British, the Dutch, and the French had made available in the Antilles, and Yucatecans benefited from existing lines of commerce. Yucatecans hired French and Italian architects and imported Italian marble to build their palaces at the Paseo Montejo, the local interpretation of the Champs-Elysées. Rich plantation owners began to construct their mansions in 1888, and the luxurious residences and the large avenue were inaugurated in 1906 (Ovando Grajales 1995) (see fig. 1.1). The economic boom attracted overseas migrants. Some came to work in the haciendas as engineers and mechanics (Germans), while others took advantage of the growing market in commodities (Spaniards, Syrians, and Lebanese). Some were brought forcibly to perform the difficult job of harvesting the henequen and obtaining the fiber from it (southern Italians, Koreans, and Chinese), whereas others came seeking to advance their situations by working on the plantations until they had accumulated enough money to move into the city (Cubans, Spanish, and peasants from other Mexican regions) (Corona Baeza 2006; Padilla Ramos 2006; Peón Ancona 2006; Ramírez Carrillo 2006).
Figure 1.1. Palace at the Paseo Montejo
Photograph courtesy of G. Vargas Cetina, 2006.
In this way, the local Yucatecan elites managed to accumulate regional power, and since their commercial arrangements bypassed the Mexican government, they developed a large degree of autonomy in their management of regional affairs. Unhappy with this situation, central Mexican elites devised strategies to undermine the power of the Yucatecan elites. The partitioning of Yucatán into three different states was a first step. Later, the central administration instituted different economic levies that drew resources from Yucatán in the form of contributions in support of different enterprises and wars in which central Mexicans were engaged. When Yucatecans refused to participate in the war against Texas (a chief commercial partner), the Mexican government imposed a commercial and military blockade on Yucatecan ships, affecting the henequen trade with the US (Evans 2007). Also, when the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, Yucatecans did not get involved in the upheaval. In fact, the last recognizable and feeble attempt to gain independence occurred in 1914, when Mexican authorities demanded that the garrisons stationed in Yucatán travel to central Mexico and support the revolutionary struggle. As G. Joseph (1979, 1982) and Paoli ([1984] 2001) have argued, the revolution did not happen, but was imported into Yucatán from outside. Facing the resistance of Yucatecan elites to get involved in central Mexican struggles, in March 1915, President Venustiano Carranza sent Salvador Alvarado into Yucatán to subdue the local hacendados (hacienda owners). With the participation of Yucatecans and the regional Socialist Party of the Southeast, Salvador Alvarado, first, and Felipe Carrillo Puerto, later, conducted the expropriation of some haciendas and distributed lands to local peasants in the form of ejidos or collective farms (G. Joseph 1982). This move delivered a powerful blow to regional elites, who were already suffering the decline of their economic self-sufficiency due to competition from other natural and synthetic fibers. Although these reforms and transformations eventually brought regional elites to their knees, they failed to provide peasants with sustainable resources. Henequen continued to drive the local economy for a long time, even if in a limited way, until central Mexico implemented a series of structural economic reforms, withdrawing subsidies from the countryside and delivering a final blow to the regional economy (Baños Ramírez 1996; Fallaw 2001; Villanueva Mukul et al. 1990). It is, therefore, in the history of these interventions that many Yucatecans trace the origins of the regional subordination to central Mexican elites and politicians, who are perceived as the source and cause of Yucatecan ills.
The Mexican Nation, Cultural Colonialism, and theErasure of Difference
The invention and institution of an imagined Mexico required the production and dissemination of narratives that sought to create a shared feeling of belonging and community among peoples—one that would, as B. Anderson (1983) suggests, transcend the ‘original' community of blood and face-to-face relationships. To be effective, the mechanics of nationalist discourse must steer individuals to recognize as their own the traits that signal and highlight what they all share. The erection of monumental flags added one more symbol to a long history of cultural colonization conducted by the center over the rest of Mexico. During the institution of the global post-colonial order, it was necessary to attain a solid cultural, economic, and politically consistent form in order to be recognized as a modern nation-state. One consequence of this demand was the veiling of regional differences, since, during the nineteenth century, multiculturalism was not seen as a virtue of the modern state. The operations performed on regional gastronomic traditions were similar to the procedures performed on other cultural practices involving regional differences, for example, religion, language, history, and ethnic identities. The affirmation of a nationalist ideology implicated a process of internal cultural colonization that, in turn, fractalized forms of imperial expansion and cultural colonization practiced by some nations over others during their history of imperial expansion and colonial domination. Although in the Mexican context the early use of the term ‘internal colonialism' was restricted to the description of the relationship of domination and subordination between populations of European and indigenous origin (see González Casanova 1965; Stavenhagen 1965), I follow Hechter ([1975] 1998) and Colley (1992) in understanding internal colonialism as a process whereby regional differences are silenced in favor of national unity. In the case of Mexico, similarly to that of Great Britain, as described by Hechter and Colley, we find a dominant central power in possession of the means to disseminate nationalist ideology (print media, radio, television, the celebration of national holidays in the schools) and with the military means to suppress resistance to the power of the metropolis. Ideologically, nationalist discourse defined the cultural differences that characterized the populations of the different regions as parochial infantilism and political immaturity, using the power of different media and state institutions to inscribe this view into the self-perception of local people (for the case of Yucatán, see Campos García 2002).
It was in the context of these political developments that the diet of the nation was distilled down to the basic pre-Columbian indigenous components: maize, beans, tomatoes, squash, and chili peppers. Reference to this diet authorized the reduction of Mexican cuisine to one and only one of the local codes; in effect, all regional cuisines were now viewed as dialectal variations of this same culinary code. Hence, the central Mexican narrative of the history of ‘Mexican food' and the anthropological study of a national cuisine can erase—or gloss over—meaningful regional culinary differences, building instead upon the cuisine of the central Mexican highlands (see, e.g., Corcuera de Mancera [1979] 1990; Flores y Escalante 1994; Long-Solís and Vargas 2005). The construction of a homogeneous nation has deep roots in Mexican history, and at least two levels of discourse can be identified. On one level, central Mexicans have invented a history of the nation defined by a teleological view that sees the diverse indigenous cultures converging into a common history of the Mexican people, a convergence explained by the ontological inevitability of cultural/racial mixing or mestizaje (Basave Benítez 1992). On another level, central Mexican elites fashioned a story of the dissemination of icons and symbols of central Mexican culture, drawn from central Mexican society and culture (or appropriated by them), and sought to impose them as markers of a single, homogeneous national identity.
From the nineteenth century onward, as Florescano ([2002] 2006) has shown, different accounts of Mexican national history were at odds over the interpretation of the relationship between European and indigenous culture. While some historians and politicians sought to erase the indigenous past in their narratives of the emergence of the Mexican nation,7 others attempted to incorporate indigenous people into the history of Mexico. At the end of the nineteenth century (1884-1889), a group of scholars dominated by central Mexican historians tied to the state, and led by Vicente Riva Palacio, forged an ideological narrative of the history of the nation that endorsed a common cultural identity. This story, titled México a través de los siglos (Mexico Throughout the Centuries), “had the virtue of bringing together past times in a discourse that joined the pre-Hispanic antiquity to the Viceroyalty and both of these to the War for Independence,
