12/9/2013Dakota J. DominguezAmerican Frontiers Final Project

Resistance, Persistence and Fusion in Mexican-American Food

“I want to make tamales for Thanksgiving, too,” I say to

Nana through the phone, my grandmother on my father’s side. We

have been chatting about putting together Thanksgiving dinner. Me

in Washington, and her back home in Salida, Colorado. All of this

small talk has been leading up to me asking about tamales. When I

say I want to make them, Nana laughs and says, “Well hito, you

better get started!” It is two days before Thanksgiving.

The advice Nana gives me on how to prepare tamales is a

story about who we are as a family. She does not give me a recipe

with measurements and exactitudes, but offers me morsels of

culinary wisdom informed by a sensory understanding of cooking

and flavored with bits of family history and flourishes of

Spanish. Her understanding is based on a long tradition of making

tamales for special occasions with her mother, and I can tell

that preparing and eating tamales is a reminder of Mexican

identity. The long hours of hard work that making tamales

1

requires is a testament to this act of cooking as an act of self-

affirmation. Nana wishes me luck as I embark on my first attempt

to make tamales.

Mexican-American foodways represent the persistence of

indigenous American cultural values and identity. The practice of

these foodways also represents a form of little recognized agency

for under-privileged people of indigenous heritage, particularly

working class women. The Raramuri ethnobotanist Enrique Salmón

writes, “My identity and culture as a Mexican is reaffirmed

whenever I eat tamales…My reaffirmation of identity and

connection to place is not a direct result of the tamales, but

comes from the processes that surround tamales, (p.8).” The

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the term foodways as “the

eating and culinary practices of a people, region, or historical

period.” Making and eating tamales is an example of this.

Feminist scholar Meredith Abarca describes the kitchen and

the cooking that goes on there as a decolonizing space, where

pre-colonial values have persisted for centuries, with Mexican-

American women keeping ancient culinary knowledge and cultural

values alive through the self-expressive art of cooking (Abarca,

2

Voices from the Kitchen). When I make tamales I am participating in

something ancient. In southern Mexico, tamales have been eaten as

a food for special occasions since at least 250 BC (Pilcher,ꜟQue

vivan). Some of the ingredients, and the names of the festivals

have changed, but we still prepare and eat tamales to celebrate

together.

Some might ask, so what? Food and cooking are often seen in

American dominant society as relatively trivial. Given all of the

bloody conquest and domination that have gone on here in the last

500 years, how can a simple combination of ingredients and the

eating of tamales on Thanksgiving say anything profound about the

history of the Americas? To understand the answers to this

question, one must seek to look at the world from the perspective

of alternate worldviews and deconstruct colonial notions of

knowledge and power.

The notion that food is a trivial aspect of life or history

is simply an extension of a Western imperialist worldview that

seeks to trivialize everything. The trivialization of everything

comes from a culture of industrialism with its base of knowledge

in empirical science, where all things are seen as isolated and

3

separated from everything else. Nature is seen as a machine with

simple parts that can be taken out and replaced by human

industriousness as needed. This way of thinking has led to

massive intrusions into natural systems such as hydro-engineering

and industrial agriculture. Alternatively, indigenous worldviews

and systems of knowledge point toward a deep underlying

interconnectedness of all things in the universe. The universe is

seen primarily as a flow of interdependent organic systems,

rather than isolated parts in a machine. In indigenous worldviews

human power is derived from seeking and accepting a place in the

grander scheme of these systems, rather than as the machinist

toying with the parts (Cajete, ed.).

In the same way that the force of industrialism has

trivialized food and nature, it has trivialized the knowledge of

the senses. Cooking is primarily a knowledge of the senses. One

must have a sensual understanding of how to get something just right

via their sense of touch, smell, and taste. Honing in these

senses is essential to the mastery of cooking anything well. In a

patriarchal/industrial society, smell, touch and taste have been

gendered as feminine senses and therefore disenfranchised and

4

trivialized in favor of the all-powerful sense of sight and the

written word (Abarca 58-59). By making the male-dominated written

word the only legitimate source of knowledge, patriarchal

industrialism has attempted to silence and trivialize many of the

ways that indigenous culture, history, and sense of identity are

transmitted. Despite popular belief, however, traditions of oral

storytelling, and forms of sensory/bodily knowledge related to

food and culture have merely been trivialized and not destroyed.

