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

the rest of Mexico under the values, culture, and worldviews of central Mexican society and disregards the differences among regional cultures, ethnic groups, and social classes. He argued that modern industrial societies have the task to create (quantitative) uniformity where (qualitative) diversity exists (ibid.: 219).¹² The story of cultural conflation and rhetorical homogenization, obviously, did not end in 1950 with Paz's Labyrinth. Other central Mexican intellectuals, for example, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz, have continued the tradition of describing Mexican culture in terms that represent it as a single homogeneous unity, based on the views, values, terms, and codes that are prevalent in central Mexican society. For example, Lomnitz (2001: 111-122) describes the term naco, used by upper-class inhabitants of Mexico City to denigrate lower, uncouth classes, as a term that encapsulates Mexican social relations. In his explanation, the term is derived from the word ‘Totonac', the name of a central Mexican indigenous group, and applied metonymically to all indigenous people and to working-class individuals. More recently, Lomnitz (2005) uses central Mexican views on death to describe the national character and culture. Needless to say, in Yucatán, where Totonacs are a distant and alien reference, the term naco does not have the same currency that it does in Mexico City. Comparing the local relationship to death in a society such as central Mexico, where murders are more frequent, to that of Yucatán, where there is a higher frequency of suicide, requires a more nuanced approach.¹³

      While some central Mexican intellectuals have been busy inventing the teleology and seeking the cultural essence of the Mexican nation, others have been active in the invention and dissemination of icons of mexicanidad (Mexican identity). This long process began in the time of colonial New Spain, when Catholic Spaniards imposed foreign military rule; an alien form of secular administration over humans, commodities, and natural resources; and an array of local saints and different Madonnas (virgin saints) in villages, neighborhoods, and cities throughout the territory. Later, the stories of local saints became partially displaced by the story of apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe. This parochial central Mexican patroness has been turned into the main religious icon of Mexican (and, more recently, of Latin American) society, displacing local saints (Gruzinski 2001). In Yucatán, well into the end of the twentieth century, cities and towns had their own saints who were celebrated on specific dates and whose churches were important sites of regional pilgrimage (Fernández Repetto 1995; Negroe Sierra 2004). For example, Valladolid is the site of residence of the Madonna (virgin saint) of Candelaria (Quintal Avilés 1993); Izamal has its own Madonna, the Virgin Saint of Izamal (Fernández Repetto and Negroe Sierra 2006); Tizimín hosts the Three Magi (Rugeley 2001); and Mérida has, among different important saints, the Christ of Blisters (Negroe Sierra 2004). During the late twentieth century, under the influence of central Mexican television, the proselytizing of a centrally controlled church hierarchy, printed newspapers, and national television, the Virgin Saint of Guadalupe was elevated in Yucatán from her old role as the patron saint of local taxi drivers to her present role as the most revered Madonna of the Catholic pantheon, receiving the blessing of Pope John XXIII as the “Mother of the Americas,” and the emphatic endorsement of Pope John Paul II after his first visit to Mexico and Yucatán in 1979.

      The print media, cinema, radio, and television have also played an important part in the dis-semination of nationalist pedagogy and the subordination of regional and cultural differences. In this homogenizing endeavor, education through broadcast channels controlled by the Ministry of Education, the repetition and routinization of female images of the Patria (fatherland) in almanacs and on the covers of schoolbooks, the rendering of national maps, and the construction of highways contributed to bring Mexicans together into a single national community (Craib 2002, 2004; Florescano 2005; Hayes 2000, 2006; Lewis 2006; Vaughan and Lewis 2006; Waters 2006). Schoolbooks printed for elementary schools and high schools, provided gratuitously by the Ministry of Education, and state-designed broadcasts, such as The National Hour, which radio stations all over the country were required to transmit (all on the same day and at the same hour), promoted the consciousness of belonging to a common nation. Also, with the development of television and cinema, the proliferation of magazines, and the dominance of news agencies at the center of Mexico, selected icons became representative of the national character. Progressively, all Mexicans came to be represented by the macho tequila drinker, wearing a charro hat while singing, laughing, and crying to mariachi and ranchero music; by masked wrestlers; and by the pious weeping women of soap operas (Fein 2001; Greene 2001; Hernández and McAnany 2001; Hershfield 2006; Levi 2001; Noble 2005; Rubenstein 2001). Funded by the state, pictorial arts such as murals displayed images of the nation that conflated utopian visions of modernity and progress with the singularity and unity of the nation (Gallo 2005; López 2006; Rochfort 2006). Furthermore, the central government reinforced the pedagogic aspect of nationalism, erecting in all cities of the republic monuments to honor national heroes taken from the pantheon of central and northern Mexican luminaries (such as Venustiano Carranza, Emiliano Zapata, and Benito Juárez).¹⁴

