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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 papadzules; 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 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, as well, an explosion in the global-local markets of foods and cuisines that permits a subjective, individual development of taste and distaste for foods, while being unaware of the cultural, but naturalized, understandings of what is edible or inedible, palatable or unpalatable (Long 2004a). Fischler ([1990] 1995) refers to this (post)modern condition as gastro-anomie.
At the same time, in post-colonial, post-national multicultural societies, food has been made into an important marker of group identities. Hence, communities, in seeking to affirm their moral and cultural values, turn food into an iconic representation of their common identity. For example, in contemporary global society, vegetarianism carries moral and symbolic connotations that sustain the imagination of a specific community lifestyle. Challenging the fast tempo of postmodern societies, the transnational Slow Food organization, founded 1989 in northern Italy by Carlo Petrini, seeks to reform society's interaction with food.2 Similarly, new movements that advocate organically grown food and farmers' markets have sprung up, stressing the consumption of local foods as opposed to those produced and marketed by transnational corporations (Charles 2001; Nabhan 2001; Petrini 2003; Spencer 2000; Trubek 2008). Revealing the fractures of post-national society, regional food cultures are now being revived as part of a reclamation of regional identities within Mexico, the US, Europe, and other parts of the world. Food is thus being resignified as a site of resistance to the homogenizing cultural strategies inscribed in the imagination of ‘national communities' (Cusak 2000; Fôret 1989; Ohnuki-Tierney 1995).
In Mérida, food has been fashioned into both an instrument for the articulation of meanings affirming a regional identity and a vehicle that can be strategically driven to establish boundaries between those who belong and those who are excluded from Yucatecan culture and society. Consequently, it is important to look at the tension and ambivalence inscribed in processes of identity construction and the politics of food. Yucatán and the Yucatecans stand in a difficult, ambivalent, and ambiguous relationship with Mexico and the Mexicans. This ambivalence sometimes conceals and sometimes reveals the structure of cultural colonization and domination and engenders practical and discursive forms of cultural mimicry and hybridity. The latter, as Bhabha (1994) has suggested, result from the articulation and production of new cultural forms that emerge from the post-colonial opening of interstitial spaces. While different understandings of cultural hybridity co-exist and compete (see, e.g., Pieterse 2001; Puri 2004), during the generation of translocal post-colonial conditions, hybrid culture has become a privileged site for the expression and negotiation of ambivalent practices and discourses.
Despite the record of historically shifting relationships between the colonial province of Yucatán and New Spain, the experience of three Yucatecan attempts to separate from Mexico during the nineteenth century, and the strong regionalism maintained throughout the twentieth century, Mexicans often dismiss Yucatecans' regionalist identity and regularly refer to the state, anachronistically, either as Mexico's ‘province' or its ‘sister republic of Yucatán'. During the formation of the modern Mexican nation-state, Yucatán and Yucatecans have been subject to policies of internal colonialism that seek to veil regional differences. The subordination of the regional to the national is also manifested in the limited inclusion of regional dishes in the national cookbook. This inclination is illustrated by Long-Solís and Vargas (2005), whose treatment of the food cultures of Mexico reduce all regional culinary practices to variations of a national (indigenous) cuisine. As they express it, “Mexico has many cuisines, some dishes so different from others that one finds it hard to believe that they all stem from the same cultural tradition” (ibid.: 97; emphasis added). They recognize the existence of six regional areas in Mexico, based on “gastronomic rather than political boundaries” (ibid.: 98). These areas are northern Mexico (extending from Baja California to Tamaulipas, including the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo León); the Pacific Coast; western Mexico; central Mexico (including Morelos, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Hidalgo, and Mexico City); the isthmus of Tehuantepec (including Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Tabasco); and the “Maya area” (which includes the three states of the peninsula of Yucatán) (ibid.: 97-121). Their description of Yucatecan food (which, in their view, includes the food of the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán, thus maintaining the colonial memory of the province of Yucatán) is rather brief—one page, compared to two pages for Mexico City alone, and somewhat less than two pages for the whole Maya region, in contrast to over eight pages dedicated to the center of Mexico. The authors highlight foods in which corn, beans, achiote, and chili peppers dominate, these being the paradigmatic ingredients of ‘indigenous' cooking (ibid.: 119-121). In this sense, their text reflects a central Mexican bias that perceives Yucatecan food in terms of indigenous Maya food. Yet, as I show throughout this volume, Yucatecan cuisine has been constructed around its cosmopolitism, with the result that the contributions of Maya cooking have been marginalized. The reductive characterization of Yucatecan cuisine to the food of the Maya is neither recent nor exclusive to these authors, as I discuss below (see also López Morales 2009). In fact, as I argue in this chapter, this characterization emerges from a long history of national cultural homogenization in which the culture and values of central Mexican elites have been turned into the representation of Mexican culture.
