cup of hot chocolate or a glass of reconstituted powdered milk. Butter was seldom used as a substitute for oil or lard. 17. As I discuss in chapter 4, Yucatecan cookbooks allow for variations in the recipes for some dishes. However, these variations are often in tune with ingredients recognizable as part of the Yucatecan taste, while those ingredients considered alien to the regional culinary field (e.g., chipotle, ancho, or guajillo pepper) are not recommended. This does not mean that Yucatecans reject out of hand these non-traditional ingredients. In fact, Yucatecans like the flavor of these foodstuffs and will accept them in dishes as long as they are not presented as ‘Yucatecan’. 18. Escabeche de Valladolid is a stew prepared by basting a turkey (although chicken is often the poor man’s alternative) with the juice of Seville oranges and a recado made of cinnamon, cumin, bay leaves, oregano, thyme, black pepper, and allspice. The turkey must be first half-boiled (to obtain a broth), then roasted over a fire, and served shredded in a broth prepared with bay leaves, Castile pepper, allspice, red onions, one or two whole heads of roasted garlic, and roasted xkat ik chili pepper. The broth is spiced up with diluted escabeche recado in white vinegar. When serving the dish, there is a choice of xkat ik or habanero chili

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pepper and pickled red onions to garnish the meal. Some families use the broth to make a pasta soup, to be served as a side dish. 19. Even today, astute customers know that there are certain days of the week when vegetables, meats, and fish are sure to be fresh at the market and certain days when vegetables are beginning to deteriorate and the meat and fish are frozen or may be at an initial stage of spoilage, despite their preservation on ice. 20. Another highly favored meal, now in disuse due to the ban on hunting deer, is venison tzic: shredded venison meat previously baked in a pit-hole, mixed with cilantro, onions, radishes, and the juice of Seville oranges and accompanied by minced habanero pepper. 21. In Mérida, public and private elementary schools and high schools may choose to start classes at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning and offer courses until 7:00 or 8:00 in the evening. Students and teachers get a break for their almuerzo beginning at 1:00 or 2:00 pm, resuming classes at 4:00 or 5:00 pm. 22. See Ayuntamiento de Mérida, http://thematrix.sureste.com/cityview/ merida1/articulos/arquimer.htm (accessed in 2002). 23. In other towns, such as Peto, in the south of Yucatán, bullfights are scheduled during the hot months of the spring. During April and May, temperatures can reach up to 43 degrees Celsius (over 110 degrees Fahrenheit). 24. Social commentators and medical practitioners have long criticized the popular Yucatecan penchant for fresh kill meat from the bullfight, as well as for the practice of drinking raw blood at the moment when the butchers drain the animal’s meat. They insist that the toxins liberated by animals in distress are unsuitable for human consumption. After the most recent mad cow disease scare, this local practice received much attention from the media, renewing medical charges against the consumption of chocolomo, and today is often difficult (although not impossible) to find calf’s brain and bone marrow, essential ingredients in chocol­ omo. Despite all moral and medical/scientific injunctions against the consumption of this meal, it continues to be a favorite among many Yucatecan families. 25. Growing up in Yucatán, I used to see a few simple altars at friends’ homes, consisting only of pictures of dead relatives placed on a table with samples of the food they loved the most. However, since these celebrations have turned into tourist events in some states of the republic (e.g., Lake Pátzcuaro in Morelia), and since during the past several years the national government has been actively enforcing central Mexican culture in the regions, elaborate altars are becoming more common in Yucatán. The municipal government of Mérida, ruled until 2010 by the centralist National Action Party (the same party that governed Yucatán from 2000 to 2006), promoted altar competitions in elementary and high schools—first all over Mérida and then all over the state—to be held in the corridors of different municipal halls. To the government’s satisfaction, tourists are always curious about these colorful demonstrations, and it is common to find the competitions attended by many national and foreign tourists, together with the relatives of the contestants. Despite the blatant cultural colonialism that the enforcement of this practice represents in Yucatán, many Yucatecans have told me that they see these practices as the “promotion of Mexican cultural heritage.”

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26. Preparing this meal is expensive for most Yucatecan families. The minimum wage is just over 40 pesos a day, which is less than US$4. One kilogram of Norwegian cod can cost, on average, 200 pesos, the equivalent of five days of work. The recipe calls for many imported and high-priced ingredients: cod from Norway, olive oil from Spain or Italy, capers, olives, and Spanish pimientos. 27. I have also found a recipe for guacamole in a cookbook that was printed earlier in the twentieth century (Hernández Fajardo de Rodríguez, n.d., ca. 1930), but since I have had access only to recent, undated reprints, I have been unable to ascertain in which edition it originally appeared. 28. I believe that the term ‘authentic’ makes reference to the memory and imagination of the dish that each consumer has acquired in her or his place of origin. For example, I have consumed guacamole with crickets (chapulines) in the city of Oaxaca, and I have seen tourists enthralled by the experience. However, I have also seen foreigners who consider their Yucatecan guacamole to be ‘tainted’, due to the addition of pieces of chorizo, and who immediately complain to the waiter about its inauthenticity. 29. A friend of Lebanese origin told me that his family is still in possession of a large stone mortar and a stone pounder that his mother used when pestling the meat and other ingredients necessary to prepare kibbeh. He also told me, on another occasion, that he derides cooks when they say that they grind pork to cook kibbeh. In his family experience, kibbeh must be prepared with either lamb or a mix of lamb and beef, but no pork. Nonetheless, I have seen him cook kibbeh exclusively with beef, ground with xkat ik chili peppers. When I remarked on his own inconsistency, he replied, “We are Yucatecans, and these are Yucatecan kibbeh.” 30. Italian and Spanish sausages are often acquired in supermarkets, imported from their countries of origin. Recently, a German master charcutier took residence in Mérida and opened two delis where he sells hams and sausages, in bulk, sliced, or in sandwiches on bread that he bakes. 31. See, in particular, the discussion on post-peasant societies in Kearney (1996) and the re-examination of the cases of Chan Kom and Pisté, near Chichén Itzá, by Re Cruz (1996) and Castañeda (1996), and of Kaal in the northern part of the state (Adler 2004). 32. De Landa (2006: 10–15) suggests that the notion of “relations of exteriority” means that an element can move from one assemblage to another without changing the properties of the assemblages (against the implication of such displacement in a seamless, bounded society). “Territorialization” is manifested through the strategies designed to establish the boundaries and the location of any given assemblage, while “deterritorialization” appears when the introduction of extraneous elements undermines its boundaries and localization. In contrast, “reterritorialization” corresponds with actions directed to a redefinition and re-establishment of the appearance of clear boundaries and territories. “Materiality of assemblages” makes reference to the bodily practices leading to face-to-face encounters and different forms of interaction, while “expressive forms” comprehends both linguistic and non-linguistic codes of communication among individuals.

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33. Vaquería is the name given to dance events organized by local hosts that take place during the celebrations of local patron saints. They have been reported since the nineteenth century and are often held in the public space of city halls. The dancing lasts all night and continues into the following morning. The jarana is a regional popular dance inspired by the Spanish jota. In her communication, Vargas Cetina was describing a vaquería that she had attended in 2006. 34. People who live alone and do not cook are sometimes invited to share in a family’s Monday meal of pork and beans. I know, however, of some instances in which the dish was not cooked by the host but was, instead, bought at an economic kitchen. 35. In July 2008, a regional newspaper quoted a nutritionist in Mérida who, speaking for the health authority of the state of Yucatán, asserted that 3,000 Yucatecans die every year as a consequence of obesity, resulting from the regular ingestion of cochinita pibil, lechón al horno, and pork and beans, along with hamburgers and French fries. See Diario de Yucatán, http://www.yucatan.com.mx/noticia.asp?cx =11$1000000000$3873487&f=20080726 (accessed on 26 July 2008).

