Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn

Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857453341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

The state of Yucatán has its own distinct culinary tradition, and local people are constantly thinking and talking about food. They use it as a vehicle for social relations but also to distinguish themselves from "Mexicans." This book examines the politics surrounding regional cuisine, as the author argues that Yucatecan gastronomy has been created and promoted in an effort to affirm the identity of a regional people and to oppose the hegemonic force of central Mexican cultural icons and forms. In particular, Yucatecan gastronomy counters the homogenizing drive of a national cuisine based on dominant central Mexican appetencies and defies the image of Mexican national cuisine as rooted in indigenous traditions. Drawing on post-structural and postcolonial theory, the author proposes that Yucatecan gastronomy - having successfully gained a reputation as distinct and distant from 'Mexican' cuisine - is a bifurcation from regional culinary practices. However, the author warns, this leads to a double, paradoxical situation that divides the nation: while a national cuisine attempts to silence regional cultural diversity, the fissures in the project of a homogeneous regional identity are revealed.

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 cuisine that are evident in the construction of a regional culinary code, one that is morally and politically grounded and stands in opposition to the homogenizing/hegemonic code of Mexican national cuisine. Yucatecan cuisine has thus been invented in the course of the combined efforts of domestic and professional cooks to create a distinct culinary practice that, in the same move, draws the boundaries of the regional gastronomic field.

Multiple and heterogeneous meanings are attributed to food in contemporary society. Food can be a vehicle for ambivalent and paradoxical social practices. Individuals may attach a nostalgic meaning to food, relating it to a sense that a community has been lost as a result of global pressures to become ‘modern'. Some observers regret that the consumption of food in late modernity has been turned into an individualistic endeavor that nurtures personal idiosyncrasies and values over communal bonds (Falk 1994; Fischler [1990] 1995). Individuals may eat with different rhythms (once, twice, thrice, or multiple times a day) and different types of food (following carnivorous, vegetarian, vegan, or raw food diets). They choose their food on the basis of their different territorial and/or cultural reference (local, national, or imported) and value it because it is ‘natural', organic, convenient, preserved, or industrialized. Individuals can also consume their meals in many different places—at the office, in the car, in the garden, in the house, at restaurants, or at fast-food stands). In present-day society, there has been, as well, an explosion in the global-local markets of foods and cuisines that permits a subjective, individual development of taste and distaste for foods, while being unaware of the cultural, but naturalized, understandings of what is edible or inedible, palatable or unpalatable (Long 2004a). Fischler ([1990] 1995) refers to this (post)modern condition as gastro-anomie.

At the same time, in post-colonial, post-national multicultural societies, food has been made into an important marker of group identities. Hence, communities, in seeking to affirm their moral and cultural values, turn food into an iconic representation of their common identity. For example, in contemporary global society, vegetarianism carries moral and symbolic connotations that sustain the imagination of a specific community lifestyle. Challenging the fast tempo of postmodern societies, the transnational Slow Food organization, founded 1989 in northern Italy by Carlo Petrini, seeks to reform society's interaction with food.² Similarly, new movements that advocate organically grown food and farmers' markets have sprung up, stressing the consumption of local foods as opposed to those produced and marketed by transnational corporations (Charles 2001; Nabhan 2001; Petrini 2003; Spencer 2000; Trubek 2008). Revealing the fractures of post-national society, regional food cultures are now being revived as part of a reclamation of regional identities within Mexico, the US, Europe, and other parts of the world. Food is thus being resignified as a site of resistance to the homogenizing cultural strategies inscribed in the imagination of ‘national communities' (Cusak 2000; Fôret 1989; Ohnuki-Tierney 1995).