There is a second source of ambivalence and tension in the constitution of the contemporary post-colonial culinary order. At the same time that the invention/creation of a Yucatecan regional cuisine can be understood as a means to affirm a regional identity against the cultural colonial force of central Mexican culture, it can also be seen as an instrument for the internal cultural colonization and domination of subordinate groups within the region itself. In confirming the distinctiveness of Yucatecan gastronomy, one variant of Yucatecan identity is locally affirmed, replicating the power structure established among different food cultures. While Yucatecan cuisine may be viewed as the blend of several cultural culinary traditions, the roots of those different cuisines are obscured. In the following section, I discuss the historical and socio-cultural transformations that have contributed to the construction of these divergent cultural paths.
Yucatán and Mexico: Stories of a Difficult Relationship
When I first saw, in 1998, a gigantic Mexican flag planted in the hotel zone of Cancún, my first thought was that since tourists encountered few Mexican nationals at this resort (other than as chambermaids or hotel employees), the Mexican government saw fit to remind them that they were in Mexican territory. Soon afterwards, in May 1999, along with all Meridans, I found another monumental Mexican flag, this time erected in the parking lot of a central Mexican department store (today with an appended shopping mall), on Mérida's exit to the port of Progreso. This time, it could be read as an overt political act, since the candidates running for governor of the state had aligned with opposing sides in the Yucatecan divide. The National Action Party (entrepreneurial and right-wing Catholic) sided with the Mexican nation, holding the position that Yucatecans are first and foremost Mexicans. 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 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; 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 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).
Figure 1.1. Palace at the Paseo Montejo
Photograph courtesy of G. Vargas Cetina, 2006.
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 theErasure 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 belonging and community among peoples—one that would, as B. Anderson (1983) suggests, transcend the ‘original' community of blood and face-to-face 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 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 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-of-factly that ‘national' (del país) means from Yucatán. From this anecdote, Gamio moved to argue that Yucatán was the only Mexican state where mestizaje 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 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 upper-class 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 working-class 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 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 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 post-independence 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 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, 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 ‘dis-semi-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 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 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).
Figure 1.2. Monument to Jacinto Canek, Canek Avenue, Mérida
Photograph courtesy of G. Vargas Cetina, 2007.
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 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'.
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 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 black-dyed 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, 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 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 nation is reinvented in each new place that it is created—sometimes willingly, sometimes as a form forced upon the local and regional populations. Hence, the term stresses the violence implied in the adoption of nationalist ideologies and practices. In adapting this concept, I seek to emphasize the hardships involved in creating a strong regional sense of peoplehood (almost, but not quite, a national identity), forged by the same anvil with which national identities were created. Nineteenth-century Yucatecan nationalism has changed into a less passionate form of regional identity that counters and relativizes Mexican nationalist ideologies. In this sense, Yucatecan peoplehood is a quasi-national form that emerged during the nineteenth century's push to create nations wherever self-contained cultural formations were found.
Yucatecans have built a deep-seated sense of regional identity that grounds the certitude of an essential cultural difference vis-à-vis Mexicans. Yucatecans understand their identity as arising not from a mono-ethnic group but rather from a multicultural society in which people of Spanish and other European ancestry and those of Maya, Lebanese, Syrian, Korean, and Chinese origins have built a unique and common ethos, culture, and community. There are parallels between the regional understanding of Yucatecan identity and standard understandings of nationalism; however, since the end of the nineteenth century, Yucatecan peoplehood has not been translated into political movements seeking secession or special status within the Mexican state, in contrast, for example, to Quebec and Catalonia (see Handler 1988; Llobera 2004). Here dis-semi-nation helps to explain the transformations of a universalized category (the nation), mediated by local understandings, appropriations, and adaptations of the concept of the nation. This is similar to what Bhabha (1996: 202) has called “vernacular cosmopolitanism”: “'[V]ernacular' shares an etymological root with the ‘domestic' but adds to it…the process and indeed the performance of translation, the desire to make a dialect; to vernacularize is to ‘dialectize' as a process; it is not simply to be in a dialogical relation with the native or the domestic, but it is to be in the border, in between, introducing the global-cosmopolitan ‘action at a distance' into the very grounds—now displaced—of the domestic.” It is this process that has historically shaped Yucatecan consciousness of a peculiar moral disposition that is part of the Yucatecan people's nature and can be recognized as Yucatecan culture that produces specific Yucatecan values and the certainty, as well, that this cultural heritage needs to be defended against the encroachment of (central) Mexican cultural, social, political, and economic structures.26
Within modern nation-states, we come across forms of affiliation that do not necessarily rest on claims of a long-established unity rooted in a common ethnicity or an ancestral territory, nor are they based on only one religion. Rather, they are constituted within a public sphere that articulates contemporary notions of citizenship and a mode of peoplehood that invokes common icons or symbols. These communities are imagined on the grounds of shared historical experiences, religious instruction, educational programs, exposure to different media, and active policies deployed by a state that aims to produce, through its institutions, a controllable population (B. Anderson 1983; Habermas [1962] 1989). With its shifting national boundary, several coexisting Christian religions (the number of Muslims is slowly growing), and more than 30 indigenous languages challenging Castilian Spanish's hegemony, the Mexican nation can hardly claim a strong primordial connection binding ethnicity, the nation, and the state.
