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Introduction

Food and the Post-colonial Politics of Identity

Cut off from Mexico by sea, great distance, and harsh terrain, the peninsula has been a virtual ‘island' during most of its history. This isolation has given the people a sense of cultural and psychological separatism. They consider their land to be un otro mundo—a world apart.

—E. H. Moseley and E. D. Terry, Yucatan: A World Apart

During the late 1990s, after spending eight years away, my wife and I often stayed at an apartment near Mérida's bullfighting ring (plaza de toros) and spent our vacations visiting friends and relatives in a couple of cities in the peninsula of Yucatán. After an initial charting of places to have breakfast, one morning we decided to visit the local franchise of a restaurant specializing in ‘Mexican food'. This restaurant is located in the Paseo Montejo, one of the elegant and expensive areas of the city. Intrigued by the listing in the menu of only one Yucatecan dish, my wife, Gabriela Vargas Cetina, ordered tacos stuffed with cochinita pibil (pork marinated in Seville oranges, annatto paste, and spices, wrapped in banana leaves and baked).¹ We were surprised when she was handed a plate with three tacos accompanied by refried black beans, sprinkled with shredded fresh cheese. We felt that the ingredients combined on the plate ran against the local logic of Yucatecan preparation and the aesthetics of the dish. From experience, we know that when Meridanos and Yucatecans consume this dish in food stands and markets across the city and in any town in the state, they expect to be served finely minced pickled red onions and a choice of ground red chili pepper or, in some instances, minced habanero chili pepper to garnish their tacos, but no beans and no cheese. We did not know what to think about this situation. Was it a change that had taken place in the consumption of the dish during our eight-year absence from Yucatán? When we told friends and relatives of our experience, they questioned our common sense: “Why would you would even think of ordering cochinita pibil in such a restaurant? You had it coming!” We pursued our exploration of local views and found some contrasting opinions about the presence of beans. Some people were absolutely reluctant to consider it a suitable accompaniment to cochinita, while others accepted that in some cases (e.g., as an adjustment to personal taste) they could be eaten together. But cheese? Definitely not. No Yucatecan friend or relative found the presence of any type of cheese acceptable in cochinita. To everyone, this was a travesty of Yucatecan cooking that is characteristic of Chilango restaurants.²

With this introductory anecdote, I wish to underline some of the themes that I will develop throughout this book. The first is that there is a prevailing and complex opposition between a territorializing, national Mexican cuisine and a deterritorializing, regional Yucatecan cuisine.³ Second, the Yucatecan gastronomic field springs from the regional culinary field as a cultural construction that is both a response to and an effect of the cultural stereotyping performed by the perceived Mexican drive to colonize regional culture. Third, through textual and culinary practices, Yucatecans establish and routinize a set of differences that characterize and define distinctive regional culinary and gastronomic fields, yet at the same time these fields reciprocally influence each other. Professional cooks borrow recipes from the culinary field and make them iconic of regional gastronomic culture. However, once instituted, these sanctioned recipes, presentation of dishes, and appropriate culinary techniques and technologies become normative of the practices that define the regional culinary field. Fourth, while the culinary field is, to a large extent, more open and inclusive than the gastronomic field, both are restrictive as to the techniques, ingredients, recipes, aesthetic forms of presentation, and eating etiquette that are considered to be properly Yucatecan. Hence, along with the institution of the gastronomic field, there is a process of ‘naturalization' whereby embodied historical and cultural practices are politically turned into the ‘essence' of Yucatecan identity and Yucatecan food.

After decades of analyzing the social and cultural dimensions of food, contemporary studies have begun to explore the political nature of this taken-for-granted aspect of everyday life (Döring, Heide, and Mühleisen 2003; Douglas [1975] 1997, 1984; Falk 1994; Fischler [1990] 1995; Murcott 1983). More recently, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have directed their attention to the relationship between national identities and culinary cultures in different parts of the globe (Appadurai 1988; Belasco and Scranton 2002; Camporesi 1970; Capatti and Montanari 1999; Cwiertka 2006; Ferguson 2004; Mennell 1985; Pilcher 1998; Wilk 2006). Although it is widely accepted that the emergence of a national cuisine is neither a necessary condition for nor a necessary consequence of the emergence of modern nation-states, most research has focused on examining the intricacies of this relationship. In this book, I look at the importance of food from a largely neglected angle: the emergence of regional cuisines as a strategy to defend heterogeneity against the homogenizing power of nationalist ideologies. I propose that we reckon global post-national and post-colonial transformations as the inescapable context for understanding the location of food in the contemporary construction, affirmation, and defense of regional identities, especially in circumstances in which local people perceive threats coming from the homogenizing/hegemonizing cultural power of the colonial nation-state. These regional identities are the outcome of a productive system of differences that, I will argue, are marked by discourses and grounded on practices conceptualized under the terms of hybridity and colonial mimicry (Bhabha 1994). Throughout, I pay attention to the ways in which regional gastronomy and the forms of sociality coupled with food (such as hospitality) are marked by ambivalent cultural negotiations and are embedded in the unequal structure of national-regional-local power. Describing the shifting politics of the relationship between Yucatecan and Mexican food cultures will help to illustrate this post-colonial and postnational transformation. Consequently, in order to understand the opposition between Yucatecan regional food and Mexican national food, I find it necessary to examine the historical processes whereby nations and subordinate regions were shaped in this part of the world.

Nations and Regions in Latin America

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

In declaring their autonomy from Spain, at least some of the leaders were acting strategically, swearing allegiance to the king, on the one hand, while affirming their autonomy during the French occupation of Spain, on the other. By the early nineteenth century, affirmations of autonomy had transformed into declarations of independence. In 1810, Argentina, Colombia, and New Spain began their struggles to obtain independence. Chile did so in 1818, and Peru delayed until 1821 its declaration of independence from Spain. Yucatán never requested independence. The short-lived republic of Gran Colombia at that time included Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador (portions of which are still in dispute between Ecuador and Peru), while Argentina then encompassed what are today Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. New Spain included much of today's Mexico, plus the present-day US states of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Yucatán, in turn, included the entire peninsula plus, at different times, parts of today's Guatemala and Belize, as well as portions of today's states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Eventually, following internecine wars, those territories succeeded in separating from the emerging countries to which they were administratively subordinated, and in each case the governing elites devised different strategies to construct distinctive nations (Acree and González Espitia 2009; Castro-Klarén and Chasteen 2003; Radcliffe and Westwood 1996; Rodríguez O. 1996). In contrast to these new emerging nations, regional Yucatecan elites were comfortable with the Constitution of Cadiz (1812) and the fiscal privileges that they gained from it, as it encompassed the main trade ports (Campeche and Sisal) located between Havana in the Caribbean Sea and the port of Veracruz, where most goods were imported into New Spain (Reid 1979).

During the construction of new independent nations, regionally dominant groups—and the intelligentsia that supported them—disregarded the fact that the territories they claimed as nation-states encompassed multiple ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious groups that provided other regional groups with the certitude that they possessed meaningful cultural differences that distinguished them from the dominant groups located in the new seats of power (Gómez-Moriana and Durán-Cogan 2001). As several authors have argued (following, and sometimes diverging from, Benedict Anderson's concept of ‘imagined communities’), in each new nation, the print media and the discussions that they encouraged in the public sphere contributed to the creation of a consciousness of belonging to distinct nations. They also disseminated the conviction that each nation was made up of only one distinct culture. As Chasteen (2003: xvii) suggests, the different Latin American nations invested lots of energy in creating nativist images in fiction, history, music, dance, and poetry and also originated ‘typical dishes' in support of their distinctiveness. In many cases, such as those mentioned above, different regions managed to separate themselves from the encompassing administrative units into which Spain had placed them. In contrast to this experience, despite initial hints of support from the Republic of Texas and the US Congress, in the end the Yucatecan government failed to garner the necessary international support and recognition in order to become an independent nation (Williams 1929).