      The calendar of national festivities celebrates dates such as the independence of New Spain from Spain, but not the independence of Yucatán from Spain (nor any of its three independences from Mexico). It celebrates the Mexican Revolution of 1910 on 20 November, but does not celebrate the arrival of Mexican forces in Yucatán in 1915 to bring what G. Joseph (1982) has called the “revolution from without.” During these celebrations, Yucatecans engage in parades, sing the national anthem, attend artistic events, listen to patriotic discourses, eat nationalist dishes (chiles en nogada, pozole), and drink nationalist tequila—practices that are repeated all over the country, on the same day and at the same time, powering the pedagogic message of nationalist discourses. Those who do not actively participate in the parades can stay home, glued to their television sets, while watching central Mexican national broadcasts of the military parade in Mexico City. These annual events reinforce the consciousness of belonging to a single nation and, as with other forms of nationalist performance, override local and regional histories and sentiments (Costeloe 1997; Duncan 1998; Lorey 1997; Tenorio Trillo 1996).

       The Invention of Yucatecan Peoplehood

      Despite efforts on the part of the central Mexican government and elites to create a homogeneous national culture, Yucatecans locate their roots in an alternative past, different from the unilinear model advanced by Mexican nationalism. Since Yucatán was conquered in a period different from that of the central highlands—the oldest cities, Campeche, Mérida, and Valladolid having been founded in 1540, 1542, and 1543, respectively, almost 50 years after the beginning of the conquest in central Mexico—and since the Spaniards and Creoles found continuous resistance to their encroachment on the peninsular territory until the beginning of the twentieth century (Sullivan 1989), Yucatecans have produced a historical narrative of Yucatán that is distinct from the history of Mexico. Diego de Landa, the Spanish bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yucatán, is considered to be the foremost colonial authority on pre-Hispanic indigenous culture and society in the Yucatán peninsula, rather than the central highlands figure of Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan friar. Hence, the story of pre-conquest Yucatán has been largely shaped by de Landa's self-justifying memoirs (with regard to the suppression of the Maya civilization), which were written in Spain decades after he left Yucatán (see Clendinnen 1987). Later historians of regional matters incorporated de Landa's views into the history of colonial and post-independence times. These colonial and nineteenth-century texts, which can be read as accounts of the trials and tribulations that Spaniards faced during the institution of Yucatecan society, refer to the Maya as one of the obstacles that Spaniards faced in their civilizing endeavors.¹⁵

      Yucatecans possessed a historical awareness that they had emerged as a people shaped in a specific and well-defined territory, in the face of natural and human obstacles (including the intervention of authorities from New Spain). Until the second half of the twentieth century, history was mainly the preserve of educated, elite Yucatecans and not of professional historians (G. Joseph 1986). Regional intellectuals were members of elite families whose children studied abroad, mostly in Europe. In Mérida, religious groups founded educational institutions where Yucatecans learned the latest philosophical and political views originating in Europe (Moseley 1980; Urzaiz 1947). It was Yucatecans' awareness that the peninsula of Yucatán possessed a different history that helped ground a sentiment of peoplehood, which,