identity is disseminated and repeated in the construction of regional identities, silencing regional difference.
Food and Imagi/nation
From the perspective of the inhabitants of the central highlands of Mexico, Mexican food is the food created in Mexico City. At the very least, it is the ideal model that all other regional (and therefore popular) cuisines should aspire to emulate.22 In their incursions into ‘Mexican gastronomy', two of the most lauded writers of the mid-twentieth century concurred in their devotion to the food of Mexico City, weaving it into the narration of their experiences with the great cuisines that they found in their travels abroad. They did not make reference to regional cuisines as gastronomic traditions in their own right, dismissing them instead as forms of cocina del pueblo (popular cookery) (Novo [1967] 1997; Reyes [1953] 2000).
Despite attempts to create a homogeneous national gastronomy discursively, Mexican cuisine has never been a culinary culture that correlates with the political territory of the nation-state. In Yucatán, food was, first and foremost, Yucatecan (and not Mexican) during most of the twentieth century. I was born in the second half of the 1950s and have had the opportunity to experience the gastronomic and culinary changes that have taken place in Yucatán since the 1970s.23 Having been born in Yucatán, a state of the federal republic of Mexico, I always took for granted that I was Mexican. Before the 1970s, I used to spend my vacations with relatives in Mérida, and I was always served what today I recognize as Yucatecan food. It was only in 1971, when I moved from Valladolid to Mérida, that I encountered restaurants selling ‘Mexican' food. This cuisine was unfamiliar enough that a number of establishments, then as now, advertised themselves as specializing in Mexican food. It was in these restaurants that I realized that Mexican food is unlike Yucatecan food. Pozole, a spicy hot stew with large white corn grains, was an alien experience. The difference between Yucatecan and Mexican food was accentuated after my initiation into tacos al pastor—a beef shawarma marinated in a mixture of different peppers and served with slices of pineapple. Although inspired by Middle Eastern roasts, this dish was not introduced by the local Syrian-Lebanese population; instead, it was imported from central Mexico (although it is attributed to the Syrians and Lebanese of the northern state of Nuevo León). The restaurants that popularized tacos al pastor in Mérida were also responsible for the introduction of fríjoles charros (cowboy beans). Although limited in number, these dishes were the harbingers of Mexican food in Yucatán. In time, along with many other dishes, they attained local popularity in Mérida during the 1970s. In 1984, I moved to work for two years in Chetumal, the capital city of the state of Quintana Roo, located near the border with Belize. As a border city, Chetumal's transient population was markedly multi-ethnic, including indigenous, peasant, and urban people who came there from different parts of Mexico and Central America. Many migrants had moved to the state of Quintana Roo to occupy agricultural lands that had been made available through the federal government's agrarian reform, while others took jobs in the federal or state administration of public services. There, amid people from different Mexican regions, I tasted new dishes, for example, pambazo, a white bread sandwich soaked in the fat of fried chorizo from Toluca and filled with fried sausage and potato chunks. Vendors on the streets sold tacos of fried shredded meat and onion in central Mexican fashion. Also, I tasted, once again, Mexican sopes, a finger food that I had first eaten as a child in 1969, when my parents took me on a road trip to Mexico City. These dishes, which were exotic to me, as they were for many Yucatecans who had not lived outside the peninsula of Yucatán, clearly did not belong in Yucatecan cooking traditions.24
In 1986, I moved to Alberta, Canada. There, my newly acquired friends asked me about Mexican food. For the first time in my life, I began telling people that although I was Mexican, I was in fact from Yucatán, a Mexican state where the food is different from what they had learned to recognize as Mexican in fast-food franchises: hard-shell tacos filled with ground meat, topped with sour cream and melted cheese; chili con carne; and fajitas (I believe that my first encounter with fajitas was in Canada). For my first potluck at the University in Calgary, I was asked to bring a dish that was representative of my ‘culture'. I contributed relleno negro (black stuffing), made of black-dyed ground pork mixed with minced hard-boiled eggs, which is used as stuffing for turkey. Everybody shied away from my dish until a woman from India dared to try it, after I had described the recipe, which she compared to curry, a dish meaningful to her. For my friends, this was unlike anything that they would recognize as Mexican food.25 Twenty years later, in Ithaca, New York, I visited a Mexican taquería (taco shop) with friends. There, as a blast from the past, I found a menu that listed chili con carne, nachos, guacamole, fajitas, burritos, and tacos. Once more I faced the old stereotype of Mexican food served to young stomachs in the city's college town—a culinary stereotype that I had thought to be obsolete in the new post-national order. An obvious question for an anthropologist is, then, how is it that some dishes are selected to be the enduring icons that stand for or represent a nation?
Throughout history, food has been firmly tied to the identity of cultural groups. In medieval Europe, Romans defined Germanic people as savages whose diet favored meat, while they, a ‘civilized' people, preferred vegetables, grains, and sea products (Montanari 1998, 1999a, 1999b). During the period of the growing divide among Mediterranean monotheistic religions, food was turned into a significant marker of identity. Muslims and Jews avoided pork, while Christians ate it. After the Castilians expelled the Moors and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, or forced them to convert to Christianity, the religious and political hierarchy encouraged the consumption of pork as a strategy to identify, through the smells emanating from kitchen hearths, any relapsing converts (Montanari 1999c). Over the centuries, the British and the French deepened the channel separating them by culinary means (Mennell 1985), and the geopolitical categories ‘East' and ‘West' have long been used to encapsulate radical, cultural differences that are also anchored in food (Goody 1999). Within national territories, food was also a marker of territorial and class origins, for example, Parisian haute cuisine avoided the smelly garlic favored by peasants (Mennell 1985). In Italy, northerners who ate polenta, millet, and wheat despised southerners who favored macaroni; the northerners' certainty of their cultural superiority was augmented by their inclination toward meat, as opposed to the southerners' preference for vegetables and grains (Capatti and Montanari 1999). Also, according to Dickie (2008), the Italian nobility despised the peasants' strong smell of onions (although, on occasion, the nobles ate onions, too). Food was thought to represent something about the people who consumed it (hence, the adage ‘you are what you eat’). In fact, when the time of the modern nation-state arrived, with the nation understood as being rooted in the spirit of a people or the fatherland (Herder [1795] 2004, [1796] 2004; Renan [1882] 1996), it was logical to presume that all national cultural productions derived from that particular spirit—and that the national cuisine was foremost among them.
The Nation and the National
There is among Yucatecans a sense of commonality and community that is often expressed by the term lo yucateco (the Yucatecan). Some similarities may be found in specific forms of group identity, for example, ethnic or national. However, I argue that it makes more sense to speak of a more diffuse sense of peoplehood in which other, more concrete categories of identity become blurred and less distinct. Often, there is in nationalist ideologies an axiological center that can be located in a people, sometimes in their language, culture, religion, or territory (A. Smith 1983, 1999). However, as Lie (2004) argues, language, religion, and culture (ethnicity) cannot support the common moral consciousness shared by a people. The contemporary sense of Yucatecan peoplehood, in contrast to other foundational modes of identification, is that it has ties to the Catholic faith (although this a somewhat superficial and unstable connection does not exclude other Christian and non-Christian denominations); to the blend of Castilian Spanish and peninsular Maya; to the mestizaje between Spaniards, Mayas, and other European groups; and to a sentimental attachment to the land. These are decentered attachments tied to changing articulations in the social structure that make Yucatecan identity a rhizomatic construct. Food is but one of the multiple points of entry into an understanding of the construction of Yucatecan