The social sciences and the humanities provide multiple entry points into the questions of the nation and nationalism. In an early introduction to the sociological problem of ‘nationalism', A. Smith (1983) identified three different approaches seeking to overcome its theoretical neglect: the developmental approach (in two varieties, modernization and uneven development), the communitarian approach, and the conflict approach, represented, respectively, by scholars who were influenced by Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. According to Smith, the previous neglect could be understood due to the development and hegemony of strong modern nation-states during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the fragmentation of nation-states that ensued following the implosion of the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century led to the growing preoccupation with the question as to whether nationalist movements were resurging or obsolete (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; A. Smith 1996a).
As scholars recognized that nationalism was not a vanishing ideological form, they were forced to produce different theories to explain its contemporary endurance. A. Smith (1999) grouped the new lines of study on the basis of the foundation each had in differing explanations of nationalism. The models he identified were based on (1) primordial alliances, (2) perennial self-understandings, (3) a close tie to the modern condition (including the modernity of the form of the nation-state), and (4) ethno-symbolic constructions and sentiments. The first two models explain national identity as foundational cultural essences and racialized differences; the third views nationalism as a product of the modern relationship among nation, state, territory, and sovereignty; and the fourth grounds the new force of nationalism in ethnicity. A common premise of the primordial, perennial, and ethno-symbolic approaches is that there exists a line of continuity (sometimes despite fractures and recurrences) between enduring, historically based ethnic identities and the contemporary nationalist claims that different groups advance (Llobera 2004; A. Smith 1996b, 1999). In some cases (see, e.g., A. Smith 1999), the emergence of the modern state is understood as an effect of nationalist movements. However, some studies suggest that the transformation of old, pre-modern forms of political, religious, commercial, and bureaucratic organization into modern states makes use of nationalist feelings to legitimate the enforcement of boundaries, the imposition of taxes, trade protectionism, and the expansion of political and military control over other territories (Armstrong 1982; Hobsbawm 1990; Llobera 1994; Wallerstein 1987). As Hobsbawm (1990: 10) put it: “[N]ationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.”
It was during the invention of the modern state that cultural, political, and commercial elites engaged in the process of inventing the nation by promoting a common language and religion and by adopting forms of territorial administration that sought to erase, or at least silence, difference (Pease 1992). The modern nation-state emerged from a process of domination, assimilation, and subordination of its internal others. These practices were instituted in today's France, Italy, Spain, and Belgium before the model of the modern nation-state was exported to the world (Badie 2000; Duggan 1994; Llobera 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 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 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 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 burritos stuffed with cochinita pibil and covered with melted cheese, and eggs motuleños. Since the latter was the only dish with a description that read closer to Yucatecan cooking, I decided to try it. In contrast to the standard form of serving this meal in Yucatán (a layer of two slightly fried tortillas with a spread of refried black beans, two fried eggs garnished with a roasted tomato and garlic sauce, green peas, shredded ham, crumbs of fresh cheese, and fried plantain), I was given two fried tortillas side by side, with a spread of refried red beans, one fried egg on top of each tortilla, garnished with a refried tomato and chili pepper sauce, shredded ham, and a mixture of fresh and processed cheeses.29 Central Mexicans are more familiar now with black beans, but they found them, until recently, second to red beans, while Yucatecans prefer the flavor of black beans. This and other changes introduced over the last few decades in different regional dishes constitute everyday examples of the ways in which many Yucatecans perceive that the Mexican taste for food is threatening the integrity and authenticity of regional cuisine. In the local understanding, there are a number of ingredients that characterize traditional Yucatecan cuisine and others that are seen as foreign and uncharacteristic of local food. To use the latter for the preparation of Yucatecan dishes in public, that is, in restaurants, is experienced as an offense to Yucatecan sensibilities.