There are diverging interpretations regarding the meaning of regional identities at the time of independence. Some suggest that they responded to specific local economic interests and were not yet ‘national' identities (e.g., Guerra 2003: 7). That is, in New Spain, the newly independent elites sought to protect their central highland regional, political, and economic interests, but they had not yet developed the common consciousness of a nation. From its origin as an independent state, Mexico was ruled by competing elites from the center and northern states, each seeking to privilege the interests of the regional group of which they were constituents. Arguably, this tendency continued after the twentieth-century Mexican Revolution (Drake 1970). The same can be said of Yucatecan elites in the territory of post-independence Yucatán, where, in the cities of Campeche, Mérida, and Valladolid, they were vying for the domination of the region's resources, commerce, and political power. In this historical context, alternative regional affiliations and interests permitted ex-centric groups to defy the power and authority of central Mexican elites. This tug-of-war happened in several Latin American countries: in Mexico, as the examples of Texans and Yucatecans illustrate (Careaga Viliesid 2000); in Argentina, where regional provincial elites challenged the authority of the Buenos Aires elite (Donghi 2003: 38), leading to the independence of some regions; and in Brazil, where Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro elites diverged on the grounds of their pro- or anti-slavery positions (Needell 1987). The need to establish homogeneous nation-states also explains the regional and national efforts to conceal from the memory of the nation the part played by indigenous or African groups in the independence struggles in places such as today's Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Argentina (González-Stephan 2009; Huner 2009; Needell 1987; Radcliffe and Westwood 1996; Verdesio 2003).⁴

This strong tie between the economic, political, religious, or military interests of different regions has generated different explanatory frameworks for the existence of regions and for the need to theorize about them. These explanations range from essentialist positions that tie the identity of a people to the geography and ecology of the place in a foundational fashion (Fabregas Puig 1992)—so that it becomes possible to write about Mexico as if it existed 5,000 years ago (which it did not—not even as an idea; e.g., see Long-Solís and Vargas 2005)—to explanations that reduce the region to economic or political networks and connections (Liverman and Cravey 1992; C. Smith 1976a, 1976b). There have been, however, attempts to introduce the cultural dimension into the analysis of regionalism as a phenomenon. For example, Van Young (1992: 2) distinguishes between ‘regionality', or the condition of being a region, and ‘regionalism', “the self-conscious identification—cultural, political, and sentimental—that large groups of people develop over time within certain geographical spaces.” For him, there is a close relationship between regional and class systems that share attributes, underscoring the multi-dimensionality of regionalism: first, both of these systems show internal differentiation among the different groups encompassed by a region; second, they reveal a hierarchical structure of power among these groups; and, third, they show articulation in the form of an organized relation among the elements constitutive of the system (ibid.: 4-5). Nonetheless, during the development of the modern nation, regionalist feelings have often been dismissed as archaic remains that pre-date the nation (ibid.: 9) or as pre-modern inclinations that obstruct the formation of the modern nation-state (Drake 1970).

Within this cultural perspective, Lomnitz (1992) privileges the relationship between region and hegemony as an inherent association—that is, he is not worried about unpacking the relationship between nation and hegemony. Instead, he suggests that when looking into the constitution of regionalism, we need to analyze the elements that are constitutive of the phenomenon: the political economy of a regional culture (who generates signs and how are they distributed) and the relationship between space and ideology (ibid.: 63). In fact, although Lomnitz recognizes that within a region different interest groups may exist and that hegemony is created regionally, taking national hegemony as the general ground of reference, he defines regional feelings as “localist ideologies” that are useful in easing the tensions between “intimate culture” and nationalist interests (ibid.: 78). In any event, for the purposes of the present argument, what these cultural approaches emphasize is, first, the existence of a set of symbols, values, and meanings that, even though they may be generated by elite interest groups, are mobilized and circulated via the instruments of different social institutions, and, second, that they are shared to a greater or lesser extent by the different groups that constitute the social, political, and economic regional structure.

Some regional identities have, in time, transformed into national identities, and some social institutions tied to the state (e.g., the educational system, the church, demographers, surveyors, cartographers, newspapers) have engaged in the spread of instruments to promote the imagination of the nation. As I argue below, this was the case for both Yucatán and Mexico, although in the end Yucatecan nationalism remained reduced to the common consciousness of a shared peoplehood that is subordinated to Mexican nationalist discourses and national identity. In the following section, I examine some of the mechanisms and instruments that have allowed the spread of the nation-form.

Dissemination: National and Regional Cuisines

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

The following arguments are well-known today, so I will not examine them here. However, it is important to point out that various scholars have analyzed the relationship between the forging of modern nations and the invention of national cuisines. Since Appadurai's (1988) seminal discussion about the part that cookbooks played in the invention of Indian cuisine, several studies have documented how culinary institutions became tied to other social and cultural forces, erasing regional differences and homogenizing national taste. This process had been largely neglected, although Camporesi (1970) had already argued that, following the political unification of Italy, Pelegrino Artusi's cookbook, La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well), first published in 1891, had profited from the new political context and the growth of industrial food processing and packaging to bring Italian regional culinary practices together into a national cuisine. In turn, Ferguson (2004), Mennell (1985), and Trubek (2000) have examined the part played by cookbooks, the press, restaurants, and chefs in the institution and universalization of French cuisine. Also, Cwiertka (2005) has described the interaction between national and European culinary values in the process of the modernization of Japanese cuisine and the ensuing invention of a national gastronomic form that silenced regional differences.

As the analysis of national cuisines progressed, other scholars highlighted that, despite attempts to homogenize national cuisines, there is a deterritorializing internal heterogeneity of cuisines within single modern nation-states. Thus, Capatti and Montanari (1999) insist in the locality and strong regional identity of Italian cuisines,⁶ putting the accent on diversity where previous descriptions emphasized homogenization. Banerji (2007), for her part, executes the same exercise for India, describing the regional specialties that mark each Indian region as distinct from the others. While dealing indirectly with the nation, other studies have privileged the study of regional foods where previously we found narrations of a single national cuisine. Hence, Long (2009) describes the existence of regional culinary traditions derived from the diverse ecological contexts and ethnic demography of US regions. In turn, Gutierrez (1992) and Bienvenu, Brasseaux, and Brasseaux (2005) look at the modern creation of Cajun food, and Swislocki (2008) describes the distinct cuisine of Shanghai, dispelling the illusion (if it still existed) that there is a Chinese national cuisine (see also Wu 2002; Wu and Cheung 2002).

While in Latin America there are, in the popular imagination, widespread associations between nations and particular dishes, there are no studies available that examine the formation of national cuisines in South American countries. Not even publications such as Lovera (2005), McDonald (2009), and Natella (2008) help to identify national cuisines in South and Central America. Lovera's and McDonald's books recognize the interaction between the environment and humans and between Europeans, Africans, Asians, and natives in the creation of culinary habits in different regions. However, they privilege the identification of commonalities across regions and the distinctiveness of regions' cooking styles as arising from the ethnic/racial composition without a reference to national cultures, or, as in Pazos Barrera (2010), privilege the discussion of local culinary ingredients, technologies, and techniques in the multiple environments of the Andean region. In a different vein, Natella (2008), seeking to dispel simplistic stereotypes in the US about food in Latin America, lists some dishes that are seen as ‘typical' in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and ‘the Caribbean', but he does not get into a discussion as to whether any of these countries has developed a national cuisine (much less any regional traditions). Thus, in the popular imagination, beef dishes and roasts often bring to mind Argentinean, Uruguayan, and Brazilian meals, while the stew feijoada evokes Brazilian taste, but the heterogeneity that characterizes each of these nation-states seems to prevent either the invention or the writing of national cuisines. Consequently, regional dishes become frequently tied to race or ethnicity (African American or indigenous groups) or to social class (Drinot 2005; Fajans 2008; Folch 2008; Walmsley 2005). There is still a lack of studies examining the relationship between regionalism and food in Latin America, and this is understandable, given the scarcity of studies on nationalist cuisines (exceptions being Pilcher 1998 and Wilk 2006).⁷ This book seeks to make a contribution in bridging this gap and to encourage discussion about the ways in which regional culinary cultures negotiate their significance and meaning in a context (commercial, political) that favors the identification of national rather than regional cuisines.