Chapter 4: Cookbooks and the Gastronomic Field 1. To the publisher’s credit, on the back cover the potential buyer is informed that this is a “cookbook of primarily Yucatecan cuisine,” thus warning that many recipes are not Yucatecan. But if only 4 percent of the recipes are Yucatecan, this means that it is primarily a Mexican cookbook that includes a small number of Yucatecan recipes. 2. The last two soups are also missing in some more recent Yucatecan cookbooks. They may be seen as commonplace recipes, but their absence is particularly striking in Rivero Molina’s cookbook, given the triviality of many non-Yucatecan recipes that were chosen to be included. 3. In the period following World War II, cookbooks all over the world began to reflect the availability of canned and processed food. At the same time, Yucatecan cookbooks started including butter as a frying agent for an increasing number of dishes. However, in recipes belonging to the gastronomic field, butter is not an ingredient of choice. Traditionally, Yucatecan recipes call for using either pork lard or olive oil for frying foods. 4. Tomato sauces are especially avoided within the gastronomic field, although many home cooks give tomatoes a more favorable reception for everyday cooking. 5. This criticism in based not on ontological presumptions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘purity’ but rather on the recognition that a Yucatecan taste, different from a Mexican one, has been naturalized through the dissemination of recipes specific to the region’s history, ecology, market, and social preferences. 6. The introduction in Rivero Molina’s cookbook shares the view that the Yucatecan ‘temperament’ plays an important part in fashioning regional recipes. In local social intercourse, one finds everyday allusions to a Yucatecan ‘nature’ that is distinct from that of Mexicans. For an analysis of the notion of

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the ‘Yucatecan soul’, see Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina (2005a), as well as the discussion below. 7. Here we can think of multiple texts/cookbooks, multiple cultural groups in co-existence in the region, multiple regional culinary traditions in interaction (and sometimes forced integration), and multiple regional and national groups (e.g., state and private tourism agencies, restaurant associations, chambers of commerce, local experts, and regional, national, and international publishing presses) that have vested interests in the development, fostering, and promotion of national and regional cuisines. 8. I do remember seeing, some decades ago, one cookbook (now out of print) that contained instructions such as “add 20 cents [worth] of cloves.” 9. Moreover, this cookbook privileges preparing meals quickly, thereby undervaluing the aesthetic quality of the food. It addresses the obligation to cook that still marks women’s place at home: although they may work outside the home, women are still responsible for feeding the family. It contains no claims for authenticity or for cosmopolitanism. It matter-of-factly includes recipes from different national and international culinary traditions adapted to the conditions of a contemporary Yucatecan kitchen in which food is treated as fuel rather than as an important way of sharing and communicating with family and friends. In fact, it recommends that women avoid cooking on Sundays, advising them to slack off. The phrase al chingadazo in the title of this cookbook suggests adding things to a pot so as to allow for a combination of flavors, but without the care and attention that sophisticated cooking demands. 10. As an outcome of cultural colonialism, Zlotnick (2003) has argued, the British were able to domesticate Indian cooking through the appropriation of curry into the national cuisine. Thus, this displacement performs a political move supplementary to the erasure and silencing of the culinary habits of cultural minorities subject to a dominant society, within or beyond the national borders. 11. From the 1930s to the end of World War II, Japan closed itself to US influence while remaining open to other Asian and European traditions (Cwiertka 2006: 115). Nonetheless, in the eyes of imperialists, Japan was defined as a closed society. The same can be argued about Yucatán closing itself off from Mexican influences while remaining open to other culinary traditions and cultural influences. 12. I have been able to trace only three volumes from the emerging nineteenth-century Yucatecan culinary tradition. While some women and men do not need cookbooks to cook, and others do not want to cook, there are, in compensation, many people who collect old cookbooks, removing them from circulation. I have thus found it impossible to find these books in libraries and second-hand bookstores. During my research, I have received on loan some notebooks in which friends’ mothers or grandmothers wrote down their recipes, but I have come to realize that very often these are verbatim copies of recipes that appear in various cookbooks still in circulation. 13. The Oxford Spanish Dictionary (Jarman and Russell 2003) translates pebre as ‘sauce’. While this linguistic use may be current in other Spanish-speaking regions, in Yucatán pebre names a full dish, as is demonstrated by its recipe.

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14. Celia Rosado Avilés and Oscar Ortega Arango sought to publish a facsimile edition of this cookbook. In their preface, they state that theirs is a copy of the original 1889 publication by Navarrete Arce. This cookbook became, in 1911, La verdadera cocina yucateca (The True Yucatecan Cuisine). Both editions, they note, are difficult if not impossible to find. An advantage (or disadvantage) is that the original edition they used was spared the additions and erasures that might have affected the text of their later edition. Unfortunately, the 1911 facsimile edition remains unpublished. 15. Some dishes with a well-established regional reputation—for example, lon­ ganiza (a sausage), pork loin in tomato sauce, escabeche, and turkey in black stuffing—have long been recognized as having their origins in the culinary creativity of Valladolid cooks. Some versions of dishes known all over the state are also recognized, in general terms, as being better prepared in Valladolid than in Mérida or other Yucatecan towns. Among the three cookbooks published during the nineteenth century, the recipe for cochinita pibil appears first in Navarrete Arce’s cookbook. Over time, the reference to Valladolid has disappeared in menus and cookbooks. In some cases, I have even found waiters in restaurants specializing in Yucatecan cuisine who assume that the word ‘oriental’ refers to China and not to Valladolid, the capital of the oriental (i.e., eastern) district of the province of Yucatán during colonial times. 16. For this discussion I am relying on the seventh edition of the cookbook, which was published in 1938 by Librería Burrel, S.A. On the cover, we read that the book contains “Volumes I, II and III, with numerous additions and reforms.” Thus, although this volume contains recipes for many dishes iconic of the regional gastronomic field, I am unable to say whether they were part of the original publication or were added during subsequent editions. However, as I have already mentioned in chapter 3, from conversations with older friends I can infer that some recipes pre-date this seventh edition. I thank Cornell Library Services and Tulane University Library for making the microfiche of this volume available to me. 17. These recipes are mac-cum de robalo, carne en naranja agria, cochinita pibil, venado pib en fricasé, relleno negro de Valladolid, escabeche de Valladolid, pavo de monte kol, pollos guisados pibiles, pollo enterrado, pavo en escabeche de Valla­ dolid, papa-azul (which should read papadzul), enrollados de chaya, mucbil pollo, vaporcitos, and queso de bola relleno. 18. I located the descendants of Concepción Hernández, and they told me in a couple of telephone conversations that the original publication would have been either in the 1920s or the 1930s, although they could not be sure. The author died long ago (they could not even say when), and they have no certain knowledge of the original date of publication. They hold the publishing rights for this cookbook, which has been out of print for some years now, and are unsure as to whether to reprint the book or not. The grandson’s wife told me: “Nowadays, women have little time for the kitchen, and the recipes in this cookbook are timeconsuming.” Thus, they fear that the demand for the book would be negligible and would not warrant further printing. 19. Some recipes are still being cooked. Some, such as mondongo (tripe), are recognized as not being specifically Yucatecan, and different versions can be found

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in other states of Mexico. The foreign origins of ajiaco cubano and pan de cazón are acknowledged, but these dishes are firmly entrenched in the local Yucatecan taste. 20. In fact, in more recent cookbooks I have not found any recipes for baked piglet (even though it is sold everyday in Mérida’s streets), and cilantro soup can be found only in the cookbook published by the restaurant Hacienda Teya (1999). 21. I remember eating this dish during my childhood but have not seen it since then. Given that some Yucatecan dishes were and still are cooked with either sherry, Porto wine, or other sweet wines, I would not be surprised if some families of limited economic means continue using cola drinks to marinate and cook their meat. In addition, cooks nostalgic for the flavors of their youth may cook this dish every so often for private consumption. 22. In the 1970s, the Secretariat of the Navy and the Secretariat of Agriculture banned the consumption of turtle meat and eggs. The fines were so high, and the prosecution of poachers so relentless, that turtles of any kind are rarely consumed today, as they are very expensive and can be found only on the black market. 23. “Quiere Asia más carne de bovinos” (Asia Demands More Bovine Meat), El Economista, 16 June 2008, http://eleconomista.com.mx/. 24. Some Meridans have told me that, up to the 1950s, in the eastern part of the city where some neighborhoods are now located, there were some small ranches at which cattle and horses were kept. 25. What Ruz refers to as “condiment” seems to be a mix or blend of spices. It is not clear why she did not include them with recados. Although she provides the instructions to prepare the recados from scratch, in several recipes she concedes to her readers that, if they wish, they may instead use a local, industrially produced brand—one that is still on the market. 26. Other than as products of illegal poaching or fishing, these two types of meat are unavailable to the Yucatecan population at large. Once a year, Los Almendros, a Yucatecan restaurant, organizes a weeklong venison festival, serving deer raised on Yucatecan ranches or imported from New Zealand that has been prepared in ‘traditional’ Yucatecan recipes. A Mexican supermarket chain also makes available, every so often, imported venison and elk at its Mérida locations. 27. Dishes that are represented today in the menus of restaurants specializing in Yucatecan food include the following: Puchero, Pulpos en su Tinta, Mac-Cum, Caracoles en Escabeche, Calamares en su Tinta, Escabeche Oriental de Gallina, Pollo Alcaparrado, Pavo en Relleno Negro (Chirmole), Pavo en Relleno Blanco, Mucbil Pollos, Carne Adobada, Cochinita Pibil (including Tacos), Papa-Sauul (sic; should read Papadzules), Panuchos Yucatecos, Pan de Cazón, Empanadas de Cazón, Sambutes (sic; should read Salbutes), Empanadas Yucatecas, and Frijol con Puerco. 28. The names that these food items receive in Yucatán are, respectively, tajine, jine de berenjena, jine de garbanzos, quibi, kafta, and tabule. 29. I am not arguing here that Maya people who cook and consume these dishes do not use a Maya name to describe them. However, these are dishes that, as I have shown, form part of the urban, Creole, and Mestizo culinary traditions and are already well-known in Yucatán—and Mexico at large—with their Spanish names.