However, it has been only since the mid-1980s, with the influx of large numbers of central Mexicans into Yucatán, that Yucatecans have considered foreign food preferences to be a menace to local culture. In addition, the growing presence of tourists explains transformations that have led to the local perception of gastronomic decadence in the region. For instance, on one of my visits to a food stand where every so often I have a breakfast of tortas de lechón al horno (sandwiches of baguette-style bread stuffed with baked piglet), I found that there were no tables available. I asked a man sitting alone if I could join him, and he consented. After a brief exchange of courtesy phrases, we turned our conversation to the food we were consuming. He told me that he comes to this food stand every week to eat three sandwiches (tortas)30 of cochinita pibil since, he pointed out, it is cooks in these types of stands who prepare and have preserved Yucatecan food “the way it should be.” To him, cochinita pibil and lechón al horno are examples of good regional food, as opposed to the food that restaurants sell to tourists and Yucatecans alike in downtown Mérida. He added that, in his opinion, the meals in those restaurants are bastardized versions of regional cuisine that are not worth paying for.
The trends now evident in restaurants in the city feed Yucatecans' fear that the marketing of regional traditions to tourists is leading to radical changes in local culinary forms. For example, in one of my multiple visits with friends to a restaurant (located in a large hotel belonging to a transnational chain) that specializes in regional food, I found 31 dishes listed on the menu. Among them were three vegetable salads and one vegetable soup, all prepared with cheese. On that occasion, my dining companions objected to the inclusion of salads, voicing the opinion that, even if tourists like them, “[salads] are not really a part of our diet. Thus, they should not be on the menu of a Yucatecan restaurant.” Although salads and soups are rare in Yucatecan eating traditions, they are not totally absent in the culinary field. I understood that the restaurateur was attempting both to keep the ingredients within the regional logic and attempting to respond to demands from customers that regional restaurants normally fail to address, that is, lighter foods and vegetarian meals, both of which are difficult to find in Yucatán, where meats are the main staple.
These examples are meant to illustrate the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which alien consumers impose (or are perceived as imposing) the taste preferences, food values, gastronomic criteria, and culture of central Mexico over local forms. Although not universally agreed upon, there is some general consensus in anthropology that modern forms of the nation-state, as socio-political and cultural organizational blueprints, originated in the North Atlantic, where they became universalized and were then exported worldwide (B. Anderson 1983; Badie 2000; Geertz 2000b; Hobsbawm 1990). The modernity of this form was supplemented by the progressive global dissemination of the creed of modernization, especially in its acultural form (Gaonkar 1999; Taylor 1999).31
Modernity and the nation-state have proved to be pervasive forms of political self-fashioning and action. To affirm their peoplehood and legitimize their own identity claims, some minority groups borrow strategies from the nation-state. In this sense, I concur with Judith Irvine and Susan Gal's (2000) analysis of the ways in which language ideologies serve to construct meaningful identities and differences. Irvine and Gal identify ‘linguistic ideologies' as conceptual schemes that are “suffused with the political and moral issues pervading the particular sociolinguistic field and…subject to the interests of their bearers' social position” (ibid.: 35). To them, linguistic ideologies are important in at least three different processes: the construction and validation of forms of difference and language change among groups; the academic objectification of language; and the legitimation of social actions (and their political implications), based on the perception of difference (ibid.: 36). I see these three different processes interacting during the establishment of new forms of colonialism, including that of forging national identities. During the construction of the modern Mexican nation-state, there has been a process whereby Mexico was represented as being different from other nation-states—primarily, Spain, the former dominant colonial power, and, secondly, the United States, the imperial power that Mexicans have had to confront from the nineteenth century onward. But also Mexico was to be defined as a more or less homogeneous nation rooted in a single indigenous culture. Those who wrote and helped to institute this centralized, hegemonic discourse also produced disciplinary knowledge that was used to construct difference and to legitimize practices that enforced the subordination of regional cultures.
Irvine and Gal (2000) propose three different concepts that I find useful in examining the processes whereby national and regional cuisines are invented. They refer to ‘iconization' as “the sign relationship between linguistic features (or varieties) and the social images with which they are linked” (ibid.: 37). This practice is closely tied to strategic forms of cultural essentializing. Irvine and Gal identify ‘fractal recursivity' as “the projection of an opposition, salient at some level of relationship, onto some other level” (ibid.: 38). This practice allows the creation of categories and subcategories within a social group that are based on structural oppositions such as the ones used in Mexican discourse—that is, uncivilized/modern, primitive/traditional, urban/rural, cosmopolitan/parochial, Mestizo/indigenous. Finally, these authors name ‘erasure' 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. 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 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 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 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 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.