Mexican National and Yucatecan Regional Cuisines

The birth of Mexican national cuisine, as both Pilcher and Juárez López have shown, was contemporaneous with the production of a variety of textual strategies deployed during the invention of an imagined Mexican national community. Juárez López (2000) examines the strategies whereby the Creole elite, before independence, sought the foundations of New Spain's cuisine in the natural environment of the continent and in the contributions of indigenous cooks and ingredients in the constitution of culinary practices that differed from those of Spain. In turn, Pilcher (1998) analyzes the creation of a nationalist cuisine and the cultural negotiations of the elite between enlightened/rational scientific ideals, on the one hand, and political nationalism, on the other. The end result has been the creation of a national cuisine that, at least rhetorically, is anchored in indigenous culinary practices, values, and taste preferences. During the construction of a national cuisine, regional cuisines were either co-opted or silenced by central Mexican institutions and media. ‘Yucatecan' ⁸ cuisine was placed in an ambivalent position: located at the margins of the Mexican nation, its existence was silenced by the political power of nationalist discourse. At the same time, as I will be arguing, it was locally conceived and born as the cosmopolitan offspring of Caribbean and European intercourses and exchanges in which members of the Yucatecan elites were engaged.⁹ Distant from and going against the Mexican culinary blueprint, Yucatecan cooks favored recipes and ingredients that were available in the peninsular lowlands and semi-tropical environment and appropriated and reformed European, Caribbean, and South American recipes, creating a culinary tradition that diverged from that of central Mexico.

If central Mexican nationalist intellectuals chose ideologically and rhetorically to accentuate the roots of national cuisine in the indigenous past, Yucatecan's intelligentsia stressed the cosmopolitan connections of their regional food. Some authors have made all-sweeping generalizations about a rather homogeneous ‘Mexican' cooking tradition. For instance, Adapon (2008: 2) states: “Living in different Mexican households, I realized that…[v]ariations of chilaquiles were normal everyday fare.” She adds: “Mexican cuisine is 90 per cent indigenous and 10 per cent other influences” (ibid.: 10). However, in Yucatecan gastronomy one finds, instead of fajitas, moles, enchiladas, and chilaquiles, dishes such as papadzules (minced hard egg tacos in a sauce of roasted and ground squash seeds and epazote, covered with roasted tomato sauce); queso relleno (Dutch Edam cheese stuffed with ground pork mixed with capers, almonds, raisins, onion, and spices); cochinita pibil (pork marinated in Seville orange juice, annatto seeds, allspice, and other spices, wrapped in banana leaves and baked in a pit-hole); or escabeche de pavo (turkey stewed with onion, cumin, oregano, garlic, allspice, bay leaves, and vinegar). In contrast to Mexican cooking, and despite incorporating some indigenous recipes and ingredients, Yucatecan cuisine stresses a cosmopolitan approach rather than indigenous connections in its regionally hegemonic contemporary representation.

The collection of food recipes that I find encompassed under the term ‘Yucatecan gastronomy' is not an eclectic assortment of recipes drawn from different culinary traditions, but recipes that sprang from the co-existence, intersection, and blending of diverse culinary cultures in response to the food preferences of local people. At an early stage, domestic Yucatecan cooks and their nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century cookbooks displayed an all-embracing openness to international influences and included recipes from North American, European, Caribbean, and even Mexican cuisines. In their homes, cooks (primarily the female members of households) sought to appropriate dishes, ingredients, and recipes that confirmed them, their families, and their immediate circle of friends as cosmopolitan in orientation and intent. The display of culinary inclusiveness enhanced regional self-esteem, publicly showcasing the economic power and cultural cosmopolitanism, the sophistication and worldliness of the regional elites. However, their culinary practices did not yet amount to a regional gastronomic tradition in the contemporary sense of the term. Yucatecan ‘sophistication' was deployed against other regional cuisines. In Yucatán, as I show below, some dishes created by local cooks were chosen, gradually, to represent the cultural uniqueness of the region. Later on, during the twentieth century, they were gathered into a canonical collection of recipes, techniques, technology, ingredients, and eating etiquette that provided the ground for the invention and affirmation of a distinctive Yucatecan gastronomy. Many Yucatecans have progressively come to see the culinary field from which Yucatecan gastronomy emerged as the embodiment of regional culture and values and as fundamentally different from Mexican cuisine.

The creation of an imagined national Mexican community involved attempts to silence regional differences throughout the territory of the Mexican state. Yucatecans (as well as the inhabitants of other Mexican regions) were particularly active in forging a regional identity that would counter the homogenizing cultural policies of central Mexican society. As I will elaborate in chapter 1, during the two-centuries-long period that began with the independence of New Spain and of the colonial province of Yucatán from Spanish domination in 1821, central Mexican intellectuals and politicians were involved in the design and invention of a ‘modern' nation—Mexico. At the same time, Yucatecan intellectuals disputed whether Yucatán should join Mexico or remain a separate republic. Central Mexicans, in the meantime, launched the process of ideological homogenization of the country by imposing cultural icons that were primarily meaningful to the inhabitants of the central highlands over those favored by the inhabitants of the different regions (now states of a federal republic). Taking this historical context into account, I argue that, in practice, these symbolic impositions produced effects that translated into additional modes of subordination: the history of the region was politically converted into a minor episode in the grand narrative of the emergence of Mexico (Craib 2002; de Gortari Rabiela 1982; Florescano 2005; Gruzinski 2001; Tenorio Trillo 1998). Central Mexican institutions initiated maneuvers intended to ensure regional economic dependency on central institutions, and local powers were placed under the surveillance of the Mexican army (Campos García 2004). In consequence, regional cultural productions that differed from those established and promoted in central Mexico were dismissed as close-minded and parochial. However, during the period spanning from the second half of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, Yucatecan elites monopolized the production of henequen natural fiber, accumulating sufficient power to oppose central Mexican designs that they perceived as contrary to regional interests, while still maintaining political and economic negotiations with Porfirio Díaz's progress-oriented regimes (Alisky 1980; Baklanoff 1980; G. Joseph 1986; Wells 1982). As Vargas Cetina argues (2010a, 2010b), Yucatecan elites had accumulated both money and power, allowing them to affirm and disseminate their own cultural preferences as characteristic of Yucatecan society at large. Literature, music, and food became important markers during the invention of a Yucatecan regional identity that stood (and still stands) in opposition to Mexican culture.

The Regional Foodscape: Post-national and Post-colonial Configurations

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

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

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

In critiquing this form of cultural domination, I contend that it is necessary to take into account two overlapping dimensions that constitute the post-national order. On the one hand, we need to focus on what Habermas (2001) has identified as the ‘postnational constellation', that is, the supranational processes—such as NAFTA, the EU, and others that are more diffuse (being tied to the unimpeded power of corporations)—that have eroded the power of the nation-state. For example, I look at the consequences, for Yucatecan food, of the immigration of people from different cultures into the territory of the peninsula and state of Yucatán, but also to the effects on Yucatecan gastronomy of the migration of Yucatecans to other parts of the world. Hence, I pay close attention to the transformations in the Yucatecan foodscape and gastronomic field, locally and globally. On the other hand, and supplementing Habermas's viewpoint, I coincide with Bhabha (1994) and Sparke (2005) on the need to take into account the internal tensions and fractures that occur within the nation-state. The post-national condition thus created is one that arises from the inability of the nation-state to keep its parts together. Accordingly, I will be examining the practices, discourses, and textual strategies deployed by Yucatecans to invent a regional gastronomy that requires ‘protection' and ‘defense' from what is perceived as external attacks, coming from both Mexican and foreign cultures. In this sense, the part that food plays in the construction of a Yucatecan identity can be understood as a process that contributes to the fracturing of the national whole and supplements the disrupting effects of transnational and supra-national events that weaken the authority of the nation-state.¹¹

These post-national and post-colonial conditions are reflected in the urban foodscape of Mérida. I understand this foodscape as an arena where food values are deployed to affirm similarities and differences between local and foreign culinary traditions. This urban foodscape expands and contracts in response to the interactions between, and the transformations in, regional and global markets, as well as in food discourses. Both local-global and lateral connections have played an important part in fashioning the Yucatecan foodscape and gastronomy. For example, some Yucatecan preparations have found inspiration in recipes from the haute cuisine of France, Italy, and Spain that have been introduced in the region since the nineteenth century. At the same time, the regional foodscape is connected to other subordinate regions, so that the food culture of Yucatán includes adaptations of dishes from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and also from European provinces and communities, such as Asturias, Galicia, Valencia, Malaga, Andalusia, and Provence. The emergence in Yucatán of restaurants specializing in the foods of these regions—subordinate either to foreign colonial powers or to the cultural colonialism of central elites within the nation-states where these foods are included—marks them as belonging to gastronomic configurations similar to the Yucatecan one. Hence, the expanding foodscape and its everyday navigation can, at the same time, support the self-image of Yucatecan cosmopolitanism and affirm the privileged position that Yucatecan food occupies in regional culinary preferences.