In the practiced and loving hands of Mexican-American women,

these ways of knowing have persisted. The power to re-harness

these ways of understanding the world comes not from re-inventing

them but from simply recognizing their strength.

In acknowledging the important implications of food and

eating in history, we are offered what food historian Jeffery

Pilcher calls a “view from below” of the stories of our

identities, our histories, that we may have thought were lost in

the industrial narrative. Similarly, historian John Super

expounds on how a study of food can illuminate our histories:

Food links the social and natural worlds in marvelously intricate

yet encompassing ways. Soil and water, belief and ritual, power

5

and personality, all are a part of the history of food. Food

shapes and is shaped by society and nature. It intersects so many

points with the human experience that it can be used to study

everything from technology to culture. From this perspective, the

history of food simply becomes history. (John C. Super, Food,

Conquest and Colonization)

If history is re-enlightened by recognizing the stories and modes

of knowledge not written in books, but the stories told and re-

told by our families around the table, and the stories told by

the hands that prepare family recipes, a more enriched picture

may come to view.

Abarca refutes the notion that the stories that come from

women’s kitchens and from their food represent simply stories of

women placed in the kitchen as a form of control (p.26). In her

book Voices from the Kitchen, she explains how, by controlling the

kitchen as the heart of the family and home, Mexican-American

women assert forms of agency in their lives as well as tell their

own stories and express themselves through cooking. This is not

to say that the kitchen has not been a place of oppression for

women, but by only seeing the kitchen as a place of oppression,

6

we miss the voices that are speaking through food, and miss the

history that is being told from the kitchen. Abarca writes about

food as information. It is a way of engaging with history, and

reaffirming our identities.

Enrique Salmón writes that food and the processes of

preparing and eating food are inextricably linked to an

indigenous connection to place: “The processes interconnect

family, landscape, collection knowledge, story, and an encoded

library of cultural and ecological knowledge, all of which

sustain and revitalize a sense of self and place (p.8).” Salmón

goes on to mention tamales again, in explaining his understanding

of food as historical and cultural information, “We have to eat

in order to survive; therefore, food becomes a medium through

which complex collective memories from generations preparing

tamales remains alive and intact (p.9).” As an indigenous and

Mexican person, Salmón understands food and the traditions

surrounding eating and preparing food as a means of transmitting

vital cultural information with regard to community values and

human-landscape interactions. Through the persistence of

7

indigenous foodways, a whole way of understanding the world may

be transmitted.

How, then, have broadly-termed Mexican-American foodways

held on to indigenous worldviews and values through the past five

centuries of culturally destructive colonialism? Persistence has

been maintained through fusion in the face of conquest. Starting

on Columbus’ second voyage, the Spanish empire sought to

ecologically re-create Spain in the new world. Spaniards had no

interest in adopting indigenous foodstuffs or foodways because

all of this represented to them a barbaric native culture. The

Spanish associated deep essences of their culture with their

staple foods. Eating bread, cooking with olive oil, and drinking

wine all made you a good Spaniard. Wheat bread especially was

eaten daily and carried heavy religious associations in the

Catholic Church (Super). As it still is for Christians today, the

eating of bread at Holy Communion represented consuming the flesh

of Christ, the source of human salvation.

Similarly, indigenous American peoples treated maize as the

bedrock of their culture. Seeing it literally as flesh and

including it in many spiritual rituals and ceremonies. For the

8

Aztecs, the empire that the Spaniards encountered on the North

American mainland, maize was entirely tied up in a shocking

ritualistic “feeding” of the gods through human sacrifice.

Sacrificed human bodies were put on maize fields to ensure that

rain would feed the plants, to in turn feed the people (Pilcher,

ꜟQue vivan). While few indigenous societies resorted to such

extreme measures as human sacrifice, maize and other staple food

crops held similar cultural and spiritual significance all over

the Americas.

