birth of Mexican national cuisine, as both Pilcher and Juárez López have shown, was contemporaneous with the production of a variety of textual strategies deployed during the invention of an imagined Mexican national community. Juárez López (2000) examines the strategies whereby the Creole elite, before independence, sought the foundations of New Spain's cuisine in the natural environment of the continent and in the contributions of indigenous cooks and ingredients in the constitution of culinary practices that differed from those of Spain. In turn, Pilcher (1998) analyzes the creation of a nationalist cuisine and the cultural negotiations of the elite between enlightened/rational scientific ideals, on the one hand, and political nationalism, on the other. The end result has been the creation of a national cuisine that, at least rhetorically, is anchored in indigenous culinary practices, values, and taste preferences. During the construction of a national cuisine, regional cuisines were either co-opted or silenced by central Mexican institutions and media. ‘Yucatecan' 8 cuisine was placed in an ambivalent position: located at the margins of the Mexican nation, its existence was silenced by the political power of nationalist discourse. At the same time, as I will be arguing, it was locally conceived and born as the cosmopolitan offspring of Caribbean and European intercourses and exchanges in which members of the Yucatecan elites were engaged.9 Distant from and going against the Mexican culinary blueprint, Yucatecan cooks favored recipes and ingredients that were available in the peninsular lowlands and semi-tropical environment and appropriated and reformed European, Caribbean, and South American recipes, creating a culinary tradition that diverged from that of central Mexico.
If central Mexican nationalist intellectuals chose ideologically and rhetorically to accentuate the roots of national cuisine in the indigenous past, Yucatecan's intelligentsia stressed the cosmopolitan connections of their regional food. Some authors have made all-sweeping generalizations about a rather homogeneous ‘Mexican' cooking tradition. For instance, Adapon (2008: 2) states: “Living in different Mexican households, I realized that…[v]ariations of chilaquiles were normal everyday fare.” She adds: “Mexican cuisine is 90 per cent indigenous and 10 per cent other influences” (ibid.: 10). However, in Yucatecan gastronomy one finds, instead of fajitas, moles, enchiladas, and chilaquiles, dishes such as papadzules (minced hard egg tacos in a sauce of roasted and ground squash seeds and epazote, covered with roasted tomato sauce); queso relleno (Dutch Edam cheese stuffed with ground pork mixed with capers, almonds, raisins, onion, and spices); cochinita pibil (pork marinated in Seville orange juice, annatto seeds, allspice, and other spices, wrapped in banana leaves and baked in a pit-hole); or escabeche de pavo (turkey stewed with onion, cumin, oregano, garlic, allspice, bay leaves, and vinegar). In contrast to Mexican cooking, and despite incorporating some indigenous recipes and ingredients, Yucatecan cuisine stresses a cosmopolitan approach rather than indigenous connections in its regionally hegemonic contemporary representation.
The collection of food recipes that I find encompassed under the term ‘Yucatecan gastronomy' is not an eclectic assortment of recipes drawn from different culinary traditions, but recipes that sprang from the co-existence, intersection, and blending of diverse culinary cultures in response to the food preferences of local people. At an early stage, domestic Yucatecan cooks and their nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century cookbooks displayed an all-embracing openness to international influences and included recipes from North American, European, Caribbean, and even Mexican cuisines. In their homes, cooks (primarily the female members of households) sought to appropriate dishes, ingredients, and recipes that confirmed them, their families, and their immediate circle of friends as cosmopolitan in orientation and intent. The display of culinary inclusiveness enhanced regional self-esteem, publicly showcasing the economic power and cultural cosmopolitanism, the sophistication and worldliness of the regional elites. However, their culinary practices did not yet amount to a regional gastronomic tradition in the contemporary sense of the term. Yucatecan ‘sophistication' was deployed against other regional cuisines. In Yucatán, as I show below, some dishes created by local cooks were chosen, gradually, to represent the cultural uniqueness of the region. Later on, during the twentieth century, they were gathered into a canonical collection of recipes, techniques, technology, ingredients, and eating etiquette that provided the ground for the invention and affirmation of a distinctive Yucatecan gastronomy. Many Yucatecans have progressively come to see the culinary field from which Yucatecan gastronomy emerged as the embodiment of regional culture and values and as fundamentally different from Mexican cuisine.
The creation of an imagined national Mexican community involved attempts to silence regional differences throughout the territory of the Mexican state. Yucatecans (as well as the inhabitants of other Mexican regions) were particularly active in forging a regional identity that would counter the homogenizing cultural policies of central Mexican society. As I will elaborate in chapter 1, during the two-centuries-long period that began with the independence of New Spain and of the colonial province of Yucatán from Spanish domination in 1821, central Mexican intellectuals and politicians were involved in the design and invention of a ‘modern' nation—Mexico. At the same time, Yucatecan intellectuals disputed whether Yucatán should join Mexico or remain a separate republic. Central Mexicans, in the meantime, launched the process of ideological homogenization of the country by imposing cultural icons that were primarily meaningful to the inhabitants of the central highlands over those favored by the inhabitants of the different regions (now states of a federal republic). Taking this historical context into account, I argue that, in practice, these symbolic impositions produced effects that translated into additional modes of subordination: the history of the region was politically converted into a minor episode in the grand narrative of the emergence of Mexico (Craib 2002; de Gortari Rabiela 1982; Florescano 2005; Gruzinski 2001; Tenorio Trillo 1998). Central Mexican institutions initiated maneuvers intended to ensure regional economic dependency on central institutions, and local powers were placed under the surveillance of the Mexican army (Campos García 2004). In consequence, regional cultural productions that differed from those established and promoted in central Mexico were dismissed as close-minded and parochial. However, during the period spanning from the second half of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, Yucatecan elites monopolized the production of henequen natural fiber, accumulating sufficient power to oppose central Mexican designs that they perceived as contrary to regional interests, while still maintaining political and economic negotiations with Porfirio Díaz's progress-oriented regimes (Alisky 1980; Baklanoff 1980; G. Joseph 1986; Wells 1982). As Vargas Cetina argues (2010a, 2010b), Yucatecan elites had accumulated both money and power, allowing them to affirm and disseminate their own cultural preferences as characteristic of Yucatecan society at large. Literature, music, and food became important markers during the invention of a Yucatecan regional identity that stood (and still stands) in opposition to Mexican culture.
The Regional Foodscape: Post-national and Post-colonial Configurations
Throughout this book, I examine how the historical and political divide between Yucatecan and Mexican culture is often played out in the cultural arena. Within this framework, food occupies a prominent position. As its identity (and difference) from other culinary forms is emphasized, it becomes a powerful marker in the recognition, inclusion, and exclusion of im/possible interlocutors in everyday forms of conviviality and commensality (Ayora-Diaz 2009). Yucatecans are particularly proud of local virtues, and hospitality is paramount among them. However, regionally, hospitality practices are often redefined and restructured in order to deal with unwanted guests. In chapters 1 and 3, drawing from Derrida (2000), I discuss how power relations pre-date and inscribe moral and political ambivalence into practices of hospitality in post-colonial society. In Yucatán, understandings of hospitality are continuously negotiated and revised to make comprehensible the shifting forms of Yucatecan-outsider interaction. It is in the context of a regional politics of identity grounded in the historical resistance to central Mexican society (and in the negotiation of local-national relations) that different codes of hospitality clash, are negotiated, and must be continuously revised and resignified.