The transformation of the urban foodscape is the product of a long insertion in the global market that has fostered, within the peninsula of Yucatán, the introduction and appropriation of culinary ingredients from diverse parts of the world (Miranda Ojeda and Negroe Sierra 2007). Consequently, throughout the book I understand the foodscape as the shifting, changing, and dynamic arena where cultural sources of food, ingredients, recipes, cookbooks, cookware, cooking technologies, ingredients, and prepared meals within the city and its surroundings become meaningful culinary markers for the consumers. This foodscape is constituted by department stores, markets, supermarkets, and delicatessens; by specialized stores that supply local, regional, national, and imported foodstuffs, wines, and liquors; and by the ever-changing availability of ‘exotic' foods served in restaurants specializing in different national and regional cuisines. Transformations in the foodscape produce effects on the cultural understanding that local people have of their own culinary and gastronomic ‘tradition', sometimes subordinating it to imported foods, sometimes favoring it above any other food.

To be sure, following Appadurai's (1996) characterization of different landscapes, the perception and navigation of the foodscape changes according to the location where the subject enters it. That is, individuals with different levels of disposable income and with different ethnic, gender, religious, or educational backgrounds enter the foodscape through different gateways; they then follow different itineraries and experience the food available in the urban space in different ways. For example, someone who has no knowledge of Spanish culture (or interest in it), someone who has read about Spain, someone who has read about Spanish gastronomy, someone who has traveled as a tourist to Spain, someone who has lived in Spain, and a Spaniard living in Mérida—all of these people have a different depth of knowledge about the food of that country and the rules and etiquette for its consumption that translate into differential expectations and access to Spanish restaurants and inform, in different ways, their experience of Spanish foods available in Mérida. Hence, the regional foodscape is one that includes a variety of cuisines identified with exotic, foreign cultures and intersects with what Dolphijn (2004) has described as the global foodscape, that is, the internationalization of different foods along the lines of distribution determined by food corporations and the erosion of national boundaries.

When we take the global context into account, we can understand how the urban foodscape, in a city like Mérida, can expand and diversify, helping to shape the regional culinary field. Visitors and immigrants to Yucatán may seek the replication of adaptations that Yucatecan food underwent during its exportation to other parts of the world, where cooks faced a limited availability of the goods necessary to reproduce an ‘authentic' regional cuisine. Also, Mexican restaurants have included their own versions of Yucatecan dishes, which in some cases depart radically from local versions. Finally, the introduction of nouvelle cuisine may inspire adventurers to experiment with local foods, changing them to suit their tastes in different ways.¹² It is during the expansion of the foodscape that both the position and the composition of Yucatecan food become altered in the eyes of local and non-local consumers.

The Yucatecan regional foodscape is going through a series of transformations that resemble those of other societies in the global arena (Dolphijn 2004; Kamp 2006). Some of these transformations lead to deterritorializing and reterritorializing strategies that shape both the culinary and gastronomic fields. In this contemporary foodscape, cookbooks that specialize in Yucatecan cuisine have been resignified and transformed to adapt to new market and cultural conditions. During the emergence and invention of Yucatecan gastronomy, Yucatecan cooks had developed the minor genre of inclusive, cosmopolitan-oriented cookbooks. Yet as the twentieth century moved forward, authors began to purge their cookbooks of recipes perceived to be alien to Yucatecan culinary forms. Yucatecan cookbook writers gradually abandoned recipes that were clearly attributable to Spanish, French, Italian, and other cultures, focusing instead on dishes that were, in due time, turned into iconic representatives of the regional gastronomic canon. This textual strategy promoted the identification of contemporary Yucatecan cuisine as different from other Mexican cuisines. The refinement of culinary practices eventually coalesced into a recognizable Yucatecan gastronomy.

The Culinary and Gastronomic Fields andthe Naturalization of Taste

What then is Yucatecan food? If it is what Yucatecans eat, what do Yucatecans eat? In general, most Yucatecans believe that anyone can easily distinguish between Yucatecan and other cuisines. Yucatecan cuisine embodies a recognizable aesthetic configuration of flavors, aromas, colors, and textures that are imagined to correspond to the cultural values shared by most people within the Yucatecan territory. Throughout the volume I will be discussing the part played by different elements in the ‘naturalization' of taste—that is, the institution of a predilection for the use of certain ingredients, combinations of ingredients (recipes), cooking techniques, and modes of food consumption that bracket their historical formation and allow Yucatecan people to recognize their preferences as a ‘natural' inclination for certain recipes and consumption techniques that set Yucatecan cuisine apart from other cuisines. Restaurants and cookbooks have been important vehicles in the dissemination of this aesthetic configuration and have contributed to the territorialization of Yucatecan taste.¹³ Cookbooks and restaurants combine their effects with those derived from (1) the oral transmission of recipes and kitchen secrets; (2) the historical expansion of the regional foodscape, a consequence of Yucatán's insertion in the global market; and (3) the practice of urban families to hire domestic cooks from rural villages (some of whom might be Maya speakers, while others could be impoverished peasants of diverse ethnic origins). Consequently, recipes, ingredients, and cooking techniques have traveled back and forth from cities to rural villages, creating the conditions for a regionally widespread appreciation of and inclination for the taste of Yucatecan foods.

It is now common knowledge that Yucatecan food typically does not include many milk products; that chili peppers are used to garnish meals, but foods are not cooked spicy hot; that pork and fowl are preferred over beef; that banana leaves are the element of choice to wrap foods before baking them in pit-holes; that Seville orange juice and lime juice are the standard marinating liquids; and that many of the spices and ingredients regularly used come from the Middle East via the Caribbean region. Also, very few Yucatecan recipes make use of tomato sauce to stew meats or vegetables (although fried or roasted tomato sauces can be used to garnish roasted, grilled, or baked meats), nor is sour cream used to cook meals. The combinations of ingredients peculiar to Yucatecan cooking allow regional dishes to be recognized by their aspect, aroma, texture, and distinctive flavors. There is also, in Yucatán, an established rhythm of food consumption, ingrained as part of the regional food culture, that contributes to the naturalization of taste. Yucatecans have adopted a weekly cycle of foods that integrates, repeats, and inscribes the preference for the use of certain ingredients and cooking techniques in local taste. Either domestic cooks or ‘economic kitchens'¹⁴ have assumed responsibility for reproducing this cycle of meals, making it almost ‘unnatural' to eat, for example, pork and beans on a day other than Monday, or puchero (stew) on any other day but Sunday. Restaurants often partake in this custom, making some dishes available as ‘specials' on the days of the week that Yucatecans expect to eat them.

However, it is also important to recognize that, whether one looks into the private or the public sphere, it is possible to find two interrelated and recognizable but distinguishable forms of Yucatecan cuisine. In this book I develop a distinction between what I call the culinary and the gastronomic fields. Since the nineteenth century, Yucatecans have appropriated culinary techniques, procedures, ingredients, and recipes originating in Europe and the Grand Caribbean region (encompassing the islands of the Caribbean Sea and its coastal areas, from Louisiana to the shores of Venezuela). Also, in their homes, domestic cooks appropriated and modified recipes from central Mexico and other Mexican regions to match local tastes. This variety of recipes was integrated into early cookbooks and in the domestic cooking of urban families, providing Yucatecans with a sense of cosmopolitanism. Hence, I conceptualize the culinary field as an open, inclusive field where recipes, ingredients, and cooking techniques and technologies from different cultural sources find acceptance, and where individuals find room for self-expression, creativity, and innovation in adapting those dishes to local taste. The analysis of the emergence and development of this field requires attention to processes of cultural exchange and hybridization, to global/local and minor translocal articulations, and to a variety of local understandings of the ‘modern'. The culinary field firmly establishes the Yucatecans' perception of themselves as cosmopolitan, progressive, and open to external influences.