In Mérida, food has been fashioned into both an instrument for the articulation of meanings affirming a regional identity and a vehicle that can be strategically driven to establish boundaries between those who belong and those who are excluded from Yucatecan culture and society. Consequently, it is important to look at the tension and ambivalence inscribed in processes of identity construction and the politics of food. Yucatán and the Yucatecans stand in a difficult, ambivalent, and ambiguous relationship with Mexico and the Mexicans. This ambivalence sometimes conceals and sometimes reveals the structure of cultural colonization and domination and engenders practical and discursive forms of cultural mimicry and hybridity. The latter, as Bhabha (1994) has suggested, result from the articulation and production of new cultural forms that emerge from the post-colonial opening of interstitial spaces. While different understandings of cultural hybridity co-exist and compete (see, e.g., Pieterse 2001; Puri 2004), during the generation of translocal post-colonial conditions, hybrid culture has become a privileged site for the expression and negotiation of ambivalent practices and discourses.

Despite the record of historically shifting relationships between the colonial province of Yucatán and New Spain, the experience of three Yucatecan attempts to separate from Mexico during the nineteenth century, and the strong regionalism maintained throughout the twentieth century, Mexicans often dismiss Yucatecans' regionalist identity and regularly refer to the state, anachronistically, either as Mexico's ‘province' or its ‘sister republic of Yucatán'. During the formation of the modern Mexican nation-state, Yucatán and Yucatecans have been subject to policies of internal colonialism that seek to veil regional differences. The subordination of the regional to the national is also manifested in the limited inclusion of regional dishes in the national cookbook. This inclination is illustrated by Long-Solís and Vargas (2005), whose treatment of the food cultures of Mexico reduce all regional culinary practices to variations of a national (indigenous) cuisine. As they express it, “Mexico has many cuisines, some dishes so different from others that one finds it hard to believe that they all stem from the same cultural tradition” (ibid.: 97; emphasis added). They recognize the existence of six regional areas in Mexico, based on “gastronomic rather than political boundaries” (ibid.: 98). These areas are northern Mexico (extending from Baja California to Tamaulipas, including the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo León); the Pacific Coast; western Mexico; central Mexico (including Morelos, Puebla, Tlaxcala, Hidalgo, and Mexico City); the isthmus of Tehuantepec (including Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Tabasco); and the “Maya area” (which includes the three states of the peninsula of Yucatán) (ibid.: 97-121). Their description of Yucatecan food (which, in their view, includes the food of the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán, thus maintaining the colonial memory of the province of Yucatán) is rather brief—one page, compared to two pages for Mexico City alone, and somewhat less than two pages for the whole Maya region, in contrast to over eight pages dedicated to the center of Mexico. The authors highlight foods in which corn, beans, achiote, and chili peppers dominate, these being the paradigmatic ingredients of ‘indigenous' cooking (ibid.: 119-121). In this sense, their text reflects a central Mexican bias that perceives Yucatecan food in terms of indigenous Maya food. Yet, as I show throughout this volume, Yucatecan cuisine has been constructed around its cosmopolitism, with the result that the contributions of Maya cooking have been marginalized. The reductive characterization of Yucatecan cuisine to the food of the Maya is neither recent nor exclusive to these authors, as I discuss below (see also López Morales 2009). In fact, as I argue in this chapter, this characterization emerges from a long history of national cultural homogenization in which the culture and values of central Mexican elites have been turned into the representation of Mexican culture.

There is a second source of ambivalence and tension in the constitution of the contemporary post-colonial culinary order. At the same time that the invention/creation of a Yucatecan regional cuisine can be understood as a means to affirm a regional identity against the cultural colonial force of central Mexican culture, it can also be seen as an instrument for the internal cultural colonization and domination of subordinate groups within the region itself. In confirming the distinctiveness of Yucatecan gastronomy, one variant of Yucatecan identity is locally affirmed, replicating the power structure established among different food cultures. While Yucatecan cuisine may be viewed as the blend of several cultural culinary traditions, the roots of those different cuisines are obscured. In the following section, I discuss the historical and socio-cultural transformations that have contributed to the construction of these divergent cultural paths.

