Regionalism and the Institution of the Yucatecan Gastronomic Field

granted Mexican cuisine heritage status, thereby underscoring the role of food as an indissoluble bond between the country's inhabitants. International recognition of how Mexican food has impacted consolidation of national identity is simply a way of legitimising an ancient and extensive tradition of stories and myths, which have over the past 200 years forged the image of a cuisine that is authentic, unique and representative of the entire national territory. The idea of a culinary culture with ancient roots -which dates from pre-Hispanic times -that has harmoniously integrated two great civilisations of the Iberian and the Aztec -has validated during the last 200 years the originality and prestige of Mexican cuisine.

Diálogo, 2015

Two recently published books examine the concept of "Mexican food" in the U.S. and Mexico. Gustavo Arellano's Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America (2012) provides a readable journalistic examination of Mexican food in the U.S., and Jeffrey Pilcher's Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (2012) offers an academic study of Mexican food presentations in a global setting by an established scholar. Each offers an entry for the field of Mexican food studies. This reading examines correlations of power in the colonial process and development of contemporary cuisine, drawing the conclusion that the concept of "Mexican food" is multifaceted, and at certain times and places, debatable.

Etnofoor, 2012, 24(2):57-76, 2013

Social and Cultural Geography

Restaurants and their attendant practices are high-profile sites at which regional and national cuisines are experienced, experimented with, and negotiated. In particular, they are important settings for the consumption and production of national identity—a crucial space through which to understand the coalescing of the material and representational. This article focuses specifically on the production side of the pairing through an examination of restaurants that are part of a prominent culinary movement (alta cocina mexicana) in the Mexican border town of Tijuana. The central argument of the paper is that Tijuana's culinary scene is indicative of the reassertion of boundaries between Mexico and the USA through the intentional rejection of northern stereotypes of Mexican food. The emphasis on traditional Mexican cuisine, rather than an internationally hybrid cosmopolitan approach, suggests that chefs are adhering to a set of rules that reflect Mexicanness. Restaurants propagating alta cocina mexicana work to differentiate the border and act as social devices which both complicate conventional understandings of Mexican food and disrupt hegemonic discourses of the border as productive of hybridity. Los restaurantes así como las prácticas vinculadas a ellos son sitios notables en que se vivencian, experimentan y negocian la cocina nacional y regional. En particular, ellos son escenarios importantes para el consumo y la producción de la identidad nacional – un espacio clave por medio del cual se puede comprender la fusión de lo material con lo representacional. Este artículo específicamente se centra en lo que atañe a la producción de tal fusión. Para ello explora los restaurantes que son parte del prominente movimiento de alta cocina mexicana en la ciudad mexicana fronteriza de Tijuana. Este artículo sostiene que la escena culinaria en Tijuana es indicativa de la reafirmación de los límites entre México y Estados Unidos mediante el intencional rechazo de los estereotipos norteños de la comida mexicana. El énfasis que se le otorga a la cocina tradicional mexicana en detrimento de la versión internacional, híbrida y cosmopolita, sugiere que los chefs adhieren a una serie de reglas que reflejan mexicanidad. Los restaurantes que propagan la alta cocina mexicana funcionan como diferenciadores de la frontera y actúan como mecanismos sociales que, a la vez que complejizan las acepciones convencionales de la comida mexicana, perturban los discursos hegemónicos que conciben a las fronteras como producto de la hibridez.

Gender & History, 2022

This article seeks to reframe the stakes of current discourses at the intersection of Mexican cooking and modernist gastronomy. Through a decolonial approach to gender and visuality, (counter)visuality, this article demonstrates how and to what extent 'modern' and 'traditional' Mexican cookery co-constitute and valorise one another, and how gendered expressions of culinary stewardship have become underscored by the persistent imaginary of the 'cocinera tradicional' [traditional female cook]. The article centres on the mutual dependency of two case studies: renowned Mexican chef Enrique Olvera and the popular YouTube channel host of 'De mi rancho a tu cocina', Doña Ángela.

Review of International American Studies, 2020

Translocality as originally used by Arjun Appadurai was an evocative con- cept that appealed immediately to anthropologists and others who study global-local connections. Its use has been widely adopted in religious studies, music studies, migration studies and food studies, but it has con- tinued to be rather undefined, which makes it difficult to apply to local data. Here, from the study of local food and gastronomy in the Mexi- can state of Yucatán, I investigate how translocality can help us look at the global in the local and the local in the global. I propose that when it comes to studying food and gastronomy in the Yucatán, translocality can help us understand the ways in which industrialization, which became both a production model and a way of life in the United States and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, rapidly extended to food everywhere, and Yucatecans fondly took to the consumption of industrially produ- ced and processed foods, incorporating them into the local gastronomy. The results, in terms of taste, have been extensive but are not particu- lar to the Yucatán, since food and gastronomy everywhere have been impacted in similar ways. However, when we analyze the changes in local dishes and preparations, we can see how ubiquitous industrialized food has become and how it has affected the particular configurations of ingre- dients in Yucatecan cuisine.

Revista del CESLA, 2019

Valeria Campos Salvaterra studies the subject of food and human feeding from a philosophical and anthropological point of view, especially concern with its ethical and political dimensions. She has done preliminary researches on food public policies, with the idea of making a proposal to unify all feeding policies under the idea that eating is a 'cultural event'. She is currently leading a reasearch entitled Policies of taste and aesthetics of food. Genesis and structure of philosophical discourses on eating and tasting, supported by CONICYT (National Council of Science and Technology of Chile). In this inquiry, she makes an analysis of the meanings and values that Western culture has given to the sense of taste, in order to obtain critical results that could help us to increase our understanding of the act of eating. Even though we probably are not aware, eating and cooking has always been –and now probably it is more strongly– big instruments for violence and domination, and maybe the most effective and concerning ones. Why? Exactly because we think they are not political issue, because we don't really think about those practices in that way, as serious concerning subjects. It seems that eating and cooking are practices that are transparent to political discourse, and to that extent they belong to other areas of interest, such as our domestic life, pleasure and playfulness, festive culture. To cook seems to be a purely celebratory act, and the same we think about tasting and eating; and as our traditions has taught us festive and pleasurable things are not important thinks to be approach from a critical point of view. Even though like never before chefs are now stars, and food is contaminating the realm of art, and cultural studies are focusing in cooking and eating practices, these is not really a key element for a critical, ethical and political approach. We have exclude our relation to food from all the relevant areas of discourse, because food is something we do –we eat, we cook– but we don't need to talk about it, at least not as an important matter. But, what is really paradoxal, is that we still love food, we love it, and by this I mean: we have a very big desire for it. We desire food more maybe than most of things in life that are desirable. Food is a very important object for desire in general: we engage with food in many different ways, and all of them are related to desire: for pleasure, for sheering, for relaxing, for making social relations, even we relate to food in some addictive and pathological ways. So, in this essay I'm going to talk about eating and cooking form what I consider a political point of view: about the role food has in the delimitation of national identities and its importance to approach this phenomenon in the world of today.

Translation

Climent-Espino, Rafael and Ana M. Gómez-Bravo. Food, Texts and Cultures in Latin America and Spain, 2020