At the time when Yucatecan domestic cooks were inventing the regional culinary field, some commercial cooks were given the opportunity to create and promote new foods, appropriating dishes from the Maya and peasant populations of the region, finding inspiration in recipes from other areas of the world, blending and adapting them to the locally available ingredients and to the taste of the region's middle and upper classes, and making them unique and specific to Yucatecan culture. Progressively, restaurateurs, with their customers' concurrence, have selected a number of dishes that have been turned into canonic and iconic representatives of Yucatecan cuisine, giving birth to what I conceptualize as the gastronomic field. Hence, in this book, I define the term ‘gastronomic field' as a socio-cultural arena in which individuals have developed explicit rules, norms, recipes, ingredients, techniques, and procedures for cooking (producing), and consuming food. My contention is that the Yucatecan gastronomic field is instituted through textual constructions, as promoted in cookbooks recognized as authoritative on Yucatecan gastronomy, and through the culinary practices performed in restaurants, where menus are seen as exemplary, pedagogical, and paradigmatic representations of Yucatecan gastronomy. Over time, Yucatecans have devised a quasi-formal set of rules that define which ingredients may or may not be allowed into the field, what combinations of ingredients or dishes in a meal are possible, the aesthetics of their presentation, and the etiquette for their consumption.¹⁵ These rules have been established through repetition and standardization, both in the content of cookbooks and in the lists of dishes presented in restaurant menus.

As I understand them, the culinary and gastronomic fields are intersecting spheres where individuals and groups engage in the textual and practical production and consumption of food. These fields are found in an immanent relation to each other. While arising from the Yucatecan culinary field, the gastronomic field is one that is restrictive, exclusive, and governed by explicit rules. It is one where writers, cooks, and consumers engage in a process of negotiation and purification whereby some elements are defined as proper or alien to Yucatecan ‘cultural traditions' and, consequently, are included or excluded from recipe collections and restaurant menus. In this context, while operating within the culinary field, agents stress their creativity and inventiveness in appropriating and devising new dishes. For them, their own creativity is based on their knowledge of diverse culinary sources. However, when performing within the gastronomic field, they declare it to be closed to external influences and affirm the exclusivity of its roots in the cultural values of Yucatecan society. It is here that we need to see that the constitution, institution, bifurcation, and relations between these fields are intersected by the post-national and post-colonial constructions of a regional identity that is opposed to central Mexican domination.

The gastronomic field disseminates its effects into the private domain. In the latter, domestic cooks see themselves (at times of heightened localism) as resisting the forces of Mexican or foreign cultural colonization and refuse to change their recipes. They assert a local gastronomic logic, claiming the authority to establish what can or cannot be admitted into—or recognized as belonging to—Yucatecan cuisine. The gastronomic field is found in a paradoxical situation: although it tends to solidify over time, it simultaneously rests upon a social imaginary that places the emphasis on local/regional ingenuity, creativity, and innovation and on the artistic freedom of expression of locally rooted but cosmopolitan cooks.

Cod Biscayne-Style: Between the Yucatecan Culinaryand Gastronomic Fields

With the following account, I seek to illustrate how the culinary and gastronomic fields contribute to the naturalization of taste. While living in San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, we were once invited to stay at a friend's house a few days before the Christmas holiday. For this social gathering, our host announced that she had cooked a dish of cod Biscayne-style. In a paella pan she had fried a mixture of shredded cod with onions, tomato slices, almonds, olives, and spices. It was a flavorful, fried meal, with scant sauce. Cod Biscayne-style is one of the several ‘traditional' dishes that families choose to consume during the Christmas season all over the Mexican territory. In response to this custom, supermarkets import massive amounts of salted Norwegian cod. Although the flavors of my friend's dish were enjoyable, I could not recognize the dish that I grew used to in the state of Yucatán (see figure I.1). In 2000, when I moved back to Yucatán, I watched how friends' families and relatives all fell into a shopping and cooking frenzy during the winter holidays in anticipation of the Christmas Eve celebration. In different families, each member who was proud of his or her cooking abilities strove to contribute his or her best dish to the meal. Thus, for Christmas supper, families' tables could end up with two soups, one or two salads, at least one pasta dish, one or two fruit salads, baked ham, baked turkey, refried black beans, lobster or shrimp—and, of course, cod Biscayne-style. During supper, relatives and friends eased their food down with national or imported red, white, or sparkling wines; after the meal, they were served brandy, vodka, whiskey, or cognac.¹⁶

Figure I.1. Cod Biscayne-style, final stages of cooking

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

Within my wife's family, one aunt has long been recognized as owning the ‘best' recipe for cod Biscayne-style. After a sustained monopoly (lasting longer than the 25 years that I have been related to her family), she selected me to inherit her ‘secret' recipe. She told me that she had developed her own recipe, taking her mother's dish as a starting point, but later including a different technique and adding an ingredient that she had learned about from a friend. Although not all regional versions are identical, her rendition of the dish fits the widespread Yucatecan understanding of the recipe, and most Yucatecans would probably recognize it as a variation on a commonly accepted culinary theme.

Thus, in order to satisfy our longing for the dish during that season of the year, especially during the weeks that precede Christmas Eve (when we would share our own Christmas dinner with relatives and friends), a party made up of myself, my wife, and some friends visited Yucatecan seafood restaurants and Mexican restaurants located in Mérida that annually list the dish in their menus, along with other central Mexican Christmas dishes, such as romeritos (see the glossary). In general, we found that the cod dish was in some places saltier, while in others the sauce was thicker. In some restaurants, the dish was spicy hot, while in others it was too bland for our taste. Overall, the different versions of the dish available in Yucatán looked alike, but they were unlike what my friend had cooked in Chiapas. In its different Yucatecan presentations, the cod had been coarsely shredded or cut into pieces and simmered in a tomato sauce with olives, with or without capers, with or without slices of pimiento (which some cooks blend into the sauce), and with or without croutons (or golden-fried slices of French bread). In addition, it was sometimes accompanied by refried black beans and sometimes not. Flavors and aromas varied according to the quality of the cod, the type of olive oil used, and whether the tomato sauce was freshly made or employed processed tomatoes.¹⁷

In a contrasting experience, sometime during the winter of 2001-2002, after learning of my research topic, a friend invited me to watch her mother cook cod Biscayne-style. She let me know that her mother's recipe was acclaimed as excellent by relatives and had been passed down in her family from one generation to the next. Her own sisters followed the same recipe for Christmas Eve dinner. In contrast to the willingness of my friend's mother to allow me to watch and film her while she cooked, my wife's aunt never allowed anybody to be present when she cooked the dish, even though help was offered when she began complaining about the heavy work that the dish demands of a person her age. She would tell us, every year, that her recipe was extremely elaborate and time-consuming. The preparation of the meal takes three days of work: soaking and washing the salt off the cod, boning and shredding it, frying in olive oil the different ingredients separately, mixing them in a specific order, and slowly simmering the whole before Christmas Eve supper. In contrast to her accounts, when I arrived at my friend's house, her mother had already prepped the cod—desalting, boning, and shredding it all in one morning—and she was about to start cooking. It took her less than two hours to have the dish simmering in a pot in a generous amount of Spanish olive oil.¹⁸ Somewhat surprised, I asked her whether the recipe she followed that day was a fast version that differed from what she did for Christmas Eve. She responded that it was her only version, the one that she and her sisters learned from her mother and that they all follow, including her daughters (adjusting this or that ingredient to satisfy each husband's or child's taste). When she finished the dish, the cod was bathed in Spanish olive oil, mixed with slices of tomato, sweet red pepper, olives, and fried garlic. I had witnessed the preparation of a version that was very different from those that I had previously encountered in Yucatán (at other friends' homes and at local restaurants) and from what I had been served at my friend's house in Chiapas.¹⁹

The different elaborations of the same dish—within Yucatán in particular and Mexico in general—illustrate the heterogeneity of the culinary field and its ties to the gastronomic field. On the one hand, within the Yucatecan region itself, one can find different versions of the same home-cooked dish that not only are considered acceptable for family members and friends but also are turned into the standard for judging other versions of the same dish. In this respect, the Yucatecan culinary field allows for the intersection of Yucatecan recipes with recipes from other regional Mexican and international culinary ‘traditions'. On the other hand, we find that the inscription of the dish in Yucatecan cookbooks and restaurant menus imposes a paradigmatic structure on the recipe that allows only minimal differences. Hence, although it is a seasonal dish from the regional culinary field, restaurant chefs and cooks have, to some degree, ‘fixed' the recipe, making one version more acceptable to regional consumers, with their aesthetic-based perception of the dish. Among other things, it must use a particular brand of olive oil, it must have been cooked with epazote leaves, and the ingredients have to be fried separately before being stewed together. The combination of ingredients and cooking techniques results in recognizable and desirable flavors, aromas, textures, and colors that set a standard to be met. A friend once cooked the same dish, but, seeking to save on olive oil, he did not fry all of the ingredients. Some guests who had eaten the food complained to me later that they found its texture to be odd, a result that they attributed to the failure to fry the ingredients.