Yucatán and Mexico: Stories of a Difficult Relationship

When I first saw, in 1998, a gigantic Mexican flag planted in the hotel zone of Cancún, my first thought was that since tourists encountered few Mexican nationals at this resort (other than as chambermaids or hotel employees), the Mexican government saw fit to remind them that they were in Mexican territory. Soon afterwards, in May 1999, along with all Meridans, I found another monumental Mexican flag, this time erected in the parking lot of a central Mexican department store (today with an appended shopping mall), on Mérida's exit to the port of Progreso. This time, it could be read as an overt political act, since the candidates running for governor of the state had aligned with opposing sides in the Yucatecan divide. The National Action Party (entrepreneurial and right-wing Catholic) sided with the Mexican nation, holding the position that Yucatecans are first and foremost Mexicans. The Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (with a rural base) chose to emphasize the autonomy of the state against centralist intervention. For them, the determination of Yucatecan destiny should be in the hands of Yucatecans. The giant flag that had been planted by the federal government, ostensibly to remind Yucatecans that they are all Mexicans, was a thorn in some Yucatecans' skin, confirming their belief that they have been subjected to Mexican interventionism and colonialism throughout their history.³

During those politically charged years, as a result of being mobilized by the polarization between regional and national sentiments, Yucatecans responded to the monumental flag and other nationalist measures with a proliferation of small Yucatecan flags (printed or stuck onto license plates or waving from car antennas) and larger flags (hung from balconies or at the entrances of businesses). Key chains and beer glasses were printed with the Yucatecan flag, as were T-shirts and baseball caps (along with the legends “Republic of Yucatán” and “Proudly Yucatecan”). At elementary schools and high schools, children chanted the Yucatecan anthem (sometimes instead of, sometimes before or following the Mexican anthem). Mexicans and those Yucatecans who had strong nationalist feelings were upset at this turn of events. Some wondered why Yucatecans were allowed to have their own flag and their own anthem. While Mexicans asked these questions, many Yucatecans waved their flags in the streets of Mérida.

Independence from Spain and the Conflict of the Elites

During colonial times, Yucatán had a shifting location within the territories of the recently conquered continent.⁴ At times, it was subordinated to the administrative powers of New Spain, located in the city of Mexico. Sometimes it was granted autonomy, and, for other short periods, it was under the authority of the province of Guatemala or under the administration of Honduras. Throughout their colonial history, Yucatecans were mostly left alone and functioned under de facto autonomous rule (Alisky 1980; Campos García 2002). Theirs was a position of fiscal privilege. Characterized by widespread poverty and infertile soils (especially around Mérida), the region was inhabited by Maya groups who resisted (some up to the present time) the presence of the Spanish conquerors. In response to the grievances of Spanish residents in the peninsula, the Spanish Crown granted them fiscal and customs exemptions to compensate for these and other obstacles to their economic welfare (no good soils to grow grains, no minerals to mine, no ‘Old World' products to market) (Moseley 1980). Positioned advantageously between the Caribbean basin and the Gulf of Mexico, Yucatecan ports slowly developed as trade posts. When groups of Creoles in New Spain and Yucatán (as well as in other regions of the American continent) began to discuss independence claims, the Spanish Crown promulgated the Constitution of Cadiz, seeking to ease trade and the administrative rule of the colonies and hence to deter the impetus toward independence. The Constitution of Cadiz preserved the Yucatecan privileges (Reid 1979).

New Spain declared its independence in 1810 and engaged in a brutal war of separation from Spain. Hostilities also took place between rival factions to secure power in the new republic. Yucatecans, still enjoying their privileges and autonomy, kept themselves to the margins of the Mexican War of Independence. In 1821, Spain finally conceded independence to Mexico and, a few months later, although the Yucatecans had neither requested nor fought for it, to the province of Yucatán.⁵ Yucatán was granted independence as a new republic—the Republic of Yucatán (Campos García 2002). Correspondingly, during a short period, Mexico and Yucatán related to each other as foreign nations, and Mexico levied import taxes and set trade barriers on products coming from Yucatán (Reid 1979: 33).

