an exception to this experience (Mallon 1995). As I have already shown, when central Mexican elites gained control of the state, they sought (and continue to seek) the construction of a homogeneous nation, whereby cultural affinities are emphasized and differences silenced (Alonso 1994). In consequence, Yucatán's particular history of strong relations with the Caribbean, the US, and Europe has been politically and historically silenced. This process of subordination and cultural colonization is reflected in the construction of a national cuisine that analogously silences Yucatán's regional specificities.
I agree with Lie (2004) that modern society presents individuals with the possibility of creating multiple attachments and belonging to many strata. In this sense, modern peoplehood is “a floating signifier [that serves] to denote disparate conceptualizations about its principal predicates and substantive meanings” (ibid.: 269). This understanding allows for a broad definition of peoplehood that shares attributes with other forms of identity but which is none of them. Lie (ibid.: 1) writes: “By modern peoplehood I mean an inclusionary and involuntary group identity with a putatively shared history and distinct way of life. It is inclusionary because everyone in the group, regardless of status, gender, or moral worth, belongs. It is involuntary because one is born into an ascriptive category of peoplehood…It is not merely a population—an aggregate, an external attribution, an analytical category—but, rather, a people—a group, an internal conviction, a self-reflexive identity.” The basis of peoplehood is not found in religion, language, or territory, but in “common consciousness” (ibid.: 15). Restricted forms of peoplehood, what Lie calls “minority peoplehood,” can be traced to forms of “majority peoplehood,” from which minority groups fashion strategies affirming their own identity against that of the majority (ibid.: 251). As I have already suggested, the majority peoplehood that Yucatecans have taken as a prototype for their own peoplehood is not that of Mexico, but rather that of modern European nations, such as France and England.
Lie's definition of peoplehood both coincides with and supplements B. Anderson's (1983) definition of the nation as an imagined community. A common consciousness can be created through different media and the constitution of a public sphere. It is by means of the latter, instituted as a national forum, that problems, issues, and solutions are conceptualized, instrumented, and legitimated. As R. Smith (2003) points out, the chosen narrative form is often that of history, which typically includes an account of the emergence of a group in ancestral times and of the perils and tribulations experienced during the foundation of its collective self-consciousness.27 At the same time, history endorses the construction of a national identity that, at least until the second half of the twentieth century, silenced minority forms of peoplehood, imposing consistency where it was found missing (see also Duara 1995). The political invention of modern nation-states has often relied on the assimilation of difference into the culture, social organization, values, and forms of administration and political control of a dominant center.
Cuisine and food have often played an important part in the iconic representation of the values, essence, and soul of a particular society. Thus, a growing literature explores the different instances in which modern nation-states have reformed their food, constructing national cuisines in order to attain unity by reducing and subordinating the diversity of cultures within the territory of the state to the culture of the metropolis. Ferguson (2004), for example, has shown how the emergence and consolidation of French haute cuisine was tightly associated with the values and taste preferences of Parisian society. This was a society that enjoyed the benefits of a centralized structure that regulated national and colonial resources and facilitated the flow of foodstuffs from all regions of France into Paris. Even the United States, a nation built by immigrants from different regions of the world (some forced to immigrate, such as African slaves and Asian indentured laborers) and by indigenous groups, has attempted to reduce the culinary diversity within the territory of the nation-state to the taste preferences and values of urban, white, Protestant middle and upper classes. The latter, promoting the scientific nutritional, rational, economic, and moral value of bland diets and the convenience and safety of processed, industrially produced foodstuffs, sought to ‘educate' the immigrant poor arriving from different European and American countries, encouraging them to abandon their ‘traditional' diets in favor of the US diet (see, e.g., Levenstein 1988, 1993; Sack 2000; Shapiro 1986). At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, some intellectuals and politicians within the modernizing Mexican state, similarly motivated by positivist science and economic rationality, sought to promote changes in the diet of Mexican rural peasants and indigenous communities. Accepting that wheat was the staple of civilizations, these intellectuals and politicians resignified corn as the food that prevented Mexicans from becoming modern (Pilcher 1998). However, in Mexico, as in France and Italy (Camporesi 1970; Capatti and Montanari 1999), the post-colonial governments of the nineteenth century and the post-revolutionary governments of the twentieth century sought to create a national cuisine that invoked the indigenous past. In Mexico, this was accomplished by resorting to Creole ingenuity and severing the country's culinary dependence on the European metropolis. The Mexican cuisine thus invented was tied rhetorically to an ancestral indigenous tradition that privileged ingredients, techniques, and components (such as moles, chili peppers, beans, squash, tomatoes, and corn) as the defining elements of the Mexican culinary tradition.
That this model is still hegemonic can be attested by developments surrounding the creation of the Mundo Maya (Maya World) Tourism Fair, a transnational tourism project. For example, tourism entrepreneurs and state bureaucrats produced a manual for tourism operators that describes the foods of the different regions included in the project (the states of Yucatán, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Chiapas in Mexico and Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras) as being based primarily on beans, corn, squash, and chili peppers, disregarding the important differences that characterize actual Maya culinary traditions. Mexican cookbooks have also promoted this understanding of Mexican cuisine, seeking to legitimize their claims to authenticity by locating their roots in indigenous cultures. Thus, in these books, it is the cuisine of central Mexican regions and sometimes the moles from the state of Oaxaca that receive more attention and space, as the local gastronomy in these places is usually represented as being dominated by indigenous recipes and ingredients.
In contrast, Yucatecans imagine a Yucatecan identity that is built upon a common consciousness derived from a common local history, a common language (Castilian Spanish with Maya inflections), a common religion (Catholicism), and common cultural productions (music, poetry, literature, theatre, food), but with the understanding that these commonalities are the creative blend of many different cultural traditions. Food plays here an important part, as Yucatecan food has been fashioned by culinary influences that are divorced from Mexican cuisine and tied to peninsular Caribbean connections. Historically, food has thus been turned into a significant marker of the differences between Yucatecan and Mexican cultures.
Nationalism and Internal Cultural Colonialism
Any Yucatecan can recognize so-called Mexican food whenever she or he sees it. As it is everywhere else, cultural difference is grounded in affect-laden stereotypes (Geertz 2000a; Herzfeld 1997; Pilcher 2004). It is not a matter of whether or not Yucatecans have been exposed to Mexican foods. Yucatecan elites have traveled abroad to acquire education, to enlighten themselves through ‘grand tours', or to secure and maintain commercial ties, but they have also traveled to other Mexican regions. Also, peasants and laborers have lived in other Mexican regions as part of a migratory workforce. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, despite the existence since the 1920s of a regional university in Mérida (and since the 1990s of several private universities), many Yucatecans still relocate to Mexico City to follow licenciatura (professional degree) and graduate studies. In addition, Yucatecan intellectuals and writers who aspire to achieve recognition beyond the region have moved to Mexico City to profit from the centralization of publishing resources (Rodríguez-Hernández 2007; Shrimpton Masson 2006, 2010) or to get involved in national politics. Thus, when these Yucatecans return home, they bring along newly acquired tastes and recipes, and sometimes, during private parties, they cook Mexican dishes such as pozole, sopes, chilorio, or mole. Some returnees, having acquired a metropolitan cosmopolitanism,