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

Food and Identity

In 2003, a disquieting note appeared in a regional newspaper. It was revealed that a Japanese company had obtained legal, proprietary rights over the name cochinita pibil. Cochinita pibil is one of the iconic dishes by which Yucatecan gastronomy is recognized, not only within the Mexican territory, but also abroad (Ayora-Diaz 2010a). How could this have happened? What would the consequences be? Were Yucatecans to be forced to use a different denomination to name, sell, and purchase their own food—a food that they had created? Xenophobic invectives flew during conversations among friends. The commotion slowly turned into a subdued irritability when, in later days, follow-up articles modified the original information: the company was not Japanese, but a Mexican firm owned by a Mexican entrepreneur of Japanese origin. Another note relayed that the name that was legally protected was not cochinita pibil, but rather La Cochinita. Moreover, it was a restaurant chain specializing in pork recipes from different Mexican regions, and its menu included the Yucatecan cochinita pibil.20 Some people never saw the follow-up shorter notes that corrected the original misinformation, and years later people would still complain about the ‘Asian invasion' or the Mexican will to appropriate dishes that are tied to Yucatecan regional culture. This widespread moral panic highlights the affective attachment that Yucatecans display regarding regional culinary productions. Cochinita pibil, along with other regional dishes, is locally taken to be representative of a particular Yucatecan sensibility. For Yucatecans, it is undoubtedly a Yucatecan dish derived from a Yucatecan ‘tradition'.²¹ It is so much a part of their Yucatecan-ness that Yucatecans believe they are justified in being upset at the appropriations and transformations that the dish has suffered at the hands of Mexicans and other non-Yucatecans.

In everyday life, the terms ‘Yucatecans' and ‘Mexicans' are often used as if they possess an objective content, that is, as if they reveal some ‘thing' about the identity (the nature, the essence) of a person, a group of people, a culture, or the food of a people. Many models and explanations of identity have been formulated in the social sciences and the humanities (Hall and du Gay 1996; Rajchman 1995; Ricoeur 1992). In anthropology, Geertz's (1973) discussion of the cognate concept of the ‘person' challenged the universality of its North Atlantic understanding, but continued to treat its different forms as the product of bounded cultures. Other anthropologists have also contributed to the relativization of ‘identity' and ‘person' (see, among others, Strathern 1991; Wagner 1991). Although it is a problematic term, social actors frequently use ‘identity' and identity-related concepts to define themselves, their social forms, and their cultural productions (as well as those of others with whom they engage). Identity politics imposes on the subjects the dichotomous logic of sameness/otherness. This logic, Lash (1999) has argued, commits difference to the margins. Hence, in contemporary identity rhetoric we find, on the one hand, that even if Mexico and Yucatán are both highly heterogeneous societies that encompass a diversity of cultures and social groups, they are often subsumed under a single identity term (‘Mexico', ‘Mexicans’) that silences cultural, economic, gender, political, religious, and other differences. On the other hand, when differences are recognized, they are reduced to ‘otherness' and are placed in a subordinate position to the identity of the group in power. In actual everyday practice, the boundaries among groups are more imprecise than these categories allow for, and those encompassed by a name, rather than a cohesive and harmonious collectivity, are frequently engaged in performative practices that challenge the legitimacy of homogeneous/hegemonic identities and subtly erode the groups from within (Ayora-Diaz 2003).

Throughout this book, I often make reference to Yucatecan identity as something that individuals purposefully oppose to a national identity, although not necessarily in an instrumental way (many Yucatecans are convinced that a Yucatecan identity ‘truly' exists). I understand identities as socially and culturally constructed attributes or qualities that can have external and/or internal currency in the characterization of any individual or group. As Bhabha (1994) has argued, colonial and colonized groups of people engage in a process of subjectification whereby they appropriate attributes and characteristics to represent themselves, often fixing their own identity into cultural stereotypes. These stereotypes obscure the fact that the chosen identity-defining attributes are dynamic, context-dependent, and constantly changing. My analysis expands the anthropological critical understanding of local identities that began with Evans-Pritchard (1940) and was followed by Barth ([1969] 1998) and Herzfeld (1997), that is, that identities, despite their apparent fixity, need to be understood as situated and as changing according to the relationship of forces among different groups and in the context of their strategies of inclusion and exclusion (Appiah 2006; Bilgrami 2006). In the contemporary stage of cultural globalization, the identity of a person in modern societies has been thought of, and sometimes experienced, as one that has reached a high degree of structural coherence and temporal consistency (Giddens 1990, 1991; Ricoeur 1992).

Since the advent of the post-Fordist mode of production and of postmodern consumption, identities have come to be lived and described as fragmentary, superficial, and fleeting—as simulacra of a ‘self’ embedded in a world of goods, information, and consumption (Gergen 1991; Jameson 1991). The linkage between consumption practices and the fashioning of transient individual and group identities has informed the argument that identities are as fleeting and superficial as the life of commodities in the market. In contrast, ethnic or national identities are understood and lived as being fixed and, at least in part, embedded in the goods that these individuals or groups produce and consume (Halter 2000; Mathews 2000). In the latter case, specific marked commodities anchor the identity of a group of people. From another point of view, group identities are understood as having been forged in the anvil of the market, be that of material goods, religions, or other forms of individual expression (Featherstone 1991; Friedman 1994; Hetherington 1998). From still another perspective, identities have come to be seen as politically imposed, giving grounds to the emergence of different identities and new social movements, including those positing regionalist and nationalist demands (Castells 1997; Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Foweraker 1995; Larraín Ibañez 2001). Despite their differences, I find that, in general, these various theoretical standpoints seem to accept that the affirmation of local identities is imbued with a high degree of instrumentality.

Some authors have described ethnic and nationalist movements either as forms of instrumental identity formation (Esman 1994; Gellner 1983) or as pre-modern political forms that prefigure contemporary political movements (Hobsbawm 1990). Nonetheless, as anthropologists who understand that identities are fashioned and not given essences, we cannot ignore that individuals develop an affective attachment toward other people whom they see as sharing the same or a similar religion, language, skin color, territory, and political and social organization, and that they develop mechanisms to exclude individuals perceived as different from themselves. Privileging this experience, some have focused on what are called primordial attachments, naturalizing and producing understandings of ethnic, regional, and national identities as an essential attribute of a group of people (A. Smith 1983, 1999). I find that these models depend too much on the territoriality of a group to explain the foundation of different national quests. In the current historical moment of decolonization, cultural globalization, economic and military imperialism, post-national disintegration, and post-colonial developments, we can no longer base our understanding on localized cultures. Instead, I argue that we need to look at the processes of cultural exchange (more often, unequal) and the ways in which flows of people affect the societies that they leave behind and those where they arrive (Ayora-Diaz 2007a).

The post-colonial order imposes on individuals the need to produce new forms of subjectivity, which they, in turn, derive from changed social, political, and cultural configurations. As M. Joseph (1999) suggests, displaced groups of people must negotiate and may be granted different degrees of formal rights within the societies that they move into. In this context, both colonizing and colonized groups forge forms of identification that are characterized by blurred boundaries, practices, and values. Hence, individuals are motivated to perform their identity by declaring and demonstrating their attachment to cultural products that root them into a culture, for example, by expressing their love for or attachment to the music, food, and forms of social conviviality that are identified as proper to the people of a territory. The more a foreigner performs as a local, the more likely it is that she or he will be accepted by the host society.²² Hybrid identities and cultural practices are now commonplace terms to describe emerging cultural products and the identity of those who find them meaningful in crafting their selves. This hybridity, as Bhabha (1994) argues, generates forms of ambivalence that can lead to unstable, changing forms of identification, including what he has called ‘colonial mimicry'. In Yucatán I found that the latter often translates into the actions and discourses of Yucatecans who accept unquestionably the authority of central Mexican or other foreign viewpoints and criticize local practices as parochial or ‘uncouth'. The economic, political, and religious institutions linked to the nation-state continuously support central Mexican culture, leading to the local perception that the presence of central Mexicans and the enforcement of their cultural views constitute an act of aggression and place a burden on the local society. The relationship between Yucatecans and outsiders, however, varies according to the groups involved. Immigrants from regions other than the central Mexican highlands have gained greater acceptance, and resentment against them seldom (although not rarely) surfaces.

