Map of the peninsula of Yucatán, showing the state divisions and the main cities and roads. Elaborated for this book by Rodolfo Canto Carrillo.
Introduction
Food and the Post-colonial Politics of Identity
Cut off from Mexico by sea, great distance, and harsh terrain, the peninsula has been a virtual ‘island' during most of its history. This isolation has given the people a sense of cultural and psychological separatism. They consider their land to be un otro mundo—a world apart.
—E. H. Moseley and E. D. Terry, Yucatan: A World Apart
During the late 1990s, after spending eight years away, my wife and I often stayed at an apartment near Mérida's bullfighting ring (plaza de toros) and spent our vacations visiting friends and relatives in a couple of cities in the peninsula of Yucatán. After an initial charting of places to have breakfast, one morning we decided to visit the local franchise of a restaurant specializing in ‘Mexican food'. This restaurant is located in the Paseo Montejo, one of the elegant and expensive areas of the city. Intrigued by the listing in the menu of only one Yucatecan dish, my wife, Gabriela Vargas Cetina, ordered tacos stuffed with cochinita pibil (pork marinated in Seville oranges, annatto paste, and spices, wrapped in banana leaves and baked).1 We were surprised when she was handed a plate with three tacos accompanied by refried black beans, sprinkled with shredded fresh cheese. We felt that the ingredients combined on the plate ran against the local logic of Yucatecan preparation and the aesthetics of the dish. From experience, we know that when Meridanos and Yucatecans consume this dish in food stands and markets across the city and in any town in the state, they expect to be served finely minced pickled red onions and a choice of ground red chili pepper or, in some instances, minced habanero chili pepper to garnish their tacos, but no beans and no cheese. We did not know what to think about this situation. Was it a change that had taken place in the consumption of the dish during our eight-year absence from Yucatán? When we told friends and relatives of our experience, they questioned our common sense: “Why would you would even think of ordering cochinita pibil in such a restaurant? You had it coming!” We pursued our exploration of local views and found some contrasting opinions about the presence of beans. Some 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