When staple grains, wheat and maize respectively, are seen

in this light as the flesh of the divine, and the literal and

spiritual source of the continuation of the people and their way

of life, the Spanish/Christian associations with bread and the

indigenous/Aztec associations with maize are similar in many

ways. In both worldviews, ritual eating and human sacrifice are

understood as being the source of the continuation and salvation

of the people. The difference being that in the Christian

worldview, the human sacrifice happened once, when Christ died on

the cross, and the eating of his flesh and blood has continued in

symbolic recognition of this event. For indigenous societies like

9

the Aztec, the act of sacrifice and renewal must be continuous to

ensure plenty. With so many cultural associations bound up in

foods for both cultures, the stage was set for a competition

between the staple grains.

When the Spanish took control from the Aztec Empire, the

long drawn out work of cultural conquest began in earnest. The

planting of and tending of the wheat crop, and the adoption of

wheat bread was a cultural imperative for Spanish conquest

(Super). The Spanish believed that the hard work of tending to

the wheat crop would teach the stereotyped lazy Indians “a lesson

in European industriousness (Cajete, ed.)”.

Just as the Spanish felt a revulsion to maize as a

representative of a destitute and inferior culture, the

indigenous peoples they forced wheat on were repulsed by the

staple grain of the old world. Food historian Jeffery Pilcher

cites The Florentine Codex as showing what indigenous people thought

about wheat bread: “like famine food…like dried maize stalks.”

The Spaniards found that they could not even hand out their wheat

bread to beggars (Pilcher, ꜟQue vivan). When in 1680, in Spain’s

northern territories (modern day New Mexico), the indigenous

10

Pueblo people revolted against the Spaniards and drove them

south, wheat was seen as a representation of an oppressive

culture. In the revolt, the Pueblo people burned all of the

Spanish fields of wheat (Pilcher, Planet Taco). Indigenous

Americans were not about to give up maize in favor of wheat. In

time, the Spanish missionaries recognized this, and attempted to

attach Christian religious values instead to the preparation of

maize. Missionaries taught indigenous women to make the sign of

the cross over the ground cornmeal masa every time they prepared

it for tortillas, a tradition that continues to this day

(Abarca).

The environment and the people of the Americas also changed

the way that the Europeans ate. This goes for both the Europeans

in Europe, and those settling in the Americas. Many fruits and

vegetables and staple crops such as potatoes made the voyage back

to Europe in a trans-Atlantic ecological exchange, and improved

European nutritional regimes and foundationally altered European

cuisines. Despite the best efforts of Spaniards settling in the

Americas to re-create the New World in the image of Spain,

certain crops simply would not take to the American soil and

11

climate. For the Spanish cooking with olive oil equated to

respectable civilization, and cooking with animal fats as

barbaric, a belief that went back to the Romans (Pilcher, ꜟQue

vivan). Despite their best efforts, olive trees would not grow in

the new climate, but the pigs that they had brought with them had

found an un-exploited ecological niche in the Americas and were

running wild everywhere. In this way, indigenous Americans,

Spaniards, and mixed mestizo people took on the practice of eating

pork and cooking with lard, which has become a common fixture in

Mexican kitchens everywhere (Super).

In many regions of the Americas, the diseases brought by

early European explorers preceded the European settlers

themselves. Large areas of land that had previously been

inhabited and managed by indigenous peoples were left empty by

the scourge of Old World epidemics by the time the settlers

arrived. These open spaces allowed for European animals and

European land-management practices to flourish on a scale unheard

of in Europe. European cattle, pigs, and chickens exploited

vacant ecological niches and changed the diets of all people

living in the Americas. Meat from cattle and pigs became everyday

12

sources of protein for indigenous, Spanish and mestizo people

(Super).

It is essential to keep in mind that indigenous people were

not simply victims of a European ecological and cultural

conquest. The view of history from the kitchen allows us to see

how indigenous people demonstrated agency and adaptability in the

face of great change. Many European foods were readily taken on

by indigenous people and incorporated into ancient foodways not

by forced assimilation, but because people liked the way foods

like beef and pork tasted and these new sources of nutrition made

for healthier people. Indigenous people saw the ways that new

foods could be incorporated into old recipe structures to make

them better, and substituted ingredients with the new foods if

the old ones became less readily available. For indigenous people

an example of this is the adoption of European chickens as simply

a substitute for the indigenous turkey. This practice of

substitution making new culinary traditions was also true for

Spanish cooks, who substituted indigenous ingredients for ones

not available. Spanish rice, traditionally made with saffron, was

made with chili peppers in the New World (Pilcher, ꜟQue vivan).

13

Indigenous and mestizo Americans made new foods their own.

They were able to incorporate new ingredients without losing a

sense of connection to older identity and knowledge. As Enrique

Salmón might say, they were still “eating the landscape”, only

accepting and adapting to the ways that the landscape truly had

changed as a result of colonization. This adaptability has

ensured cultural survival. As John Super aptly puts it, “Like a

great river able to accept water from many tributaries without

changing course, Indian diets increased in volume and variety,

though the staples remained the same. Adequate food supplies

helped Indians combat new biological and social threats of the

conquest.” The fact that many elite Spanish men relied on Native

women to cook for them, and others married into indigenous

families, ensured that the process was one of cultural fusion and

adaptation rather simply one of conquest and domination (Pilcher,

Planet Taco).

Abarca explains how Mexican-American women as a “colonized

people” exercise agency through cooking today and in history by

quoting the philosopher Lisa Heldke:

14

“cuisines are always a patchwork of borrowing and lending,

undertaken at various conditions of liberty and bondage.” The

borrowing and lending helps her consider “the possibility that members

of a culture may be responding to colonization as [people] who are

deciding for themselves whether and how they will incorporate the

strange foods that are making their way into their community.” I

believe this to be true because people stripped of economic and

political power remain “active agents whose sense of self is projected

on to and expressed in an expansive range of cultural practices.”

By cooking forms of indigenous knowledge, Native women

counter-balanced colonial methods of domination in subtle yet

profound ways.

For mixed persons of any multiple heritages, the kitchen

represents a space for profound reconciliation (Abarca). I think

of the Thanksgiving dinner mentioned earlier, the one for which I

prepared tamales. The tamales themselves, being filled with beef

or pork meat and cooked with lard, represent a history of

cultural and ecological colonialism as well as a deep statement

of indigenous identity. My roommate also served a dish honoring

his Moroccan heritage, representing his own background of

immigration and cultural mixing. The turkey we harvested locally

and the apples we cooked it with represent our attempt to honor

an agricultural heritage of the state of Washington, which is

15

itself a result of cultural and ecological exchanges. The white

wheat dinner rolls and the apple pie my mother and grandmother

baked for the meal are made from the old recipes of English and

German pioneers in California. The culinary histories present in

this one feast are expansive and profound; they cover realities

of conquest and imperialism as well as fierce statements of

indigeneity. And yet our two families can sit down and enjoy this

food together and find a strength and community in the sharing of

our heritages.

“I have always mentioned to anyone within earshot that mole

is nearest to the type of intricate foods that Mesoamericans

consumed when Europeans first floundered their way into North

America. Mole is a complex dish fully representative of the

landscape and agricultural system cultivated by Central

Americans. The list of ingredients and the numerous steps

involved in producing even a simple mole are multifaceted enough

to cause any culinary student to pause. (Salmón)”

Mole is considered by many to be a dish that is

distinctively and authentically Mexican through and through.

Enrique Salmón insists that mole most effectively represents the

genuinely indigenous foodways of the past in its style and

structure, but a closer look at the history and legend

16

surrounding mole speaks more to a profound cultural fusion and

persistence. Mole is served as a sauce or stew flavored with any

number of ingredients, but most prominently chili peppers and

unsweetened cacao.

Food historian Jeffery Pilcher sees the history of mole

differently than Salmón, in that he sees it primarily as a

Spanish food influenced by indigenous ingredients. Pilcher

explains that the structure of the sauce mirrors the cuisines of

Spain with its base of broth and flavoring with nuts. He also

draws attention to the fact that Spanish cooking at the time of

colonization was severely influenced by Muslim foodways after

centuries of Muslim rule in Spain, and that the culinary

architecture of mole is more a representation of middle-eastern

Muslim cooking styles than of either genuinely Spanish or

indigenous (Pilcher, Planet Taco, ꜟQue vivan). This represents

the profound complexity of cultural influences and historical

connections when it comes to eating any food.