At the beginning of this twenty-first century, the population of Mérida is undeniably multicultural. Correspondingly, the market for non-local cuisines has also grown over the last three decades. From an unmarked consumption of food, Yucatecans have come to appreciate cuisines (including a variety of Mexican regional cuisines) that could be considered somewhat exotic for local taste. Yucatecan and Mexican cuisines are noticeably different: Yucatecan cuisine has developed by avoiding the blueprint of a national Mexican cuisine, finding greater affinity with European and Caribbean traditions. Yucatecans have grown to perceive themselves as different from the rest of Mexico—socially, culturally, and morally.²³ In the performance of identity politics, regional cuisine is understood locally to reflect the values of the Yucatecan population at large, which are, in the same move, affirmed as different from Mexican values (Ayora-Diaz and Vargas Cetina 2005a).

While some differences between regional and national culinary traditions are often explained by environmental and ecological differences, we need to revise this explanation, drawing from the history of the difficult relationship between these regions (described in more detail in chapter 1). In short, there are accounts that suggest that Yucatán developed in practical isolation from the rest of Mexico, as a world apart, as suggested by the epigraph (from Moseley and Terry 1980b: 1) at the beginning of this introduction.²⁴ However, this was not the case. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Yucatecans perceived Mexico as an interventionist, colonialist power that sought to undermine the economic autonomy of the state and to remove regional elites from positions of authority, putting in their place either individuals and families from Mexico or Yucatecans who were sympathetic to the centralist project of the national government. In the context of this antagonistic relationship, the Yucatecan elites expanded their commercial and cultural ties with Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean, in particular with Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Venezuela. The peninsular market with Europe, mediated by Cuba and Belize, fostered the inclusion of European ingredients into the regional cuisine. While the culinary field spread all over the state, it was in cities where the wealthy lived that the inchoate gastronomic field began to emerge. The dishes that today are iconic of the Yucatecan gastronomic field developed, gradually, in Mérida, Motul, Ticul, and Valladolid, the main cities of the state of Yucatán.²⁵ Hence, Yucatecan identity and gastronomy need to be seen as a two-pronged construction: on the one hand, they underline the specificities of local culture and society and local-cosmopolitan relations; on the other, they affirm the Yucatecans' opposition and resistance to central Mexican culture and power structures. In this historical context, food in Yucatán, as elsewhere, plays an important part in drawing the boundaries of Yucatecan culture and in shaping the cultural politics that defines who belongs to that culture and who is excluded from it (Ayora-Diaz 2009).

The Performance of Research in Yucatán

Traditionally, ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted in distant places, within cultures that are typically different from the anthropologist's home society and culture. For many years anthropologists have been inclined to deploy rhetoric and practical strategies to make fieldwork at home acceptable, masquerading the familiar as exotic. This enterprise was considered necessary so long as anthropology was understood to be a discipline concerned with the ‘Other' (di Leonardo 1998). The reflexive critique of anthropological and other cultural texts, which began in the late 1970s, made it possible to question and refashion the definition of anthropology's task (Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fabian 1983; Marcus and Cushman 1982; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Said 1978). No longer concerned with classifying and ordering otherness, some anthropologists, from one wing of the anthropological spectrum, sought to redefine the discipline as an interpretive task (Geertz 1973; Rabinow and Sullivan [1979] 1987).

To reach an understanding of local culture, it is necessary for the anthropologist to engage in intersubjective, dialogic negotiations of meaning (Clifford 1988; Tedlock and Mannheim 1995). We anthropologists must grasp the native's understanding of the world in order to represent it (Geertz 1983). Although this ambition has been both strongly criticized and forcefully defended (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Geertz 1990; Marcus and Fischer 1986), there is some consensus on the need for anthropologists to get as close as possible to the native's perspective. At the same time, in the name of the ‘science' of anthropology, some anthropologists defend the contention that a sense of distance has to be preserved to allow for critical reflection and analysis. The directive to preserve the geographical distance between the observer and the society that he or she observes has complicated the ambition to grasp the local point of view. To find their ‘Other', anthropologists are forced to travel geographically and to displace themselves in time. For a long period, it was not deemed acceptable to look closer to home, as the early reception to Campbell's (1964) and Friedl's (1962) work illustrates. Both were criticized for studying Greek rural society, which was not exotic enough for the rigidities of the anthropology of their time. This proscription survives today, as often anthropologists who study their own society (which could be any so-called Western/ized society) are accused of seeking comfortable places. A segment of the academic status quo tends to dismiss studies that focus on shopping malls, kitchens, urban homes, restaurants, musical productions, and many strands of consumption-related issues. National or regional identity has become a regular topic to study somewhere else, but it is still largely proscribed ‘at home'—unless the research is being conducted among marginal or ethnic groups (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Passaro 1997).

I find, however, that there are advantages in approaching my ‘own' culture. I have partaken of the general embodiment and naturalization of taste, as have most Yucatecans. I grew up in an environment in which Yucatecan meals were the norm and the ‘proper' taste and texture were always expected. However, after living 14 years abroad and in another Mexican region (Chiapas), and, moreover, after becoming an anthropologist, I was able to slip between my local knowledge of food culture and moral values and my ‘expert' knowledge as an anthropologist who cannot bracket historical and political contexts and conditions that are critical in establishing cultural ‘necessities'. Hence, given that my main concern in this book is to explore the relationship between a form of cultural production and consumption (Yucatecan gastronomy) and the ways in which it intersects with the local politics of identity, I have sought to unpack the local structures of the social field, to trace its transformations, and to explore the strategies that seek to establish the boundaries of what locally they/we construct and understand as ‘regional culture' and local cultural productions.

To describe the gastronomic field, I have had to deal with at least five levels of ethnographic engagement, which often blurred into each other during everyday forms of interaction. I observed and discussed (1) the recipes and ingredients that domestic cooks and consumers of food consider to be Yucatecan in the private domain; (2) the recipes and culinary elements that restaurant managers and chefs consider to be Yucatecan in a public sphere ruled by the catering industry; (3) the dishes that the print media, radio, and television (local, national, and international) promote as part of the regional culinary tradition; (4) the recipes, ingredients, and techniques that cookbook writers represent as being Yucatecan in a traditional and authentic sense; and (5) the components of the gastronomic field that the bureaucratic and cultural institutions of the nation-state and the state of Yucatán recognize as such. These five levels are present in my analysis of the foodscape and the culinary and gastronomic fields. Although there is an abundance of layers of meaning in the constitution of the gastronomic field, in this volume I pay specific attention to the part played by cookbooks and restaurants. A greater emphasis on the ways in which Yucatecan gastronomy is constructed in different media (e.g., on television and radio shows and in newspaper columns written by cultural brokers who have been authorized by the local government to speak as appointed ‘chroniclers' of Mérida) was beyond the scope of this project and will be left for future research. However, from the examples presented in this volume, I would suggest that the importance of the media is to contribute to the cultural constructs instituted primarily by cookbooks and restaurateurs.

In Yucatán, as in many other places, people love to talk about food. It is treated not simply as a source of nourishment but as a pleasurable activity to be shared with relatives and/or friends in different contexts and, often, to be remembered (Sutton 2001). For example, on one's return from travels to other places, friends will ask about how pleasurable the trip was. Food is usually viewed as an important dimension of the experience of travel, and it is not uncommon to hear a narration that describes what the traveler ate each day of the week and the dishes that she or he missed while away from home. As I noted above, many families have members who are recognized as ‘experts' in the preparation of a certain dish or a number of dishes. These experts find gratification in this recognition and strive to maintain their privileged position within the family, so that they will always be needed on special days. Some are called upon for specific days of the week, while birthdays and special days of the year are occasions when these members of the family are counted on to perform their culinary art for the pleasure of relatives and friends (e.g., during the celebration of Independence Day, invitations from those who have mastered central Mexican recipes, such as pozole or chiles en nogada, are much appreciated). On these special days, friends anticipate an invitation to eat this or that Mexican or Yucatecan dish that they lack either the know-how or the patience to prepare. Also, in anticipation of the Day of the Dead and All Saints' Day, relatives put pressure on the women or men who know how to cook mucbil pollos (a special chicken tamale) so that the dish can be enjoyed at that time of the year. These experts enjoy talking about their cooking abilities and are always passionate when referring to the family tradition that they inherited and that allows them to cook such a special dish. Nonetheless, I have found that when they speak of the recipe itself, they often describe it in general terms and ‘forget' to mention what they consider either key ingredients or steps, so that relatives and friends always fail to replicate the recipe at their homes. An important part of the gastronomic performance is to serve the food properly, to consume it willingly, and to openly display one's satisfaction with the high quality of the meal by consuming more than one serving of each dish, later requesting leftovers to take home or, in some instances, asking permission to return the following day to procure an additional share of the dish's leftovers.

