Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn. Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz

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