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11. Eating Mexican in a Global Age: The Politics and Production of Ethnic Food
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter 11 Eating Mexican in a Global Age: The Politics and Production of Ethnic Food Jeffrey M. Pilcher As late as the 1960s tacos, quesadillas, and mole poblano were largely unknown outside of Mexico and its former territories in the southwestern United States. Now you can buy Mexican food in restaurants ranging from Barrow, Alaska, to Sydney, Australia, and from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Thanks to packaged taco kits, eating Mexican is possible virtually anywhere in the world; NASA even launches tortillas into space to feed astronauts onboard the international space station.1 This sudden proliferation resulted from a confluence of economic factors—new food processing and distribution technologies—and cultural politics—the emergence of tacos as a fashionable sector in the food service industry. While observers of globalization have devoted increasing attention to the international relations of power that determine whose culture is packaged and marketed around the world, an equally relevant question is, Who does the globalizing? North American entrepreneurs have taken the lead in marketing Mexican food, and Tex-Mex stereotypes have become widely entrenched as a result. Even NASA’s tortillas are made of wheat flour—generic “wraps” of indeterminate ethnicity—rather than the Mexican preference of maize. Technological efficiency and the availability of ingredients help to explain this disparity; after all, nobody would carry a Mexican tortilla factory with corn mills and conveyor belts to the Mongolian steppe, much less into outer space. Such basic considerations suggest the usefulness of approaching culinary globalization from a commodity chain analysis, with its comprehensive perspective on production, distribution, and consumption. The commodity at the heart of Mexican cuisine, maize, has undergone historical changes at each stage of the supply chain. A versatile and productive grain, it traveled the world in the early modern era, offering peasants from West Africa to East Asia a new and dependable source of subsistence. However, Native American women did not come along to teach local cooks the intricate skills of tortilla making; only after the mechanization of tortilla production in the twentieth century did Mexican food become available beyond the ethnic community. For such outsiders, the Tex-Mex taco shell was not obviously inferior to fresh corn tortillas. Thus, at each historical juncture farming patterns, cooking methods, and consumer tastes shaped the fate of the Native American plant. As these cultural considerations indicate, the process of ethnic formation is crucial for understanding globalization. Foods have long been central to ethnic identity, both by building up affiliations within a group through the commensality of shared meals and by marking the differences between groups in a particularly visceral fashion by definitions of the edible and inedible. This role of policing boundaries is central to Frederik Barth’s concept of ethnic groups as political constructs rather than primordial organisms. Recently, however, mass media and corporate marketing have begun to challenge more immediate forms of social contact in the construction of group identities, particularly on a global scale. Under such circumstances, commercial expedience has taken precedence over individual tastes, leading to the homogenization of cuisines and the loss of subtle local variants.2 Another constant factor in the transformations of globalization has been the basic human desire to domesticate the foreign and fit it within familiar cultural patterns. In the early modern era, the inability to make bread from maize because of the lack of gluten led Europeans to dismiss it as inferior to their own staple, wheat bread. By the same token, cultures without an existing tolerance for spicy foods tend to adopt watered-down versions of Mexican cuisine—that, or they jump madly into the macho world of the jalapeño-eating contest, which is just as alien to Mexican sensibilities. Such examples of appropriation, whether by corporate food formulators or creative cooks, have raised concerns among philosophers and social critics about cultural property rights. Already in the 1930s, as Anne Goldman has observed , New Mexico women such as Cleofas Jaramillo and Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca were inspired to write cookbooks in order to refute the distorted image of their food appearing as recipes in mainstream women’s magazines.3 Corporate advertising has been an even more blatant source of ethnic defamation, in campaigns ranging from the Frito Bandito to the Taco Bell dog. Moreover, Uma Narayan and Lisa Heldke have questioned the colonial power relations inherent even in individual acts of consumption.4 Yet Meredith Abarca has rightly warned against trying to define or claim authenticity...