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