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30. In fact, chachalaca (with a c and not a k) it is a large turkey-like bird that can be found from Mexico to Costa Rica. 31. See Hervik (1999b) and Restall (2004) for a forceful critique of the presumptions of cultural continuity when writers deal with the indigenous cultures of Yucatán. 32. In the introduction of his volume, Díaz-Bolio (1985) lets readers know that he enjoyed the collaboration of Amelia García López in collecting the recipes, but her name does not appear as a co-author. 33. It is not my intention to suggest that people do not eat or have never eaten these dishes in rural and urban areas of Yucatán. Rather, I suggest that this list of foodstuff is so reductive that it misrepresents the diet of rural people. Similarly, the recipes in Traditional Maya Foods are consumed, sometimes as snacks, sometimes as an accompaniment to other dishes, sometimes as appetizers. But they do not constitute the main staples in the rural diet, other than in the poorest of villages. The author is from Espita, an agricultural village that was impoverished during the implementation of structural adjustment policies in the countryside, but still, it is not one of the poorest villages of the state. 34. I have attempted to preserve the writing form, as it is in awkward Spanish, seemingly written by someone who has not mastered Spanish writing rules. The book is bilingual, and the sponsors decided to respect the expressive forms.

Chapter 5: The Gastronomic Field 1. In 1987, when I was a student in Calgary, I helped a friend to prepare Yucatecan dishes to sell at a benefit. The food buyers rejected our food, saying that ours was not Mexican because we were serving soft tacos instead of tacos with hard shells. 2. Of course, not all central Mexicans reject Yucatecan food and the cultural/ social aspects and implications of its production and consumption. In 2009, a woman from central Mexico told me that she and her husband have grown used to pork and beans and eat this dish at least once every two weeks. I have also found many other central Mexicans who have turned Yucatecan food into their main domestic cuisine—to the point that some of them travel to towns and villages seeking their favorite recados and dishes. 3. Before the local market was flooded with agricultural produce from different Mexican regions, the south of Yucatán produced large avocados whose skin and flesh were both green when ripe, with the flesh having a buttery texture. These avocados were discarded when they turned dark. In contrast, the small avocados from the central highlands turn dark when they ripen 4. An Internet search for Yucatecan restaurants will reveal a large number of these restaurants in the United States and in Canada. Also, one can find in Europe some restaurants of Mexican food that offer a few Yucatecan dishes (mostly cochin­ ita pibil), although they are sometimes listed as Mexican instead of Yucatecan. 5. The importance of French chefs is also found in literature. For example, the historical novel De caracoles y escamoles by Pairé (1999) tells the story of

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a fictional French chef who arrives in nineteenth-century Mexico and seeks to establish his culinary practice in a country that lacks the sophistication to match his skills. In Carr’s (1994) The Alienist, the protagonist investigators discuss their findings while eating at Delmonico’s in New York City, the first fine dining restaurant in the US to allow patrons to order food à la carte and to use a separate wine list. The authority of French cuisine is also present in many movies. For example, in Chow and Lee’s (1996) The God of Cookery, a movie that combines martial arts and cooking techniques, we witness a cooking match, Iron Chef-like, that is judged by blue ribbon chefs. Lastly, in Axel’s (1987) film Babette’s Feast, the undeniable moral properties of French food conquer the souls of the inhabitants of a Nordic fishing village. 6. I did not, in my research, investigate culinary schools. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, some established private schools and one state-funded university have opened culinary schools. Also, a US chef has opened his own private school in which he teaches mainly tourists (and also some Yucatecans) the principles of Yucatecan cuisine (D. Arizaga and F. Fernández Repetto, pers. comms.). His work was featured in Martha Stewart’s television show during 2008. 7. This stands in contrast to cheaper restaurants located in old, unkempt buildings. In 2007, at a downtown restaurant founded in the late 1960s, I noticed that the cooks remained hidden behind closed doors. I accidentally caught a glimpse of their messy kitchen, with its oil-stained ceiling, walls, and floors. My foreign friends, who had found the restaurant while walking downtown, had liked the food and had suggested that we meet there. 8. The figure of the chef is so important that even restaurants employing noncertified cooks refer to their head cook as a chef. However, high-end restaurants do provide employment for schooled and certified chefs, some of whom have later ventured into opening their own restaurants. 9. Secretaría de Turismo del Estado de Yucatán, “Resumen Informativo” (2005), http://www.sectur.gob.mx/work/resources/LocalContent/13378/1/ AGOSTO/Resumen25.Agosto.05.doc+cocina+yucateca+patrimonio (accessed 17 June 2009). 10. In November 2010, the Mexican Tourism Board announced that Mexico had achieved recognition as part of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. See http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mexico-tourismboard-celebrates-unesco-honor-for-traditional-mexican-cuisine-109871009.html. 11. See Secretaría de Turismo del Estado de Yucatán, “Principales indicadores del Sector Turismo en Yucatán acumulado de enero a marzo de 2007” (2007), http://www.mayayucatan.com.mx/directorios/estat/estadisticas.pdf. Indicative of the recent transformation of Yucatán into a tourism destination is that in the Enciclopedia Yucatanense, in volume 6, published in 1946, we find an analysis of the economic structure of the state, and of the development of Mérida with no mention whatsoever of tourists or services addressing the needs of visitors from abroad (Ferrer de Mendiolea 1946; Martínez H. 1946). 12. This attitude is depicted well in the film If It’s Tuesday, This Must be Bel­ gium (Stuart 1969).

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13. It is possible yet today to find postings on the Web sites of tourism agencies located in the EU, the US, and Canada that warn against the consumption of local foods in Mexican regions. 14. Framing consists in contextualizing the food so that its edibility is highlighted (Long 2004b: 38). Naming or translating involves giving names to foodstuff that are not their literal translation but rather make them closer to the consumers’ cognitive framework; that is, it means calling something by a different name—or calling it ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘traditional’—in order to seduce the consumer (ibid.: 39). Explication consists in providing information about the ingredients and culinary techniques involved in preparing a dish and/or its history and meaning (ibid.). Menu selection refers to providing a consumer with the dishes that the restaurateur deems are more suitable for his or her palate. As Long suggests: “Menu selection clearly reflects the intentions of the producer and the anticipated consumer” (ibid.: 42; emphasis added). Finally, recipe adaptation “involves the manipulation of the ingredients and preparation methods of particular dishes in order to adapt to the foodways system of the anticipated consumers” (ibid.: 43). 15. In Italy, for example, I have visited a number of museums created by local groups where villagers exhibit their culinary traditions involved in the production of salami, prosciutto, pasta, and bread. Festivals as well are dedicated to showcasing local cheeses, prosciutto, or fish. There are also culinary schools that offer intensive cooking seminars, for example, on Tuscan food and/or wine. 16. The Thursday night serenade used to focus exclusively on Yucatecan music, poetry, and dance. At the time of the regional National Action Party’s move toward a stronger alliance with the central government, the programming of this event began to include Mexican poetry and songs that were perceived to go against Yucatecan feeling. Yucatecan song and poetry tend to exalt women, and the audience found the content of some Mexican poems and songs to be, in comparison, somewhat misogynistic. On a couple of different nights, I saw Spanish-speaking tourists abandoning the park disapprovingly when they heard the poems’ unsentimental lines. 17. In other Mexican regions, chelada and michelada refer to beer cocktails, but their formulation can be quite different from that in Yucatán. 18. Yucatecans can be found at these downtown restaurants, especially during the evenings. The café at the theatre is the main meeting place for Meridans on nights when shows or events are scheduled to take place. However, it is more common to find Yucatecan laborers and employees, both men and women, consuming their meals at one of the many food stands located within new, small shopping centers that have been built in Mérida’s old colonial buildings. 19. I have also seen small restaurants of Yucatecan food open and fail in downtown Mérida. Although their food may be of the same or similar quality as that served in the older, established restaurants, they do not seem to gain the favor of customers because they are located either in modern-looking buildings or on less-traveled streets. These restaurants are often of unremarkable architecture and food.

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20. When visiting restaurants in Mexico City and Guadalajara, I frequently found trios and/or mariachi bands that moved among tables and, for a set fee, played songs requested by the customers. 21. According to its Web site, Hacienda Temozón was originally founded as an estancia (ranch) in 1655. See http://www.haciendatemozon.com/. 22. According to its Web site, Hacienda Teya was originally founded in 1683. See http://www.haciendateya.com. 23. Before closing and reincarnating as Los Almendros, El Mural, a restaurant that opened during the time of affirmation of Yucatecan regionalism (at the turn of the twenty-first century), was the only high-end restaurant that provided its guests with botanas. Its menu was exclusively Yucatecan and included drinks that were produced by regional companies: Yucatecan beers (since then the brewery was purchased by a Mexican corporation that closed it and moved the production of Yucatecan-named beers to Oaxaca) and Yucatecan sodas of a Mérida brand (Sidra Pino and Soldado de Chocolate). The desserts were all Yucatecan, as were the liquors (anis and flavored mistelas, such as orange, marañón, and nance), which were distilled in either Mérida or Valladolid. 24. Several Italian friends I have hosted and Italian acquaintances residing in Yucatán have complained about the “excessive” use of spices in Yucatecan sauces because, they say, the sauces mask the flavor of the main ingredients. 25. A cenote is a large natural well that is fed water through subterranean rivers. The restaurant Cenote Zaci in Valladolid has been administered partly by City Hall. For a long time, it was a preferred destination for travelers going to Cancún and for local people who wanted to eat out on Sundays. A fire destroyed the restaurant in 2004, and after long delays in its reconstruction, it was open for business in 2006. Since reopening, many local friends have complained that the old cook moved (to his own restaurant) and that the food has not been up to its previous standards. For example, a friend told me in shock that when she ordered lomitos de Valladolid (a dish recognized throughout the region as having been created in that city), she got gross chunks of meat in tomato sauce accompanied by potato fries, rather than finely diced pork in tomato sauce, garnished with minced hard-boiled eggs, and a serving of refried white beans (ibes). 26. Knowledgeable local gastronomes expect several meals in Valladolid and Yucatán to be served with white beans. When I have commented on the replacement of one type of bean for another, my friends from Valladolid have explained that white beans are more expensive and scarce. To make ends meet, cooks substitute black for white beans, thus changing the flavor that one expects from the dish. 27. In the markets of Valladolid and other Yucatecan cities, including Mérida, cooks retain the fat when serving cochinita, as there is widespread agreement that it emphasizes the flavor of the meal. However, in this era of trimmed profiles, the number of restaurants cooking lean cochinita, to satisfy their figure-conscious and cholesterol-worried customers, is growing. 28. There is a tight relationship between panuchos and a narrow selection of toppings, which can be a choice from among—or a combination of—pickled

