Food is a natural conduit of change, evolution, and innovation.
Wishing for a foodstuff to remain static, uncorrupted by outside
influence—especially in these United States—is as ludicrous an idea
as barring new immigrants from entering the country. Yet for more
than a century, both sides of the political spectrum have fought to
keep Mexican food in a ghetto. From the right has come the canard
that the cuisine is unhealthy and alien, a stereotype dating to the
days of the Mexican-American War, when urban legend had it that
animals wouldn’t eat the corpses of fallen Mexican soldiers due to
the high chile content in the decaying flesh. Noah Smithwick, an
observer of the aftermath of the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836,
claimed “the cattle got to chewing the bones [of Mexican soldiers],
which so affected the milk that residents in the vicinity had to
dig trenches and bury them.”Similar knocks against Mexican food can be heard to this day in the lurid tourist tales of “Montezuma’s Revenge” and in the many food-based ethnic slurs still in circulation: beaner, greaser, pepper belly, taco bender, roach coach, and so many more. “Aside from diet,” the acclaimed borderlands scholar Américo Paredes wrote in 1978, “no other aspect of Mexican culture seems to have caught the fancy of the Anglo coiner of derogatory terms for Mexicans.”
Thankfully, the buying public has never paid much attention to those prandial pendejos. Instead, Americans have loved and consumed Mexican food in large quantities almost from the moment it was available—from canned chili and tamales in the early 20th century to fast-food tacos in the 1960s, sit-down eateries in the 1970s, and ultra-pricey hipster mescal bars today. Some staples of the Mexican diet have been thoroughly assimilated into American food culture. No one nowadays thinks of “chili” as Mexican, even though it long passed for Mexican food in this country; meanwhile, every Major League baseball and NFL stadium sells nachos, thanks to the invention of a fast-heated chips and “cheese” combination concocted by an Italian-American who was the cousin of Johnny Cash’s first wife. Only in America!
In the course of this culinary blending, a multibillion-dollar industry arose. And that’s where leftist critics of Mexican food come in. For them, there’s something inherently suspicious about a cuisine responsive to both the market and the mercado. Oh, academics and foodies may love the grub, but they harbor an atavistic view that the only “true” Mexican food is the just-off-the-grill carne asada found in the side lot of your local abuelita (never mind that it was the invading Spaniards who introduced beef to the New World). “Mexico’s European-and-Indian soul,” writes Rick Bayless, the high priest of the “authentic” Mexican food movement, in his creatively titled book, Authentic Mexican, “feels the intuitions of neither bare-bones Victorianism nor Anglo-Saxon productivity”—a line reminiscent of dispatches from the Raj. If it were up to these authentistas, we’d never have kimchi tacos or pastrami burritos. Salsa would not outsell ketchup in the United States. This food of the gods would be locked in Mexican households and barrios of cities, far away from Anglo hands.
That corn-fed Americans love and profit from Mexican food is viewed as an open wound in Chicano intellectual circles, a gastronomic update of America’s imperial taking of the Southwest. Yanqui consumption and enjoyment of quesadillas and margaritas, in this view, somehow signifies a weakness in the Mexican character. “The dialectic between representation and production of Mexican cuisine offers a critical means of gauging Latino cultural power, or, more precisely, the relative lack of such power,” write scholars Victor Valle and Rudy Torres in their 2000 book Latino Metropolis. (Another precious thought from Valle and Torres concerns Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, two Midwestern girls who came to Los Angeles and learned to love Mexican food during the 1980s, parlaying that fondness into a series of television shows and books under the billing “Two Hot Tamales.” The academics claim the Tamales’ success arose from “neocolonial appropriations of world cuisine by reviving a gendered variant of the Hispanic fantasy discourse.” Um, yeah…)
With due respect to my fellow lefty professors, they’re full of beans. I’m not claiming equal worth for all American interpretations of Mexican food; Taco Bell has always made me retch, and Mexican food in central Kentucky tastes like …well, Mexican food in central Kentucky. But when culinary anthropologists like Bayless and Diana Kennedy make a big show out of protecting “authentic’ Mexican food from the onslaught of commercialized glop, they are being both paternalistic and ahistorical.
That you have a nation (and increasingly a planet—you can find Mexican restaurants from Ulan Bator to Sydney to Prague) lusting after tequila, guacamole, and tres leches cake isn’t an exercise in culinary neocolonialism but something closer to the opposite. By allowing itself to be endlessly adaptable to local tastes, Mexican food has become a primary vehicle for exporting the culture of a long-ridiculed country to the far corners of the globe. Forget Mexico’s imaginary Reconquista of the American Southwest; the real conquest of North America is a peaceful and consensual affair, taking place one tortilla at a time.
by Gustavo Arellano, Reason | Read more:
