Abstract
In 2010, UNESCO declared Mexican traditional cuisine as Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The figure of the mayora—the wife or concubine of the Spanish American Hacienda owner and therefore principal cook in the Estate household during the colonial period—has over the past couple of decades been recovered, revalorised, and promoted in Mexico as a purveyor of ancestral culinary knowledge among First Nations (pueblos originarios). Native ingredients, techniques, and practices, mostly transmitted orally and almost exclusively by women, have been reinterpreted and included in the culinary repertoire of high-end restaurants, with mayoras acting as ‘traditional cooks’ (never ‘chefs’) and guarantors of the intergenerational transmission of ‘traditional Mexican food’.
We seek in this chapter to critically explore the political, socio-economic, and cultural processes by which mayoras have come to represent Mexican culinary authenticity whilst at the same time ‘elevating’ this cuisine to fine dining. In particular, we are interested in explaining how and why First Nation female household cooks so emblematic of Mexico’s settler-colonial past have been recharged with distinctive economic value, cultural authority, and political power at the start of the twenty-first century.
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Notes
- 1.
We adopt here the more capacious notion of ‘creole’ as denoting ethnic admixture emerging in settler-colonial societies, rather than the narrower, etymological conception of ‘criollo’ as descendants of Europeans born in the New World. It is in this regard that ‘mestizo’ in Mexico is an equivalent to ‘creole’ elsewhere and, gastronomically, close to what Donna Gabaccia (2000) understands by ‘colonial creoles’ across the Americas, or Richard Wilk the process of ‘creolisation’ in Belize: ‘hardly a smooth blending process [but a] compound of appropriation and resistance, full of ambivalence and ambiguity’ (Wilk 2006, 109).
- 2.
The dictionary does include an entry for Mayordomía (Mexican traditional festivity) but does not acknowledge those in charge of its organisation as mayoras.
- 3.
Local term used in Oaxaca to describe women that achieved the highest position in a local kitchen. According to the Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Gastronomía Mexicana, a comidera is elected by their community and oversees the organisation of regional festivities. The most famous comidera is Abigaíl Mendoza, traditional cook from Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, and owner of the storied restaurant Tlalmanalli (Muñoz Zurita 2010).
- 4.
Also known as Oaxaca cheese, it is a string semi-hard cow’s cheese similar in texture to mozzarella.
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Prieto-Piastro, C., Colás, A. (2022). ‘Like the Papacy of Mexican Cuisine’: Mayoras and Traditional Foods in Contemporary Mexico. In: Ranta, R., Colás, A., Monterescu, D. (eds) ‘Going Native?'. Food and Identity in a Globalising World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96268-5_5
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