During the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Caribbean basin was beset by frequent commercial and military conflicts among different European powers. Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands were all vying for domination and commercial control of the region (Hinckley 1963; Sluiter 1948; Stern 1988). At an early stage, following its independence from Spain, Mexico promised to create a federation of republics, and when in 1821 Yucatán joined Mexico, it did so as the Republic of Yucatán, with autonomous power. However, elites in central Mexico fought with each other, and when the government adopted centralist measures subordinating the different regions, Yucatán declared its independence. Yucatán first remained independent from Mexico but then rejoined the Mexican Republic in 1823 without surrendering its autonomy. In 1841, when administrative policies shifted to enhance central powers, Yucatecans again declared their independence from Mexico, remaining independent until 1843, when the central government offered a new treaty of peace and reunion that, according to Williams (1929: 134; see also Alisky 1980), was dictated by Yucatecans and protected regional instead of Mexican interests. Since the Mexican government did not respect the terms of the treaty, Yucatecans voted again for their independence from Mexico in 1846. During this period of independence, a faction of the regional elites, overwhelmed by the so-called Caste War of Yucatán began flirting with the governments of Spain, England, and the United States, seeking annexation, while other factions sought outright independence. When their attempts failed, they were constrained to accept, in 1848, their reincorporation into Mexico, this time under central Mexican terms (Williams 1929: 143).

This final incorporation marked the beginning of the decline of Yucatecans' efforts at independence and the temporary silencing of their autonomous, regionalist identity. In 1862, the federal government of Mexico, recognizing the local power of factional elites located in both Mérida and the city of Campeche, first divided Yucatán into two different states, Campeche and Yucatán, the Campechanos having already declared unilaterally their autonomy from Yucatán in 1858 (see Wells and Joseph 1992: 182). Then, it granted portions of the Yucatecan territory to Guatemala and British Honduras and, as a strategy to deal with the Maya rebels of the peninsula, created in 1902 the federally administered territory of Quintana Roo, which became a full state in 1974 (Konrad 1991) at a time when the beach resort of Cancún was under construction. Since the time before independence, Yucatán was obligated to pay Mexico for military ‘protection', creating a fiscal debt that would later translate into the economic dependence of the region and its subordination to the Mexican Republic (Campos García 2004). However, in contrast to other Mexican states, where central elites overpowered regional ones, Yucatecan elites continued to develop their own strategies to control the resources of the state of Yucatán.

In a combination of global market forces that have been well-described and analyzed by different scholars (see, e.g., Brannon and Joseph 1991; Carstersen and Roazen 1992; G. Joseph 1986; Labrecque and Breton 1982; Moseley and Terry 1980b; Villanueva Mukul et al. 1990; Wells 1985; Wells and Joseph 1996), the Yucatecan elite of the late nineteenth century gained control of henequen production in Yucatán and dominated the global market for these natural fibers from the end of the 1800s to the first decade of the twentieth century. Their domination was approved of and encouraged by the US company International Harvester, which controlled prices and the marketing of Yucatecan fibers (used for twine and paper pulp) in the US (Carstersen and Roazen 1992; Wells 1985). The boom economy that emerged from the cultivation of henequen, from the local production of its fibers, and from the international market was important in supporting regional elites. Viewed as an exemplar of Yucatecan civilization and progress, their success was put on display by central Mexican científicos seeking to promote an enlightened image of Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship (Wells 1996; Wells and Joseph 1992).

During this period of economic expansion, Yucatecan elites sent their family members abroad, primarily to the United States, Cuba, and Europe, to obtain their education. The market with the Caribbean was enhanced, and when the central government had to deal with rebellions in the north, they sent Yaqui prisoners to work as indentured laborers in the henequen plantations. Similarly, when Yucatecans had to deal with the insurrection of Maya groups within the peninsula, they sold Maya prisoners as slaves to Cuban plantations (Rodríguez Piña 1990). To solve its labor shortage, the region attracted immigrants from Cuba, Germany, the Ottoman Empire (today Lebanon and Syria), Spain, and other Mexican regions. The arrival of these groups contributed importantly to the cultural mosaic that today characterizes Yucatecan society.⁶

The economic boom of the peninsula encouraged the import of commodities from Europe and the US. Some of the main ports in the Caribbean...