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.
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