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red onions, minced pork, sliced hard-boiled eggs, shredded turkey, or shredded chicken. In contrast, salbutes (made from unflavored, fried corn dough) are more versatile. This flat bread can be topped with the choice of the consumer, including cochinita pibil, black stuffing, or whatever pleases one’s palate. The main difference lies in the fact that panuchos have black beans in them. According to custom, for example, cochinita is not eaten with beans; thus, it is acceptable to eat it on salbutes but incorrect to eat it on panuchos. 29. A tostada in Yucatán is a tortilla that has been sun-dried and then baked in an oven. Regular soft tortillas can be turned into tostadas or panuchos if they are filled with refried black beans and deep-fried. If the tortilla is cut into pieces before undergoing any process, the result is called tostaditas, the diminutive of tostada. In other Mexican regions it may be called totopo, but this name is still rare in Yucatán, especially among Yucatecans. 30. If one looks at the recipe for, say, turkey in escabeche, one can expect a dish with a specific set of characteristics that many Yucatecan gastronomic purists demand. However, even in Valladolid, the birthplace of this dish (pavo en escabeche oriental), I have been treated with escabeche oriental that was in fact a roasted chicken served with a chicken broth and spices. In July 2007, an acquaintance who now spends most of the week in Valladolid told me that this is the “traditional” version of the meal and that he always brings buckets of escabeche to his family in Mérida. 31. Because patrons are not openly charged for their botanas (the cost is usually included in that of the drinks, which are more expensive than in bars with no botanas), restaurant-bars often cook a generic stuffing for their tacos. They may boil some meat along with spices and shred the meat to stuff tacos, which they flavor with the sauce or broth of a Yucatecan dish, for example, the sauce used in black stuffing or the broth used in escabeche. For restaurant-bars, the main goal is to serve spicy dishes that will encourage their clients to consume more beer. Plus, most customers go to such establishments in order to have a sociable time drinking beer with their friends, not necessarily to consume the best meals. Nonetheless, many Yucatecans select their restaurant-bars according to how they perceive the quality of the food that is served. 32. In Yucatán, there are different ways of consuming tortillas. In rural areas or among people with less income, the tortilla is eaten in pieces along with each bite of food. The common procedure is to divide the tortilla into four pieces, fold each piece with one’s fingers, and use it to grab some food or broth and take it to one’s mouth. This procedure favors the consumption of large quantities of tortillas, with volume replacing the quality of the food. In urban areas and among people with higher incomes who may be counting calories, the chosen technique is to roll the tortilla and to nibble it, every so often, in accompaniment to the food. Some people, betraying classist and racist forms of discrimination, complain that the excessive ingestion of tortillas results in the smell of corn in one’s skin and sweat—that is, the poor and the peasants are said to smell of tortillas. 33. Longanizas are pork (in some instances venison) sausages for which the meat has been previously seasoned with achiote, oregano, allspice, and the juice of

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Seville oranges (or vinegar) and then smoked during a short curing process. They are relatively fresh and are not eaten raw. They must be fried, grilled, or roasted. 34. In old Yucatecan cookbooks, brazo de reina (queen’s arm) corresponds to a dessert. However, the tamale called by its Maya name dzotobichay has recently received the name brazo de reina. Many Yucatecans, in fact, know this tamale only by the name brazo de reina and are unaware of the dessert version, which has long been discontinued in Yucatecans’ everyday diet. However, some of my older acquaintances are confused by the name and still think first of the dessert rather than the tamale when they see the dish’s name. 35. The list can be long. In different homes, it may include noodle and other small pasta soups, fish soup or broth, the broth of puchero, potaje, and pork and beans recycled with or without additional ingredients; Moors and Christians (rice and black beans) and different forms of dry rice soups; and vegetable soups. 36. In the Dutch Caribbean and Venezuela, ‘traditional’ stuffed cheese is prepared with shrimp rather than ground meat (as is typical in Yucatán). 37. Diners sometimes choose beef under the assumption that pork is richer in fat. However, Yucatecan pork has been bred to be leaner than chicken or other meats considered ‘healthier’. 38. In Yucatán, chirmole is a derivative of turkey in black stuffing. It is often the black stuffing in a thick black sauce, sometimes with black beans added. In other parts of Mexico, chirmol is a tomato sauce that includes chile guero and cilantro (Gironella de’Angeli and de’Angeli 2006). 39. Mondongo Andalusia-style is in fact a Yucatecan recipe, a variation on a generalized European dish. However, Yucatecans feel justified in giving it a Spanish name because of the addition of chickpeas and ham. 40. Some dishes, in being called de Valladolid, identify their city of origin. Such dishes may also be called oriental because Valladolid is located to the east of Mérida, in the eastern section of the peninsula. Among the dishes that still receive that appellation, or that old cookbooks describe as originating in that city, we find the following: lomitos de Valladolid, escabeche oriental, longaniza de Valladolid, and turkey in black stuffing. A friend from Valladolid strongly argued that panu­ chos were created in Valladolid, but I have not yet found any documentation that attributes the dish to any particular city or town of the state. In February 2009, a couple of friends from Mérida suggested that it was created in Mérida. In fact, the oldest reference to the dish that I have found relates it to Mérida, where a food stand was said to prepare panuchos in the barrio San Juan during the 1920s (Montejo Baqueiro 1981a). 41. See Helstosky (2008) on the flexibility of pizza and the resistance of Neapolitans to its transformations abroad. 42. The cook took me to see the pit oven. He proudly explained that everybody in his village knows how to cook in this way. He said that the smell is so recognizable that when a family cooks cochinita, the whole village knows that a party is on the way. 43. In response to growing requests from tourists and local people alike, some Yucatecan restaurants have begun to include a couple of salads in their menus.

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The most common ingredient is chaya, a local leaf that is believed to have healing and nutritional powers and whose flavor has been compared to spinach. Another ingredient in these salads is Edam cheese, as the preparation of stuffed cheese requires it to be carved, leaving some unused pieces. This byproduct is then added to salads, soups, and some desserts. When I mentioned these uses to a restaurant manager, he said that it is the restaurateurs’ responsibility to be honest and to make it clear that such dishes are the creation of the restaurant and not part of Yucatecan gastronomy. In his view, a dish becomes ‘Yucatecan’ only when it gains widespread acceptance and becomes a common feature in restaurants of Yucatecan food. 44. This restaurant closed in early 2010 and became a botanas bar. 45. During colonial times and into the first seven decades of the nineteenth century, Campeche was an integral part of Yucatecan culture and society. Its secession from Yucatán in the second half of the 1800s gave Campechanos the impulse to distinguish their society and culture from that of neighboring Yucatán. Cookbooks of Campeche food often present variations of dishes that Yucatecans never fail to recognize as their own.

