associations inscribed in this term can be useful in understanding how Yucatecan gastronomy and identities have emerged amid cultural negotiations that respond to both the goal of defending the interests of regional elites—disseminating their values and views among other social groups—and the desire to define and establish regional culture as one marked by cosmopolitan inclinations. Hence, in addition to Bhabha's usage, ‘dis/semi/nation' uncovers three different processes that are usually collapsed into one single term. First, as ‘dissemination' it privileges, since the end of the eighteenth century, the spread of nationalist ideologies as a universal blueprint to legitimize any state's claim to ‘modernity'. Second, as ‘dis-semination' it emphasizes the differences inscribed in the local appropriation of ideas about the nation inspired by European philosophy and political thought. As I show in chapter 1, this process, which unfolded among central Mexican and Yucatecan elites alike and in parallel, informed the Yucatecan tendency to affirm its distinctiveness from Mexico throughout most of the nineteenth century. Third, as ‘dis-semi-nation' it places the emphasis on the consequences of the displacement of independence claims in favor of the emergence, since the early twentieth century, of a strong sense of regional identity. This identity is rooted in an awareness of peoplehood that, without giving rise to separatist desires, sustains the regional certitude that Yucatecan culture is different from Mexican culture. Yucatecans do not fully participate in Mexican cultural values and institutions, nor do they fully constitute a nation; rather, they can be seen as embodying a semi-nation in an ambivalent, difficult (dis-) relation with the nation. As I will be showing throughout this volume, these concepts find expression in the political construction of the Yucatecan foodscape and in the regional culinary and gastronomic fields.5
The following arguments are well-known today, so I will not examine them here. However, it is important to point out that various scholars have analyzed the relationship between the forging of modern nations and the invention of national cuisines. Since Appadurai's (1988) seminal discussion about the part that cookbooks played in the invention of Indian cuisine, several studies have documented how culinary institutions became tied to other social and cultural forces, erasing regional differences and homogenizing national taste. This process had been largely neglected, although Camporesi (1970) had already argued that, following the political unification of Italy, Pelegrino Artusi's cookbook, La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well), first published in 1891, had profited from the new political context and the growth of industrial food processing and packaging to bring Italian regional culinary practices together into a national cuisine. In turn, Ferguson (2004), Mennell (1985), and Trubek (2000) have examined the part played by cookbooks, the press, restaurants, and chefs in the institution and universalization of French cuisine. Also, Cwiertka (2005) has described the interaction between national and European culinary values in the process of the modernization of Japanese cuisine and the ensuing invention of a national gastronomic form that silenced regional differences.
As the analysis of national cuisines progressed, other scholars highlighted that, despite attempts to homogenize national cuisines, there is a deterritorializing internal heterogeneity of cuisines within single modern nation-states. Thus, Capatti and Montanari (1999) insist in the locality and strong regional identity of Italian cuisines,6 putting the accent on diversity where previous descriptions emphasized homogenization. Banerji (2007), for her part, executes the same exercise for India, describing the regional specialties that mark each Indian region as distinct from the others. While dealing indirectly with the nation, other studies have privileged the study of regional foods where previously we found narrations of a single national cuisine. Hence, Long (2009) describes the existence of regional culinary traditions derived from the diverse ecological contexts and ethnic demography of US regions. In turn, Gutierrez (1992) and Bienvenu, Brasseaux, and Brasseaux (2005) look at the modern creation of Cajun food, and Swislocki (2008) describes the distinct cuisine of Shanghai, dispelling the illusion (if it still existed) that there is a Chinese national cuisine (see also Wu 2002; Wu and Cheung 2002).
While in Latin America there are, in the popular imagination, widespread associations between nations and particular dishes, there are no studies available that examine the formation of national cuisines in South American countries. Not even publications such as Lovera (2005), McDonald (2009), and Natella (2008) help to identify national cuisines in South and Central America. Lovera's and McDonald's books recognize the interaction between the environment and humans and between Europeans, Africans, Asians, and natives in the creation of culinary habits in different regions. However, they privilege the identification of commonalities across regions and the distinctiveness of regions' cooking styles as arising from the ethnic/racial composition without a reference to national cultures, or, as in Pazos Barrera (2010), privilege the discussion of local culinary ingredients, technologies, and techniques in the multiple environments of the Andean region. In a different vein, Natella (2008), seeking to dispel simplistic stereotypes in the US about food in Latin America, lists some dishes that are seen as ‘typical' in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and ‘the Caribbean', but he does not get into a discussion as to whether any of these countries has developed a national cuisine (much less any regional traditions). Thus, in the popular imagination, beef dishes and roasts often bring to mind Argentinean, Uruguayan, and Brazilian meals, while the stew feijoada evokes Brazilian taste, but the heterogeneity that characterizes each of these nation-states seems to prevent either the invention or the writing of national cuisines. Consequently, regional dishes become frequently tied to race or ethnicity (African American or indigenous groups) or to social class (Drinot 2005; Fajans 2008; Folch 2008; Walmsley 2005). There is still a lack of studies examining the relationship between regionalism and food in Latin America, and this is understandable, given the scarcity of studies on nationalist cuisines (exceptions being Pilcher 1998 and Wilk 2006).7 This book seeks to make a contribution in bridging this gap and to encourage discussion about the ways in which regional culinary cultures negotiate their significance and meaning in a context (commercial, political) that favors the identification of national rather than regional cuisines.
Mexican National and Yucatecan Regional Cuisines
The birth of Mexican national cuisine, as both Pilcher and Juárez López have shown, was contemporaneous with the production of a variety of textual strategies deployed during the invention of an imagined Mexican national community. Juárez López (2000) examines the strategies whereby the Creole elite, before independence, sought the foundations of New Spain's cuisine in the natural environment of the continent and in the contributions of indigenous cooks and ingredients in the constitution of culinary practices that differed from those of Spain. In turn, Pilcher (1998) analyzes the creation of a nationalist cuisine and the cultural negotiations of the elite between enlightened/rational scientific ideals, on the one hand, and political nationalism, on the other. The end result has been the creation of a national cuisine that, at least rhetorically, is anchored in indigenous culinary practices, values, and taste preferences. During the construction of a national cuisine, regional cuisines were either co-opted or silenced by central Mexican institutions and media. ‘Yucatecan' 8 cuisine was placed in an ambivalent position: located at the margins of the Mexican nation, its existence was silenced by the political power of nationalist discourse. At the same time, as I will be arguing, it was locally conceived and born as the cosmopolitan offspring of Caribbean and European intercourses and exchanges in which members of the Yucatecan elites were engaged.9 Distant from and going against the Mexican culinary blueprint, Yucatecan cooks favored recipes and ingredients that were available in the peninsular lowlands and semi-tropical environment and appropriated and reformed European, Caribbean, and South American recipes, creating a culinary tradition that diverged from that of central Mexico.
If central Mexican nationalist intellectuals chose ideologically and rhetorically to accentuate the roots of national cuisine in the indigenous past, Yucatecan's intelligentsia stressed the cosmopolitan connections of their regional food. Some authors have made all-sweeping generalizations about a rather homogeneous ‘Mexican' cooking tradition. For instance, Adapon (2008: 2) states: “Living in different Mexican households, I realized that…[v]ariations of chilaquiles were normal everyday fare.” She adds: “Mexican cuisine is 90 per cent indigenous and 10 per cent other influences”