In the conclusion, I argue that post-national and post-colonial formations and interventions are constantly changing the relationship between the culinary and gastronomic fields and the nature of the relationship between food and identity. In the end, Yucatecan food, like Yucatecan identity, is becoming pluralized and fragmented. Under new forms of fractalized cultural colonialism, both are becoming progressively heterogeneous.
1
The Story of Two Peoples
Mexican and Yucatecan Peoplehood
Yucatecan Creed
I believe in my Yucatán as the center of the universe and in the sun and the stars that spin around it.
…
I believe in panuchos; in pork and beans, in cochinita pibil and papadzules; in papaya sweets with Edam cheese and [squash] seed marzipan; in [sour] lima drinks, in horchata and xtabentún; and, above all, I believe in the mucbilpollo and [turkey in] black stuffing to be found at the altar dedicated to my soul when I return from Xibalbá during the sacred night of Hanal Pixán. Amen.
—Javier Covo Torres, Pasaporte yucateco1
As this epigraph suggests, food always invokes much more than just eating. It reveals the beliefs that members of a culture have about the place in which they dwell in the cosmos. A growing literature in the social sciences and humanities has focused on the relationship between food and its cultural meaning—on the economic, social, and political aspects involved in its definition, availability, and forms of consumption (or avoidance) and thus on its power to define a group's identity (see, e.g., P. Caplan 1997b; Counihan and Van Esterik 1997; Goody 1982). Anthropologists have long recognized the importance of food in generating social and moral bonds that constitute a sense of community. The people with whom we share food, the occasions when we do so, and the type of food that is shared are important for establishing, confirming, and reproducing a sense of belonging—or of exclusion. In contemporary urban societies, individuals seldom invite superficial acquaintances or people whom they barely know to their tables at home. Meals in the home are mostly reserved for family members, close kin, and, every so often, close friends (Douglas [1975] 1997,1984). In this sense, food has been and continues to be a form of social cement that validates the ‘natural’ membership of individuals in a group, helping to produce and recreate the feeling of communitas (Falk 1994). At different levels of meaning, a shared meal allows people to create boundaries that exclude outsiders and, in addition, favors a hierarchical structure of relations at the table (P. Caplan 1997a; Stoller 1989). In this chapter, consequently, I discuss the historical narration that frames the perception and explains the defense of a Yucatecan regional identity that is opposed, very often actively, to a homogenizing Mexican identity. As I argue, it is the concept of ‘peoplehood' that can aid our understanding of this particular form of identity politics, mediated by the opposition of gastronomic ‘traditions'.
Appadurai (1981: 495) has defined ‘gastro-politics' as a “conflict or competition over specific cultural or economic resources as it emerges in social transactions around food.” He restricted his focus to the food politics found in South India in familial and social-religious contexts. Here it is my purpose to further our understanding of food as a vehicle for the exercise of power manifest in the politics of internal cultural colonialism that in-formed the invention of the modern Mexican nation-state. In this neo-colonial context, in Yucatán, the practices and discourses that are involved in the packaging of food as a cultural product, specific to a group, can and are deployed as postcolonial and post-national strategies for the affirmation of regional identity. The creation of particular dishes and the appropriation of specific ingredients and culinary techniques are understood as defining attributes of Yucatecan regional cuisine that are evident in the construction of a regional culinary code, one that is morally and politically grounded and stands in opposition to the homogenizing/hegemonic code of Mexican national cuisine. Yucatecan cuisine has thus been invented in the course of the combined efforts of domestic and professional cooks to create a distinct culinary practice that, in the same move, draws the boundaries of the regional gastronomic field.
Multiple and heterogeneous meanings are attributed to food in contemporary society. Food can be a vehicle for ambivalent and paradoxical social practices. Individuals may attach a nostalgic meaning to food, relating it to a sense that a community has been lost as a result of global pressures to become ‘modern'. Some observers regret that the consumption of food in late modernity has been turned into an individualistic endeavor that nurtures personal idiosyncrasies and values over communal bonds (Falk 1994; Fischler [1990] 1995). Individuals may eat with different rhythms (once, twice, thrice, or multiple times a day) and different types of food (following carnivorous, vegetarian, vegan, or raw food diets). They choose their food on the basis of their different territorial and/or cultural reference (local, national, or imported) and value it because it is ‘natural', organic, convenient, preserved, or industrialized. Individuals can also consume their meals in many different places—at the office, in the car, in the garden, in the house, at restaurants, or at fast-food stands). In present-day society, there has been, as well, an explosion in the global-local markets of foods and cuisines that permits a subjective, individual development of taste and distaste for foods, while being unaware of the cultural, but naturalized, understandings of what is edible or inedible, palatable or unpalatable (Long 2004a). Fischler ([1990] 1995) refers to this (post)modern condition as gastro-anomie.
At the same time, in post-colonial, post-national multicultural societies, food has been made into an important marker of group identities. Hence, communities, in seeking to affirm their moral and cultural values, turn food into an iconic representation of their common identity. For example, in contemporary global society, vegetarianism carries moral and symbolic connotations that sustain the imagination of a specific community lifestyle. Challenging the fast tempo of postmodern societies, the transnational Slow Food organization, founded 1989 in northern Italy by Carlo Petrini, seeks to reform society's interaction with food.2 Similarly, new movements that advocate organically grown food and farmers' markets have sprung up, stressing the consumption of local foods as opposed to those produced and marketed by transnational corporations (Charles 2001; Nabhan 2001; Petrini 2003; Spencer 2000; Trubek 2008). Revealing the fractures of post-national society, regional food cultures are now being revived as part of a reclamation of regional identities within Mexico, the US, Europe, and other parts of the world. Food is thus being resignified as a site of resistance to the homogenizing cultural strategies inscribed in the imagination of ‘national communities' (Cusak 2000; Fôret 1989; Ohnuki-Tierney 1995).
In Mérida, food has been fashioned into both an instrument for the articulation of meanings affirming a regional identity and a vehicle that can be strategically driven to establish boundaries between those who belong and those who are excluded from Yucatecan culture and society. Consequently, it is important to look at the tension and ambivalence inscribed in processes of identity construction and the politics of food. Yucatán and the Yucatecans stand in a difficult, ambivalent, and ambiguous relationship with Mexico and the Mexicans. This ambivalence sometimes conceals and sometimes reveals the structure of cultural colonization and domination and engenders