Glossary of Recipes

The origin of recipes is subject to some disagreement. In this glossary I follow the attributions of origin found in Muñoz Zurita’s (1998) Diccionario enciclopédico de la gastronomía mexicana. No entry for huaraches is found in this dictionary or in the Larousse de la cocina mexicana (Gironella de’Angeli and de’Angeli 2006). However, on Internet Web sites huaraches are usually recognized as a recipe invented in Mexico City. Chicken pibil (Yucatán). Chicken marinated with the juice of Seville oranges, achiote, and spices, wrapped in banana leaves with slices of sweet bell peppers, onions, and tomatoes, then cooked in a pit oven, often along with cochinita pibil. Chilaquiles (several states in central Mexico). Slices of fried tortillas in a sauce of tomato and hot chili peppers, mixed with cream and covered with melted cheese. Chiles en nogada (Puebla). Poblano peppers stuffed with minced meat, covered with cream mixed with ground walnuts, and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. Usually consumed during the celebration of Mexican independence in the month of September. Chilorio (Sinaloa). Pork cooked in vinegar, chili peppers, garlic, oregano, and black pepper. In Yucatán it is available in supermarkets in cans produced by Mexican food companies. Chorizo (throughout Mexico). Sausages normally made out of pork, mixed with different spices according to the region of Mexico. They are shorter than longaniza. Cochinita, cochinita pibil (Yucatán). Pork marinated with the juice of Seville oranges, achiote, allspice, and herbs, wrapped in banana leaves and baked in a pit oven. Specialists in this dish are hired for parties, and the food is regularly consumed in tacos or tortas in markets or at food stands on the street. Dzotobichay, brazo de reina (Yucatán). A type of tamale in which chaya leaves are mixed with the corn dough and stuffed with ground roasted squash seeds, cilantro, and hard-boiled eggs. It is now commonly referred to as brazo de reina (queen’s arm), even though this name was formerly used for a regional cake. – 278 –

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Eggs motuleños (Yucatán). Attributed to the city of Motul in northern Yucatán. Fried eggs placed on top of tostadas with a spread of refried black beans, covered with tomato sauce, green peas, and habanero pepper. Often accompanied by slices of fried plantain. In Mérida and other parts of the peninsula, cooks add fresh cheese and minced ham on top of the sauce. Enchiladas (throughout Mexico). In Yucatán, it is consumed as a ‘Mexican’ food, usually in cantinas or in ‘Mexican’ restaurants. It consists of a tortilla folded and stuffed with shredded chicken and covered with mole or pipián sauce, and topped with fresh cheese and cream. Escabeche Valladolid-style, escabeche oriental, escabeche de pavo (Yucatán). Turkey stew, attributed to the city of Valladolid in the east of Yucatán. Pieces of turkey are marinated in the juice of Seville oranges and recado for escabeche, then roasted with whole garlic and onions and xkat ik chili peppers. It is called escabeche because most of the spices used for this stew are the same as those used in pickling. Frijoles charros (northern Mexico). A stew made of red beans along with different meats, according to the region. It may include a choice of bacon, ham, pork, beef, onions, bell peppers, Serrano pepper, and beer. Huaraches (Mexico City). Elongated corn tortillas covered with refried beans, cheese, and any topping. Lechón al horno (Yucatán). Piglet marinated in the juice of Seville oranges, with oregano and other herbs, then baked in an oven. Normally consumed in markets and streets in tacos or tortas. Lomitos de Valladolid (Yucatán). Attributed to the city of Valladolid, in the east of Yucatán. Minced pork loin with fat, slowly cooked with tomatoes and a touch of ground roasted red chili peppers. Ideally served with minced hard-boiled eggs and refried white beans (ibes). Longaniza de Valladolid (Yucatán). Smoked sausages 40 centimeters long, stuffed with ground pork marinated in Seville orange juice, achiote, oregano, allspice, and other herbs. Mole (central and southern Mexico). Each state has different versions of this stew. Like the Yucatecan recado, each mole is a paste of spices blended for each type of meat. Different ingredients (chili peppers and herbs) go into each mole, giving it different flavors and colors. In Yucatán, mole is part of the culinary field and in contrast to other Mexican regions, it is usually cooked sweet instead of spicy hot. Mucbil pollos (Yucatán). Tamale prepared for the Day of the Dead and All Saints’ Day, as well as for the ochavario, Catholic rituals performed one week after the Day of the Dead. The corn dough is mixed with achiote and pork lard. The tamale is stuffed with pieces of chicken or turkey, pork, and gravy prepared with achiote, corn flour, abundant epazote, and tomatoes. In Valladolid and in rural areas, as well as in the south of Mérida, cooks may add whole hard-boiled eggs.

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Pambazo (Veracruz, Mexico City, Durango, Querétaro). A torta stuffed with fried chorizo and potatoes. Panuchos (Yucatán). Hand-made tortillas in which the cook makes a lateral incision to fill the tortilla with refried black beans. The tortilla is subsequently fried and topped with simple garnishes (sliced pickled red onions or sliced hard-boiled eggs or a tiny amount of ground meat). During the 1970s, cooks in the town of Kanasín, in the east of Mérida, made it popular to top them with lettuce leaves, turkey in escabeche, and jalapeño peppers. In Mexico City, customers became accustomed to eat them topped with cochinita pibil. Growing numbers of immigrants in Mérida are turning this version into a common menu selection in tourist-oriented restaurants. Papadzules (Yucatán). Tortillas lightly soaked in a sauce of ground green squash seeds and epazote, filled with minced hard-boiled eggs and covered with fried tomato sauce. Poc-chuc (Yucatán). Attributed to the city of Ticul in the south of Yucatán. Grilled pork filets previously marinated in the juice of Seville oranges, garlic, salt, and black pepper, cooked over aromatic wood. Pozole (Colima, Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán, Sinaloa). A stew that can be made of beef, pork, lamb, or goat, with chili peppers, oregano, cumin, and hominy. Puchero de tres carnes, puchero (Yucatán). A Sunday family favorite. Stewed chicken, pork, and beef with assorted seasonal vegetables. Accompanied by rice with saffron and wheat noodles, avocado, and a sauce of minced radishes, cilantro, and habanero pepper in the juice of Seville oranges. Queso relleno (Yucatán). Dutch Edam cheese stuffed with ground pork mixed with minced olives, onion, capers, sweet bell pepper, tomatoes, and roasted pine nuts. Served on a sauce of k’ol covered with fried tomato sauce. Relleno negro, pavo en relleno negro (Yucatán). Turkey stewed in a black sauce prepared with recado for black stuffing. Attributed to Valladolid in older cookbooks. Although the turkey itself is seldom stuffed, the stuffing is cooked apart, made of ground pork with recado for black stuffing, shaped into balls the size of an orange, and stuffed in turn with hard-boiled eggs (whole and minced). Before appearing in restaurants, this meal was the special dish for weddings, birthdays, and Catholic celebrations. Romeritos (central and northern Mexico). An herb (suaeda torreyana Wats) commonly added to revoltijo during the Christmas season. Revoltijo are different mole or pipián sauces (depending on the state) in which, besides the romeritos, shrimp patties or nopal can be added and simmered. Salbutes (Yucatán). Dough shaped into a tortilla, deep-fried and topped with the meat or garnish of choice. Unlike the panucho, it does not contain black beans; thus, it is acceptable to top it with any food that the customer or a relative may request.

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Sandwichón (Yucatán). Known in the 1950s and 1960s as a birthday or Christmas meal, today it is sold in markets, supermarkets, and corner stores. Slices of white processed bread covered with canned cream blended with canned pimientos and processed cheddar cheese. Each layer of bread is stuffed with shredded chicken, and the cake is covered with the cream mix and slices of canned pimiento and canned green peas. Sikil pak (Yucatán). Attributed to the Maya people of Yucatán. A dip made of roasted and blended tomatoes mixed with roasted squash seeds, epazote, and minced habanero pepper. Sometimes it is mixed with minced hard-boiled eggs and consumed with tostadas. Sopes (central Mexico). A type of tortilla filled with refried red beans, topped with raw onion, cream, and cheese. Tacos al pastor (Mexico City, Nuevo León). A shawarma-type of meat. In Yucatán, the cooks marinate the meat with achiote and mild chili peppers and cook it with pineapple slices. It is usually served in tacos along with spicy hot sauces and cilantro. X’ni pek (Yucatán). Said to be a variation on Lebanese tabbouleh. In Yucatán it is used as a garnish on various foods. It is made with minced cilantro, onions, tomatoes, and habanero pepper in the juice of Seville oranges.

Cookbook References

Mexican Cookbooks Aaron, Jan, and Georgine Sachs Salom. [1965] 1981. The Art of Mexican Cooking. New York: Garland Books. Anonymous. [1831] 2000. El cocinero mexicano. 3 vols. Mexico City: CONACULTA. ______. [ca. 1800s] 2002. Formulario de cocina mexicana: Puebla, Siglo XIX. Mexico City: CONACULTA. Arjona Martín, Greisy. 2006. Comidas al chingadazo: Agenda-recterario. Self-published. Bergeron, Victor J. 1973. Trader Vic’s Book of Mexican Cooking. New York: Doubleday and Company. del Paso, Fernando, and Socorro del Paso. [1991] 2008. La cocina mexicana. Mexico City: Punto de Lectura. Gironella de’Angeli, Alicia, and Giorgio de’Angeli. 2006. Larousse de la cocina mexicana. Mexico City: Larousse. Kennedy, Diana. [1972] 1986. The Cuisines of Mexico. New York: Harper & Row. Milton, Jane. 2001. Mexican: Healthy Ways with a Favorite Cuisine. New York: Hermes House. Muñoz Zurita, Ricardo. 1998. Diccionario enciclopédico de la gastronomía mexicana. Mexico City: Clio Editorial. Ortiz, Elizabeth Lambert. 1965. The Complete Cookbook of Mexican Cooking. New York: M. Evans. Quintana, Patricia. 1986. The Taste of Mexico. New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang. Tausend, Marilyn. 2001. Savoring Mexico: Recipes and Reflections on Mexican Cooking. Singapore: Borders/Williams-Sonoma.