The folk legend that Mexican and Mexican-American people

tell about the invention of mole may say more than either of

these experts in explaining what mole represents, a testament to

17

the truth in oral tradition. Abarca retells the legend in her

book Voices from the Kitchen, based on the versions told to her by her

Mexican relatives. The legend goes that long ago, a group of nuns

in a rural convent in Puebla, Mexico were

preparing for a visit by a Spanish noble. They

wanted to make something special for him to eat

so they prepared a sauce including many old world

ingredients. After all, Spanish colonial

authority still valued European foods as

culturally superior to indigenous foods for

centuries after the initial conquest. The

Spanish caste system exemplified by the castas paintings

represented indigenous and mixed peoples of lower classes

alongside indigenous foodstuffs. The castas paintings were a clear

reminder that ethnic mixing and the foods associated with it,

relegated people to lower socio-economic castes (Pilcher, ꜟQue

vivan).

The legendary nuns of Puebla wanted to prepare a more

Spanish-influenced food for the visiting noble, because Spanish

foods represented upward mobility and Spanish colonial values.

18

Figure 1 Castas Paintingfrom Colonial Spanish America

This accounts for perhaps the structure of mole as well as the

inclusion of non-indigenous ingredients in mole recipes such as

garlic, coriander, cumin, and raisins. It is also probable that

the nuns of native heritage were already entirely used to complex

mixtures of ingredients from a culinary heritage of complex

sauces reaching back before the arrival of the Europeans, and

that taking on the task of making an acceptable dish for the

Spanish noble was not such a challenging endeavor. The crux of

the legend, though, is when the stew is finished and simmering in

the pot, a mischievous nun pours cacao powder, the ancient

indigenous drink, into the sauce, changing all of the flavors and

asserting something altogether new (Abarca). When cooking mole I

always feel I should only add the chocolate when no one is

looking. In this legend, the dominant chocolate flavor in mole

announces, “I am still here.” Preparing and eating mole

recognizes colonial influence, but is overwhelmed by an assertion

of resistance. The flavors of mole retell this story of cultural

strength, the ability to resist and to adapt to new influence.

Mole becomes primarily a form of flavorful information, and those

19

who prepare it are speaking; telling their own history in a

language of the senses.

It may be difficult to see all of this intricate cultural

history underneath the messy heaps of chili sauce, iceberg

lettuce and cheese found in most Mexican restaurants in the

United States today (Pilcher, Planet Taco). But this

representation of Mexican food is also a result of interplay of

cultural adaptation and fusion with colonial and imperial forces

of conquest. The model for what has become the widely understood

and globally dispersed version of Mexican food was built on

templates of indigenous reaction to Spanish colonial and

indigenous southern Mexican culinary influences as mestizo

culture spread north to the modern day American Southwest

(Cajete, ed.). Pueblo people in the regions of New Mexico and

Arizona encountered the concept of the tortilla and the food crop

of wheat around the same time, and started making flour tortillas

as a response to these new culinary influences. The result today

is the white-flour tortilla wrapped burritos popular all around

the United States. Further complicating the culinary heritage of

modernly understood industrialized Mexican cuisine in the U.S. is

20

the inclusion of rice and beans, which is a result of mestizo

adoption of Caribbean slave cooking traditions (Pilcher, Planet

Taco).

The fewer ingredients present in the Mexican restaurant menu

items of today is in many ways simply a result of the indigenous

cooking styles of the northern Spanish frontier, which sought

many innovative ways to cook a small amount of available food

resources. This was a response to environment, and an

understanding of landscape. This was how Pueblo people knew how

to cook. The Anglo-American immigrants who came to the Mexican

borderlands in the 19th century took the indigenous Pueblo take

on the mixed indigenous-Spanish foods that had come from southern

Mexico, and fused it with their own understandings of cooking.