In this food-centered context, as an anthropologist, I gained access not only due to my curiosity or the authority of my ‘science'. I found an advantage in displaying culinary abilities of my own, which were on a par with those of domestic cooks, and in showing an ample appreciation for food in general—and for Yucatecan food in particular. Because the nature of my social interaction was mediated by food, I avoid referring to the people who spoke, cooked, and ate with me as ‘informants'. Food was a social binder that allowed me to see everybody as subjects and not as information-giving objects. The approach of talking about food, cooking a meal, and sharing it with others requires a negotiation of aesthetic, ethical, political, and culinary values that the objectification of individuals as informants usually leaves unexamined. During the years that I lived outside Yucatán, I appropriated the skills to cook a few Indian, Thai, and Italian dishes for my friends. I also cooked Yucatecan dishes for Yucatecan and non-Yucatecan friends abroad, thus gaining acceptance as a culinary interlocutor who could ask questions and, every so often, even obtain a ‘secret' ingredient or be taught a secret procedure for special dishes (as I could also share some learned secrets of my own). When cooking and eating in company, whether I was seen as the group's resident anthropologist or simply as another friend, family members and friends, motivated by the meal, spent a long time talking about their favorite dishes, the ingredients they like best, the ones they would omit in their cooking, their favorite cooks for different meals, their favorite restaurants and food places, and their own skills in cooking. Thus, performing anthropological work at these family reunions and at gatherings of friends was, and continues to be, an enjoyable task.

The fact that Yucatecans live in a multicultural society also fosters the exchange of information. As an anthropologist, I hosted and was hosted by people from different cultural traditions who were often willing to share their knowledge, informing others about their culinary techniques, about where to find fine ingredients or cooking appliances, and about their experiences seeking good restaurants in different neighborhoods of the city. Friends would sit and long for the meals that they used to have in the past or in their places of origin. It is also in these contexts that people become more explicit about the boundaries of their own culinary fields. People would make remarks in confidence, such as “in Yucatán we do not use—” or “in Oaxaca they add—whereas here we—” or “in Indian cooking they heavily douse their food with—.” In these contexts, people do not mind having an anthropologist at the table. The anthropologist cooks every so often and eats food with the others as well.

During my research, restaurateurs proved to be a different matter. In speaking with restaurant managers and chefs, I found them to be more secretive about the cooking techniques and ingredients used in their establishments. Public health concerns, tax issues, and trade secrets were looked on as requiring circumspection or protection, and these concerns constituted barriers to gaining access to restaurant kitchens. Some restaurateurs claim that a particular dish was created in their own kitchen. Thus, they treat their recipe as a trade secret to ensure their economic success. They were willing to speak with me at the table, sharing a special dish or drinking a coffee, and they were often generous when narrating the trajectory of their restaurants, their importance, or their awards. However, they turned silent and reserved when the conversation shifted to issues related to the cooks, their kitchen staff, and the source of the ingredients they use. Restaurant managers were not impressed by my cooking abilities and knowledge. Their main concern was that no publication should impair the public image and thus the economic success of their restaurants. In contrast, there were some instances during conversations when some chefs were willing to tell me their secret for preparing a dish, often only after I had revealed my own secret for another recipe.

For this volume I interviewed restaurant managers and chefs, as well as domestic cooks, mainly in Mérida but also in Valladolid and some former haciendas around the city of Mérida. The descriptions that illustrate this book are all based on my participation, as both host and guest, in numerous meals among acquaintances, friends, and relatives, as well as in larger celebrations that involved different degrees of commensality. Many conversations on food were informal and unstructured, and some were triggered spontaneously by the experiences being shared. I was invited to see other friends (or their relatives) cook, and three of my licenciatura students (Guadalupe Cruz Flores, Ashanti Rosado Novelo, and María José Quintal Ávila) at the Autonomous University of Yucatán fulfilled their social service obligations by conducting a short survey on economic kitchens in a neighborhood located in the north of Mérida. Because some informants asked me not to reveal their names or the names of their businesses, I use pseudonyms in some instances (which I note in the text), while in other instances I keep the actual name of public persons and restaurants that are also public by nature.

In my travels to Mexico City, Guadalajara, Oaxaca, and Argentina and to different cities in Canada, the US, and Italy, I have sought to explore the local knowledge on Mexican food and the food of Mexican regions, particularly that of Yucatán—when and wherever it is known. These different experiences have allowed me to become aware of certain global-local connections and the different ways in which Mexican national cuisine is understood by both Mexicans and foreigners.

The Structure of the Book

The chapters of this book are structured to facilitate the understanding of Yucatecan gastronomy as a political and cultural construct that has become important in the fashioning of Yucatecan identities vis-à-vis nationalist, homogenizing cultural colonialism. In chapter 1, I examine the historical narrative that has founded an oppositional regional identity that is performed against Mexican culture but, at the same time, is open to cosmopolitan influences. This context has allowed the creation of a culinary and gastronomic tradition that is both different from Mexican cuisine and also connected to the world at large.

In chapter 2, I discuss the constitution of the urban foodscape and its explosion in Mérida. This rapid expansion connects the local to the global transformation of the marketing of foods and forces Yucatecan restaurateurs to establish, as clearly as possible, the boundaries of Yucatecan gastronomy that must, perforce, secure its own niche in both the local and global markets of ‘ethnic' foods.

In chapter 3, I propose that there is in place a social and cultural process of naturalization of taste that supports the territorialization of Yucatecan culinary culture. That is, despite some intra-regional variations and differences, there are mechanisms for the repetition, standardization, and routinization of culinary practices and ingredients that make the preference for certain flavors, aromas, colors, and textures an integral part of the values that define Yucatecan culture. These mechanisms favor the co-extension of a culinary culture with the territory occupied by Yucatecans and, by allowing experimentation, playfulness, and inventiveness, opens the culinary field to influences from other cuisines.

In chapters 4 and 5, I analyze the constitution and institution of the gastronomic field. In chapter 4, I discuss the importance of cookbooks in the bifurcation of the culinary and gastronomic fields and show how their dynamism is related to their intersection with post-national and post-colonial power structures. Cookbooks, I argue, have become contributory minor texts that are both instruments and vehicles in the constitution of the gastronomic field. At the same time, because of their inscription in a post-national, post-colonial, multicultural society, they play an important part in deterritorializing both national and regional identities. More recent cookbooks have emerged that highlight the cultural diversity of Yucatecan culinary traditions and challenge the co-extensiveness of a single culinary tradition within the Yucatecan territory. In chapter 5, I examine the part played by restaurants, as public institutions, in delimiting the content of Yucatecan gastronomy. By listing and excluding dishes from their menus, restaurateurs display the social and cultural values that (in)form Yucatecan gastronomy. This field, which tends to become closed and relatively fixed, I suggest, slowly changes by adopting widely accepted (and demanded) dishes that correspond with the ‘natural' aesthetics of Yucatecan food and, at the same time, marks and insinuates the direction of change for the regional culinary field. As is the case with cookbooks, the combined effects of tourism, immigration, and multiculturalism also challenge the meaning of restaurant foods and force restaurateurs to renegotiate the contents of their menus.

In the conclusion, I argue that post-national and post-colonial formations and interventions are constantly changing the relationship between the culinary and gastronomic fields and the nature of the relationship between food and identity. In the end, Yucatecan food, like Yucatecan identity, is becoming pluralized and fragmented. Under new forms of fractalized cultural colonialism, both are becoming progressively heterogeneous.