Yucatecan Cookbooks Aguirre, María Ignacia. [1832] 1981. Prontuario de cocina para un diario regular: Por doña María Ignacia Aguirre bien conocida por lo primorosa en el arte. Introd. Renán Irigoyen. Mérida: Comisión Editorial de Yucatán. Arjona de Castro, Atalita, and Enrique Castro Arjona. n.d., ca. 2000. K’oben: Los guisos que se sirvieron y se comen en las mesas yucatecas. Mérida: Krear de México, S.A. de C.V. Carrillo Lara, Silvia Luz. 1994. Cocina Yucateca Tradicional: Platillos rescatados de antiguos recetarios. Mexico City: Diana. Colegio de Mérida. 1959. Libro de cocina: Recetas de damas yucatecas. 2nd ed. Mérida: Impresora Comercial del Sureste, S.A. ______. 1977. Libro de cocina: Recetas de damas yucatecas. 5th ed. Mérida: Imprenta Manlio.

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CONACULTA (Consejo Nacional de Culturas Populares). [1988] 2000. La cocina familiar en el Estado de Yucatán. México City: Océano. Díaz-Bolio, José. 1985. El libro de los guisos del maíz (cocina jach yucateca). Mérida: Editorial Área Maya. Gerlach, Nancy, and Jeffrey Gerlach. 1994. Foods of the Maya: A Taste of the Yucatán. Freedom: Crossing Press. Hacienda Teya. 1999. Cocina Yucateca de la Hacienda Teya. Mérida: Dante. Hamman, Cherry. 1998. Mayan Cooking: Recipes from the Sun Kingdoms of Mexico. New York: Hippocrene Books. Hernández Fajardo de Rodríguez, Concepción. n.d., ca. 1930. Cocina Yucateca: Cocina y repostería práctica. 2 vols. Mérida: Self-published. Irigoyen Rosado, Renán. 2000. Guisos y postres tradicionales de Yucatán: 20 menús completos. Mérida: Maldonado Editores del Mayab. Maldonado Castro, Roberto. 2000. Recetario maya del estado de Yucatán. Mexico City: CONACULTA. Mesa Redonda Panamericana de Mérida. [1976] 1992. Cocina Yucateca e Internacional, ed. María Eneida Arjona de Morales. 2nd ed. Mesa Redonda Panamericana de Mérida No. 1 A.C. Mérida: Talleres Gráficos del Sudeste, S.A. de C.V. Miller, Loretta Scott. 2003. A Yucatan Kitchen: Regional Recipes from Mexico’s Mundo Maya. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company. Navarrete Arce, Manuela. [1889] 1911. El sabor de Yucatán: Consejos para la comida y el buen vivir. Preface by Celia Rosado Avilés and Oscar Ortega Arango in an unpublished 1911 facsimile edition titled La verdadera cocina yucateca. Mérida, Yucatán. Parroquia de Itzimná. 1993. Recetas de cocina para la mujer de hoy. Parroquia de Nuestra Señora del Perpetuo Socorro de Itzimná. Mérida: Libros, Folletos y Revistas de Yucatán, S.A. de C.V. Pinzón May, Ana Laura, ed. 2004. U janalo’ob mayao’ob: Comidas mayas tradicionales, mayaespañol. Espita: PACMYC, Gobierno del Estado de Yucatán, ICY, CONACULTA. Rendón de García, Hortensia. [1898] 1938. Antiguo manual de cocina yucateca: Fórmulas para condimentar los platos más usuales de la península. Tomos I, II y III refundidos con numerosas adiciones y reformas. 7th ed. Mérida: Librería Burrel, S.A. Rivero Molina, Josefina. 2004. Cocina Yucateca: Lo que se comía en mi casa. Mexico City: Trillas. Ruz viuda de Baqueiro, Lucrecia. [ca. 1950] 2000. Cocina Yucateca. Mérida: Self-published, Imprenta Manlio. Tabernáculos de Yucatán. 1970. Prepare un bufet [sic]. Libro de cocina: Obra de los Tabernáculos de Yucatán, ed. Fanny Velásquez de Esquivel. Mérida: Imprenta Manlio. Velázquez de León, Josefina. 1946. Platillos regionales de la República mexicana. Mexico City: Ediciones J. Veláquez de León. ______. 1952. Cocina Yucateca: Selección de las principales recetas regionales de Cocina y Repostería del Estado de Yucatán, experimentadas y garantizadas por la “Academia de Cocina Velazquez de Leon.” Mexico City: Academia de Cocina.

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Index

acultural modernity, 65, 191, 198, 254n31 adaptation: in cookbooks, 268n9; in Yucatecan restaurants, 210, 230, 232; local, 17, 22, 112, 139–141, 151, 172, 185; of Caribbean recipes, 14; of Lebanese recipes, 142, 179; of Yucatecan recipes abroad, 15; to foreign taste, 71; to Mexican taste, 154–157 advertisement, 76–77, 177, 255n1 Aguirre, Ignacia, 168–169, 176 Almendros, Los, 78, 214, 215, 225, 226, 256n4, 270n26, 274n23 Alvarado, Salvador, 42, 252n18 ambivalence: cultural, 3, 117; food, 34, 113; hospitality, 12, 146; hybridity, 24, 140; nation, 7, 72, 118, 240, 248n10; postcolonial, 245; and Yucatecan cuisine, 9, 34–36, 139, 180, 197, 207 Anderson, Benedict, 4, 43, 59, 61, 65, 72, 117, 217, 250n23 anthropological performance, 27–31 Appadurai, Arjun, 2, 165; gastro-politics, 34; imagination, 256n2; landscapes, 14, 76; on cookbooks, 8, 165–166; on national cuisines, 205 appropriation: culinary, 112, 119, 139–140, 164; culinary field, 151, 160; cultural, 173, 234; of culinary ingredients, 14; of recipes, 23, 34 268n10; of the global, 140, 191, 198; of the nation, 7, 58, 118, 243; of the Other, 191, 203 Arciniegas, Germán, 51 assemblage: cookbooks as, 159; culinary, 114; de Landa, M., 145–146, 266n31; Deleuzian, 145; hospitality, 146–150; multiplicity, 145–146; nostalgia, 191; Yucatecan peoplehood, 149, 151

authenticity: cod Biscayne-style, 115; food, 113, 120; in culture, 140; in ethnic cuisines, 194; in Maya cuisine, 194–199; in Mexican cuisine, 62; in national cuisines, 106; in regional (Yucatecan) cuisine, 15, 28, 64, 112, 115–116, 123, 181, 190, 216; in restaurants, 201–203, 206, 208, 210; local, 89 baked piglet (lechón al horno), 64, 86, 96, 98; breakfast, 132; nutrition, 267n34 Balada de la Mérida Antigua (Ballad of Ancient Mérida), 256n5, 257n11. See also Bestard Vázquez, J. barbecue, 108, 261n42 beer: almuerzo, 103, 131–132; botanas, 92, 93, 101–102, 142, 254n34, 275n31; chelada and michelada, 212, 273n17; cooking, 140; in supermarkets, 87, 88; preference, 110; Yucatecan and imported, 45, 260n34 Bestard Vázquez, Joaquín, 256n5, 257n11 Bhabha, Homi: ambivalence, 25; colonial mimicry, 3; dissemiNation, 7, 57; hybridity, 3, 13, 25, 35, 140; nationalism, 118; pedagogical and performative dimensions, 72, 254n3; stereotypes, 23–24; vernacular cosmopolitanism, 58, 173, 248n10 botana, 84, 102, 223–224, 254n34, 274n23, 275n31; Lebanese, 104, 142; Maya, 190; Mexican, 93. See also beer bullfights, 265n22; and chocolomo, 135–136, 265n23 butter: in stores, 87, 264n16; in the culinary field, 124, 156, 267n3; in Yucatecan cookbooks, 166, 171

– 306 –

I n d ex

Campeche, 4, 5, 36, 39, 48, 52, 62, 103, 250n25, 277n45 Cancún, 37, 39, 68, 105, 210, 233 canned food, 76, 83, 87–89, 130, 139, 175, 177–179, 195, 255n36, 267n3 cantinas. See restaurant-bars Caribbean: boundaries, 50–53, 252n20; cuisines, 9, 10, 17; independence movements, 3; trade, 4, 16, 26, 38, 40, 49, 52; Yucatecan culture, 50, 143 210–211, 239; Yucatecan food, 26, 53, 62, 119, 166–167 Carrillo Lara, Silvia, 53, 172, 184, 185 Carrillo Puerto, Felipe, 42, 50 Chasteen, John C., 4–5 cheese: Edam, 10, 156, 276n43; fresh, 124, 156; in Mexican cuisine, 55, 63–64, 99, 106; in supermarkets, 87, 88; in Yucatecan cuisine, 67, 70, 137, 156, 171, 231 chicharra, 131, 148, 257n11 Chilango: adjective, 246n2; cooks, 231; food, 261n42; restaurants, 2 chiles en nogada, 29, 47, 140 Chinese: food, 115, 133, 143, 260n38; immigrants, 40, 58, 74, 105, 183; restaurants, 85–86, 93, 94, 104–105 chocolomo, 135–136, 148, 155, 193, 226, 265n23 civic associations, 99, 178, 179, 180 cochinita pibil, 1–2, 10, 22, 63, 64, 98, 123, 125, 200, 259n28, 264n12, 276n42; and moral panic, 22–23; as iconic dish, 228; breakfast, 96, 132; in movies, 203; specialists, 148 cocina económica (economic kitchen), 17, 69, 100–101, 108, 127, 129, 133, 249n14, 260n31 cocinero mexicano, El (The Mexican Cook), 123, 169 cod Biscayne-style, 18–21, 135, 138, 249n19 colonialism: cultural, 12–14, 191, 244, 265n24, 268n10; internal, 34, 35, 36, 43, 57, 191, 242, 254n31; Mexican, 37, 43; neo-colonialism, 65, 146, 191, 243 colonial mimicry, 3, 25, 35 Constitution of Cadiz, 4, 38 cookbooks, 159, 161–162, 262n1, 268n12; culinary field, 167; gastronomic field, 157, 181–184, 236, 243; identity, 165;