That is, to fry and cover meals with cheese and gravy. This is

what is commonly understood as Tex-Mex or Cal-Mex. This is where

we get crunchy taco shells and deep fried chimichangas (Pilcher,

Planet Taco).

After these culinary infusions had taken place, Anglo-

Americans readily accepted broadly termed “Mexican Food” and

formalized and industrialized this one version. Once it was

21

accepted, the selling of Mexican food by Mexican people, mestizo

and indigenous alike, became an avenue of self-determination.

There are many ways that the standardized mystique of American

Mexican restaurants perpetuate negative stereotypes of Mexican

and Mexican-American people through decorations of stereotypical

sombrero-wearing Mexican peasants drinking tequila and sleeping

under saguaros, and a homogenized representation of relatively-

non-nutritious Tex-Mex food as genuinely Mexican (Pilcher, Planet

Taco). However, as we have seen, there is still a rich cultural

history embedded in even these foods, and a voice of indigenous

resistance remains a part of the story of our dinners, if only we

choose to recognize it.

To conclude, I want to bring you to my Nana’s kitchen table,

where to me, all of this is most true. The family home in Salida,

Colorado where my grandparents live has a very obvious front door

on one side of the house. In all my life I think I have seen that

front door opened only once. The front door opens into the living

room where the couch and television reside, but no one ever walks

in that way. That door is so insignificant as an entryway that

furniture has been placed in front of it. Instead, the front door

22

of the house has become what would have been the back door. The

doorway is opened into a domestic space. You walk past the

washing machine, the dryer, and the refrigerator to enter Nana’s

kitchen, where a big table dominates the space. This table is

where each meal of the day is taken, and where nearly all the

times in-between are spent. This table is where the family is

reunited and reconstituted, where stories are told and memories

made. This table is where we reaffirm who we are as a family.

Simply sitting at this table to pass a few hours drinking coffee

or to listen to my dad and his sisters tell funny stories about

when they were kids, or especially to eat some of Nana’s green

chili, is an act of reaffirming my identity.

Abarca writes of spaces within the home being gendered by

colonial forces in the same way that the senses have been

gendered, relegating smell touch and taste, senses of the

kitchen, gendered as being feminine and inferior. In a

patriarchal architecture, the kitchen is a place where women are

put in their place simply to produce trivial food. The kitchen is

placed in the back of the house, away from what visitors might

see when they enter the home, often a masculinized space of a so-

23

called living room. But as we have seen, women continue to have a

voice from the kitchen even if it is placed out of sight, through

the stories told in the foods they choose to produce there. There

are ways that women still control the family and the home even

from this coded-as-trivial space of the kitchen.

In the case of my grandparents’ home, the house has been

flipped, asserting very clearly that the kitchen, my Nana’s

place, is the beating heart of the home and of the family. All it

takes is simple recognition of what something so simple as the

location of the kitchen table, or the nuanced skill involved in

preparing tamales may represent to bring into focus the true

power of these things in the face of a dominant colonial

narrative. Choosing to actively recognize the historical

implications of eating, and seeing how foodways represent

alternative modes of knowledge that are all around us is itself

an act of de-colonial descent by anyone who chooses to do so. By

changing the way we think about food, we can change the world.

Works Cited

24

Abarca, Meredith E. Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World

from Working-Class Mexican and Mexican American Women. Texas A&M

University Press, 2006. Print.

Cajete, Gregory ed. A People’s Ecology: Explorations in Sustainable Living.

Santa Fe, New Mexico: Clear Light Publishers, 1999. Print.

Merriam-Webster. "Foodways." Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster,

2013. Web. 08 Dec. 2013.

Pilcher, Jeffery M. ꜟQue vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of

Mexican Identity. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,

1998. Print.

Pilcher, Jeffery M. Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. New

York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.

Salmón, Enrique. Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food,

Identity, and Resilience. Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press,

2012. Print.

Super, John C. Food, Conquest, and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century

Spanish America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,

1988. Print. Texas A&M University Press, 2006. Print.

Photos:

Figure 1:

http://realhistoryww.com/world_history/ancient/Images_Olmec/Paint

ings/Casta_8.jpg

25

26