‘Like the Papacy of Mexican Cuisine’: Mayoras and Traditional Foods in Contemporary Mexico

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.