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307

Maya cooking, 192–199; Mexican, 160; minor texts, 15, 32, 159; nation, 163, 165–166; national cuisines, 8, 157; naturalization, 53, 158; normative texts, 200; recados, 121–124, 263nn7–8; territorialization, 16, 21, 187, 201; textual sites, 158, 164, 165; Yucatecan, 10, 15, 168–180, 206 cooks: domestic, 10, 16, 17, 18, 95–96, 114, 117, 126, 151, 242; indigenous, 9; Mexican, 253n28; professional, 2, 98, 117, 124, 158, 194, 240–241, 262n1; Yucatecan, 11, 53, 76, 166, 168 cosmopolitan: and local, 113, 167, 234; cookbooks, 15, 157, 170–171, 179, 262n1; elites, 143; food, 10, 17, 89; global-cosmopolitan, 58; inclinations, 7, 111, 199; performance of, 133–134; vernacular cosmopolitanism, 58, 173, 180; Yucatecan, 14, 82, 114 Creole: cuisine, 166, 234; elite, 9; independence, 3, 38 Cuba: commerce with, 26, 40, 52; cookbooks, 163; immigrants, 83; plantations, 40; recipes, 172, 175, 179; restaurants (in Yucatán), 108–109; Yucatán-Cuba relations, 40 culinary: aesthetic, 16, 116, 117; code, 34, 43, 117, 154, 164, 186–188, 200; hybrid, 53, 112, 119, 151, 168, 245; practices, 2, 9, 18, 32, 112, 114, 116, 117, 123, 147, 241, 245 culinary field, definition of, 17, 114, 117, 242 cultural colonialism. See colonialism Day of the Dead, 29, 135–137, 250n1, 265n24 de Landa, Diego, 48 de Landa, Manuel, 145–146, 164, 246n3; assemblage, 145–146, 266n31 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari: assemblages, 145; deterritorialization, 164, 246n3; minor literatures, 159–160; reterritorialization, 246n3; territorialization, 164, 246n3 delis, 86–89 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 12, 72, 240 deterritorialization: Mexican cuisine, 32, 245, 246n3; Yucatecan gastronomy, 112, 149, 150, 188, 234

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Index

dissemination, 7, 46, 119, 121, 221, 240; dissemiNation (see Bhabha, H.); dis/semi/nation, 7, 57, 118, 206, 236, 240, 243; dis-semination, 7, 47, 57, 242; dis-semi-nation, 7, 50, 58; Dolphijn, Rick, 15, 77 economic kitchen. See cocina económica eggs motuleños (huevos motuleños), 64, 221– 222, 248n12, 253–254n29 elites, 247n9, 258n21; central Mexican, 5, 36, 39, 44, 57, 60; Creole, 9, 192; Yucatecan, 4, 7, 10, 11, 39–42, 49, 57, 63, 74, 83, 151, 234, 244, 257n12 Enciclopedia Yucatanense, 49, 257n10, 272n11 erasure, 66 escabeche de pavo, 126, 156, 264n18, 275n30 ethnic cuisine, 8–9, 32, 77, 80, 94, 192, 194, 203, 234, 241, 243 ethnographic engagement, 28 fantasy, 256n2 fast food, 13, 67, 77–78, 86, 91, 109; Chinese, 143; Italian (see Italian restaurants); Mexican, 55; Yucatecan, 232, 256n4 Ferguson, Priscilla P., 8, 61, 249n15, 262n1 Fernández-Repetto, Francisco, 92, 272n6 Fischler, Claude, 35 fish and seafood, 92, 98, 103–104, 128, 129–130, 225, 233; recipes, 160, 171, 175, 176, 182, 184, 250n25 flags: Mexican, 37, 43, 251n3; Yucatecan, 37, 38, 67, 254n35 Florescano, Enrique, 44, 251n8, 255n39 fondas (diners), 84, 103 food fair, 78 foodscape: definition, 13–14, 15, 76; ethnic, 203; global, 77, 112, 117, 134, 203; history, 84; regional, 12, 76, 79; urban (Mérida), 14, 15, 76, 80, 86, 93, 110, 112, 113, 163; Yucatecan, 15, 92, 241–243 Forjando patria (Forging the Fatherland), 45 fraccionamiento, 85, 127, 216, 257n12; homes, 260n32 fractal recursivity, 54, 66 French: chefs, 91, 205, 271–172n5; cuisine, 8, 91, 163, 166, 185; gastronomy, 13, 61, 205–206, 234–235, 261–262n1; in

Yucatán, 81, 84, 85, 204, 256–257n8; restaurants, 80 frijoles charros (cowboy beans), 55, 140 Gal, Susan. See Irvine, J. Gamio, Manuel (on Yucatecan mestizaje), 45 García Cubas, Antonio, 49, 82 gastro-anomie, 35 gastro-nomadic itineraries, 80 gastronomic: canon, 11, 15, 155, 171, 228; tourism, 192, 207–209 gastronomic field, definition of, 18, 189; bifurcation of the culinary, 21, 117, 153, 189, 201, 235 gastro-politics, 34 grandes problemas nacionales, Los (Great National Problems), 45 Guattari, Félix. See Deleuze, G. guest, 146, 250n22; hostile, 22, 146–147 Habermas, Jürgen (on post-national constellation), 13 haciendas, 42, 93, 183, 217–218, 232, 259n24 Hansen, Asael, 83, 257n9 Hernández Fajardo de Rodríguez, Concepción, Cocina yucateca: Cocina y repostería práctica (Practical Cuisine), 174, 269n18; recados, 121, 263n7 homogenization: cultural, 13; Mexico, 11; national cuisines, 8, 117, 157, 160, 236, 144, 247n7; nationalist, 34, 45–47, 72–73, 251–252n10; Yucatecan identity, 189, 239 homogenizing-hegemonic, 3, 34, 117, 153, 159, 188, 239, 240 hospitality, 134, 146–147, 170; ambivalence, 3, 12, 250n22; food, 147; virtue, 12, 188; Yucatecan, 69, 71, 147–150, 151 host, 250n22; hostile, 146 Howes, David, 120 hybrid: culture, 35, 118, 140, 164; identity, 25; Yucatecan cuisine, 53, 112, 194 hybridity, 3; cultural, 13, 35, 122, 140, 199; Yucatecan culinary, 245 hybridization, 17, 151 hyperaesthesia, 120 hypermarket, 66, 88–89

I n d ex

iconization, 66 identity, 5, 23, 193; cultural, 25; essential, 25; food, 33, 56; Maya, 74, 193–194, 199, 247n8; Mexican, 23, 46, 57; national, 44, 54, 59, 118, 181; peoplehood, 60; politics, 12, 28, 34, 146; regional, 7, 11, 35, 39, 158, 159–160, 181; Yucatecan, 13, 23, 26, 36–37, 49–50, 57–58, 62, 122, 193, 239–140, 254n35; Yucatecan food, 12, 57, 121, 188, 238, 243, 144–145. See also hybrid identity imaginary, 18, 149, 158, 199, 253n28, 256n2 imagination, 35, 147, 150, 207, 238, 256n2 immigration (into Yucatán), 40, 68–69, 74, 81, 83, 104–105, 141, 143, 145, 162, 189 indigenous: cooking, 9, 36; diet, 43, 166; in Mexican food, 10, 36, 62, 63, 166, 253n28; in nationalism, 44–45, 160, 194; in Yucatán, 122, 190, 191, 239, 263n10, 263–264n11; in Yucatecan food, 10, 36, 111, 171, 183, 188, 195– 198, 263n3 International Harvester, 40, 244 Irigoyen Rosado, Renán, 169, 184, 185 Irvine, Judith, and Susan Gal, 54, 65, 66 Italian: food, 56, 105, 253n25; immigrants, 40, 74, 105, 106, 110, 253n25; national cuisine, 8; pizza restaurants, 78, 85, 86, 104, 105–106; restaurants, 85, 93, 104, 110 jarana, 50, 148, 188, 266–267n32 kibbeh, 84, 142, 266n28. See also Lebanese food kitchen, 127, 149, 161, 178, 260n32 kitchenware, 89, 127, 178, 197 Labyrinth of Solitude, The (El laberinto de la soledad), 45–46 lard, 124, 125, 128, 131, 171, 264n16, 267n3 Lebanese: food, 55, 89, 104, 141, 142, 179, 193, 254n34, 257n10; immigrants, 40, 74, 81, 83, 255n40; restaurants, 85, 86, 100, 212; Yucatecan cuisine, 83, 142– 143, 183, 190, 224, 226, 254n34 lechón al horno. See baked piglet light food, 96, 109, 215, 223

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309

linguistic ideologies, 65 lomitos de Valladolid, 115–116, 220, 228, 229–230, 274n25 Lomnitz, Claudio, 6, 46; naco, 46; regionalism, 6 lonchería (diner), 108 Long-Solís, Janet, and Luis Vargas, 6, 36, 125, 194 Madonna (virgin saint), 46–47, 148 markets (local), 81, 83, 86, 92, 98, 121, 126, 129–130, 212, 258n16, 274n27 Maya. See indigenous Mennell, Stephen, 8, 205, 261–262n1 Mérida population, 26, 68, 145 mestizaje, 44–45; gastronomic, 183 Mestizo, 45, 74, 122, 247n8, 251–252n10, 263–264n11; cooking, 199, 234 Mexican: cookbooks, 62, 123, 160, 267n1; cultural colonization, 13, 18, 25, 34, 117, 153, 157, 240; food, 20, 29, 43, 54, 62–63, 64, 99, 108, 109, 117, 126, 140, 207, 255n37; immigrants, 22, 67–69, 151, 236; indigenous food, 36, 43–44, 62, 195; national cuisine, 9–10, 62, 117, 160, 164, 181; restaurants (in Yucatán), 15, 20, 54, 63, 78, 85, 99, 106; Yucatecans and, 53, 139, 140, 175, 190, 250n24 mexicanidad, 46 México a través de los siglos (Mexico Throughout the Centuries), 44, 251n8 minor, 160; code, 199, 200; genre, 15, 159, 181; literature, 153; peoplehood, 60; text, 32, 189 Miranda Ojeda, Pedro. See Negroe Sierra, G. mole, 62, 126, 139, 152, 185 Molina Enríquez, Andrés, 45 moral panic and cochinita pibil, 22–23 mucbil pollo, 29, 81, 135, 136–137; with cheese, 137 multiculturalism, 22, 30, 35, 43, 188, 190, 238, 245 Mundo Maya (Maya World), 62, 192–193, 194, 210 national cuisine. See Mexican nationalism. See elites; homogenization nation-state, 2; heterogeneity, 9; homogeneity, 5, 36, 54, 57, 60, 237 naturalization, 2; of food, 120, 123; of taste, 16, 28, 32, 117, 124, 147, 158

3 10

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Index

Navarrete Arce, Manuela, 168, 170–171, 173, 269n14 Negroe Sierra, Genny, 92, 256n7 New Spain independence, 4, 5, 11, 38 Norman, M. B., 81 normative Yucatecan gastronomy, 2, 112, 120, 157, 243, 261–262n1 nostalgia, 188–191, 198, 219 nouvelle cuisine, 15 Ober, Frederick K., 81–82 offal, 96, 112, 131, 136, 148, 225, 248n13 olive oil, 21, 87, 124, 130, 138, 166, 171, 249n18, 265–266n25, 267n3 pan de cazón, 103, 148, 184, 186, 225, 269–270n19 panuchos, 67, 84, 86, 92, 98, 108, 111, 120, 133, 175, 184, 186, 204, 206, 211, 220, 223, 231, 248n12, 274–275n28, 276n40 papadzules, 10, 84, 186, 229, 231–232 Paseo Montejo, 1, 40, 86, 257n12 Patkanov, S. K. (in Richards), 81 patria (fatherland), 47 Paz, Octavio, 45–46 pedagogic, 13, 248n10; discourses, 48, 72; hospitality, 147; nationalism, 47, 72, 118, 247n9, 254n35; regionalism (Yucatecan), 50, 247n9; representations, 18; strategies, 49 peoplehood, 56, 58–59, 61, 253n27; minority, 60, 61; modern, 60; Yucatecan, 7, 48–50, 57–58, 72, 74–75, 243 performative, 72, 248n10; hospitality, 147; nationalism, 13; practices, 23; regionalism, 50 Petrini, Carlo, 35 pibil, 125, 137 Pilcher, Jeffery C., 9, 96, 140, 166, 181, 253n28 poc-chuc, 92, 155, 214, 219 pollo en china, 139 pork and beans (frijol con puerco), 17, 115, 123, 124, 128–129, 148, 226, 260n31, 267n33 Port of Progreso restaurants, 92, 104, 130 post-colonial: condition, 12–13, 190–191, 244; critique, 143, 237, 254n31; discourse, 74; fragmentation, 146; hospitality, 250n22; order, 22, 25, 36, 43; transformation, 3, 243

post-national: condition, 143; order, 13, 22, 32, 189; transformation, 3, 243 pozole, 47, 54–55, 141 pre-Columbian food, 43, 195, 196, 234 Príncipe Tutul Xiu (restaurant), 78, 92, 256n4 puchero, 17, 131; three-meat, 131; vaquero, 130 queso relleno, 10, 53, 117, 172, 219–220, 225, 226, 252n21, 264n14, 276n36 recado, 119, 121; cookbooks, 263, 270n25; culinary field, 121, 124, 147, 151, 242; ingredients, 121, 124–125, 264–265n18; packaged, 126; preparation, 121; types, 121 Redfield, Robert, 83, 144 regional identity, 7, 11, 18, 58; food, 34, 35, 189, 236, 243 regionalism, 3–4, 6, 247n4; “localist ideologies,” 6; nationalism and, 44–45, 239; parochial, 11, 43, 166, 253n26; peoplehood, 57; pre-modern, 6; Yucatecan, 36, 254–255n35 Rendón de García, Hortensia, 168, 171–172, 173 repetition (culinary), 18, 32, 116, 127, 128, 132, 135, 147, 152, 182, 200; gastronomic field, 228; menus, 219–221, 235 Republic of Yucatán, 36, 37, 38–39, 67 restaurants: and naturalization of taste, 16; chains, 22, 63, 78; diversity, 93–94; gastronomic field, 182–183, 216, 222, 228–229, 234–236; invention, 80, 204; membership, 259n29; Mexican, 15, 54–55, 63, 85, 106; restaurant-bars, 69, 84, 92, 101–103, 223, 275n31; Yucatecan (regional), 14, 92, 112 reterritorialization, 77, 80, 246n3, 266n31; of Yucatecan cuisine, 150, 146, 221 Rivero Molina, Josefina, 153–157, 267–268n6 Rodríguez O., Jaime E., 3–4 Rosello, Mireille, 146, 250n22 sandwichón, 177–178, 249n17, 255n36 seafood. See fish and seafood secret: ingredient, 30, 115, 127, 201, 222, 230; kitchen, 16; recipe, 20; technique, 30; trade, 30 shawarma, 55, 78, 85, 108. See also tacos al pastor

I n d ex

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shopping mall, 27, 163, 256n4, 258n18 Slow Food, 35, 250–251n2 smuggling, 52 social action leagues, 180 sopes, 55, 253n24, 254n32 Stephens, John L., 81 street food vendors, 95–96 stuffed cheese. See queso relleno supermarkets, 14, 86–88, 249n16, 258n18 Syrian. See Lebanese

Vargas Cetina, Gabriela, 12, 52, 69, 110, 148, 267n33 Vargas, Luis. See Long-Solís, J. Vasconcelos, José, 122, 251–252n10 Velázquez de León, Josefina, 141, 173, 181–183 vernacular cosmopolitanism. See cosmopolitan Viera Hernández, Virginia, 130, 260n36 Virgin of Guadalupe, 46–47, 73, 255n39

tacos al pastor, 55, 85 tequila, 107, 110, 261n45 territorialization, 146, 164, 266n31; hospitality, 147; Yucatecan cuisine, 116, 123, 147, 201, 221, 246n3; Yucatecan peoplehood, 149 Texas, 5, 42 Ticul, 26, 92, 214, 235, 256n4 tortas, 64, 78, 254n30, 259n27 transconsistency, 77 translocal: articulations, 17; conditions, 35; foodscapes, 76, 114; relations, 145 trova music, 50, 110, 210, 212 Trubek, Amy, 8, 205

wedding food, 112, 147–148 Williams, Mary Wihelmine, 5, 39 wiro, 122, 252n13

Valladolid, 5, 26, 46, 48, 92, 99, 126, 171, 193, 219, 274n25; restaurant food, 229–230, 275n30 Van Young, Eric, 6 vaquería, 148, 267n33

311

Yucatecan: culture, 7, 17, 32, 35, 58, 73–73, 122, 150, 163, 228, 239, 252n16; independence, 5, 38, 47, 73, 238; nationalism, 7, 58, 239; peoplehood (see peoplehood); regionalism, 57, 239, 274n23; separatism, 39, 42, 49, 250n25; sociality, 147 Yucatecan cuisine, 10, 16, 18, 34, 119, 159, 163, 185, 206, 240; as not Mexican, 246n1, 246n3; Caribbean influences (see Caribbean); European influences, 26, 53; Middle East influences, 16, 53, 89, 151, 188, 257n10. See also cosmopolitan Zayas Enríquez, Rafael de, 49, 82