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

inherit her ‘secret' recipe. She told me that she had developed her own recipe, taking her mother's dish as a starting point, but later including a different technique and adding an ingredient that she had learned about from a friend. Although not all regional versions are identical, her rendition of the dish fits the widespread Yucatecan understanding of the recipe, and most Yucatecans would probably recognize it as a variation on a commonly accepted culinary theme.

      Thus, in order to satisfy our longing for the dish during that season of the year, especially during the weeks that precede Christmas Eve (when we would share our own Christmas dinner with relatives and friends), a party made up of myself, my wife, and some friends visited Yucatecan seafood restaurants and Mexican restaurants located in Mérida that annually list the dish in their menus, along with other central Mexican Christmas dishes, such as romeritos (see the glossary). In general, we found that the cod dish was in some places saltier, while in others the sauce was thicker. In some restaurants, the dish was spicy hot, while in others it was too bland for our taste. Overall, the different versions of the dish available in Yucatán looked alike, but they were unlike what my friend had cooked in Chiapas. In its different Yucatecan presentations, the cod had been coarsely shredded or cut into pieces and simmered in a tomato sauce with olives, with or without capers, with or without slices of pimiento (which some cooks blend into the sauce), and with or without croutons (or golden-fried slices of French bread). In addition, it was sometimes accompanied by refried black beans and sometimes not. Flavors and aromas varied according to the quality of the cod, the type of olive oil used, and whether the tomato sauce was freshly made or employed processed tomatoes.¹⁷

      In a contrasting experience, sometime during the winter of 2001-2002, after learning of my research topic, a friend invited me to watch her mother cook cod Biscayne-style. She let me know that her mother's recipe was acclaimed as excellent by relatives and had been passed down in her family from one generation to the next. Her own sisters followed the same recipe for Christmas Eve dinner. In contrast to the willingness of my friend's mother to allow me to watch and film her while she cooked, my wife's aunt never allowed anybody to be present when she cooked the dish, even though help was offered when she began complaining about the heavy work that the dish demands of a person her age. She would tell us, every year, that her recipe was extremely elaborate and time-consuming. The preparation of the meal takes three days of work: soaking and washing the salt off the cod, boning and shredding it, frying in olive oil the different ingredients separately, mixing them in a specific order, and slowly simmering the whole before Christmas Eve supper. In contrast to her accounts, when I arrived at my friend's house, her mother had already prepped the cod—desalting, boning, and shredding it all in one morning—and she was about to start cooking. It took her less than two hours to have the dish simmering in a pot in a generous amount of Spanish olive oil.¹⁸ Somewhat surprised, I asked her whether the recipe she followed that day was a fast version that differed from what she did for Christmas Eve. She responded that it was her only version, the one that she and her sisters learned from her mother and that they all follow, including her daughters (adjusting this or that ingredient to satisfy each husband's or child's taste). When she finished the dish, the cod was bathed in Spanish olive oil, mixed with slices of tomato, sweet red pepper, olives, and fried garlic. I had witnessed the preparation of a version that was very different from those that I had previously encountered in Yucatán (at other friends' homes and at local restaurants) and from what I had been served at my friend's house in Chiapas.¹⁹

      The different elaborations of the same dish—within Yucatán in particular and Mexico in general—illustrate the heterogeneity of the culinary field and its ties to the gastronomic field. On the one hand, within the Yucatecan region itself, one can find different versions of the same home-cooked dish that not only are considered acceptable for family members and friends but also are turned into the standard for judging other versions of the same dish. In this respect, the Yucatecan culinary field allows for the intersection of Yucatecan recipes with recipes from other regional Mexican and international culinary ‘traditions'. On the other hand, we find that the inscription of the dish in Yucatecan cookbooks and restaurant menus imposes a paradigmatic structure on the recipe that allows only minimal differences. Hence, although it is a seasonal dish from the regional culinary field, restaurant chefs and cooks have, to some degree, ‘fixed' the recipe, making one version more acceptable to regional consumers, with their aesthetic-based perception of the dish. Among other things, it must use a particular brand of olive oil, it must have been cooked with epazote leaves, and the ingredients have to be fried separately before being stewed together. The combination of ingredients and cooking techniques results in recognizable and desirable flavors, aromas, textures, and colors that set a standard to be met. A friend once cooked the same dish, but, seeking to save on olive oil, he did not fry all of the ingredients. Some guests who had eaten the food complained to me later that they found its texture to be odd, a result that they attributed to the failure to fry the ingredients.

      There are, in addition, other arenas where the tension, and sometimes conflict, between Yucatecan and Mexican cultures is evident. In the contemporary post-national, post-colonial order, population flows force groups to enter into contact and to engage in negotiations over their different world-views and value systems (Kaplan 1996). The post-colonial is a complex sphere of interaction in which the experience of central Mexicans migrating into different Mexican regions cannot be compared conceptually to the forms of cultural subordination experienced, for example, by Mexican immigrants (from the center or elsewhere) in the United States. Sometimes central Mexicans who move into different regions feel entitled, as carriers of the cultural and colonial values embodied in national cultural icons and institutions, to preferential treatment in all domains of public interaction. In the contemporary multicultural environment that characterizes Mérida and Yucatán, local people sometimes describe ‘Mexicans' as a people who demand to be treated as guests, but on their own terms, rather than adapting to the local code. Since this situation is lived as a form of cultural violence, the relationship between immigrants and local people is charged with tension, constituting a hostile context for intercultural negotiation.

       Food and Identity

      In 2003, a disquieting note appeared in a regional newspaper. It was revealed that a Japanese company had obtained legal, proprietary rights over the name cochinita pibil. Cochinita pibil is one of the iconic dishes by which Yucatecan gastronomy is recognized, not only within the Mexican territory, but also abroad (Ayora-Diaz 2010a). How could this have happened? What would the consequences be? Were Yucatecans to be forced to use a different denomination to name, sell, and purchase their own food—a food that they had created? Xenophobic invectives flew during conversations among friends. The commotion slowly turned into a subdued irritability when, in later days, follow-up articles modified the original information: the company was not Japanese, but a Mexican firm owned by a Mexican entrepreneur of Japanese origin. Another note relayed that the name that was legally protected was not cochinita pibil, but rather La Cochinita. Moreover, it was a restaurant chain specializing in pork recipes from different Mexican regions, and its menu included the Yucatecan cochinita pibil.20 Some people never saw the follow-up shorter notes that corrected the original misinformation, and years later people would still complain about the ‘Asian invasion' or the Mexican will to appropriate dishes that are tied to Yucatecan regional culture. This widespread moral panic highlights the affective attachment that Yucatecans display regarding regional culinary productions. Cochinita pibil, along with other regional dishes, is locally taken to be representative of a particular Yucatecan sensibility. For Yucatecans, it is undoubtedly a Yucatecan dish derived from a Yucatecan ‘tradition'.²¹ It is so much a part of their Yucatecan-ness that Yucatecans believe they are justified in being upset at the appropriations and transformations that the dish has suffered at the hands of Mexicans and other non-Yucatecans.

      In everyday life, the terms ‘Yucatecans' and ‘Mexicans' are often used as if they possess an objective content, that is, as if they reveal some ‘thing' about the identity (the nature, the essence) of a person, a group of people, a culture, or the food of a people. Many models and explanations of identity have been formulated in the social sciences and the humanities (Hall and du Gay 1996; Rajchman 1995; Ricoeur 1992). In anthropology, Geertz's (1973) discussion of the cognate concept of the ‘person' challenged the universality of its North Atlantic understanding,