Mesquite Pods to Mezcal: 10,000 Years of Oaxacan Cuisines

New case studies documenting ten thousand years of cuisines across the cultures of Oaxaca, Mexico, from the earliest gathered plants, such as guajes, to the contemporary production of tejate and its health implications.

Among the richest culinary traditions in Mexico are those of the “eight regions” of the state of Oaxaca. Mesquite Pods to Mezcal brings together some of the most prominent scholars in Oaxacan archaeology and related fields to explore the evolution of the area’s world-renowned cuisines. This volume, the first to address food practices across Oaxaca through a long-term historical lens, covers the full spectrum of human occupation in Oaxaca, from the early Holocene to contemporary times. Contributors consider the deep history of agroecological management and large-scale landscape transformation, framing food production as a human-environment relation. They explore how, after the arrival of the Spanish, Oaxacan cuisines adapted, diets changed, and food became a stronger marker of identity. Examining the present, further studies document how traditional foodways persist and what they mean for contemporary Oaxacans, whether they are traveling ancient roads, working outside the region, or rebuilding after an earthquake. Together, the original case studies in this volume demonstrate how new methods and diverse theoretical approaches can come together to trace the development of a rich food tradition, one that is thriving today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Feb 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781477327982

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

THE MAKING OF OAXACAN FOODWAYS

Andrea M. Cuéllar, Verónica Pérez Rodríguez, Shanti Morell-Hart, and Stacie M. King

The state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico traces its distinct multiethnic character to prehispanic times. Archaeologically, the state is perhaps best known for pioneering projects that investigated the origins of plant domestication, at sites such as Guilá Naquitz, or for the explorations led by Alfonso Caso and associates at the Zapotec city of Monte Albán (Caso 1942; Flannery 1986). West of the Valley of Oaxaca is the Mixtec region, where late prehispanic and early colonial kingdoms known as ñuu are renowned, thanks to the codices, lienzos, and other documentary sources they produced (Caso 1977; Jansen and van Broekhoven 2008). For decades, ethnographers and linguists have been documenting Oaxaca’s linguistic diversity, the social and political dynamics of its diverse Indigenous communities, and the diasporic communities that have emerged in other parts of Mexico and in the United States (Cornelius et al. 2009; Mountz and Wright 1996).

In recent decades Oaxaca has grown as a prominent touristic and culinary destination, and tourism is now one of the state’s main industries. In 2016, the tourism industry brought 12,250 million pesos to the state’s economy, and Oaxaca received over 5.3 million visitors (Oaxaca Juntos Construimos el Cambio 2016). These figures were projected only to rise. Among the state’s main attractions are its archaeological sites, colonial cities, and beaches, as well as its culinary culture and gastronomic experiences. The state’s 2016–2022 strategic tourism plan proposed to design tourist products with the objective of giving visitors direct access to gastronomic, craft, cultural, and natural experiences at their destinations (Oaxaca Juntos Construimos el Cambio 2016:27; translation by V. Pérez).

Oaxacan food is increasingly appreciated worldwide, in part popularized by streaming food series and online competitions, but such popularity comes at a cost. As cheap and delicious eats such as tlayudas become trendy, their demand rises and so do their prices. As with food gentrification elsewhere (see, e.g., Matta 2013), those who benefit from the promotion and sale of these foods are rarely the Indigenous people, the cocineras (female cooks), who made them in the first place. Food gentrification has been underway for decades, and millennium-old food traditions are being gentrified, as attested by the contributions in this book.

One of the main perks for those of us who work in Oaxaca is the food we have enjoyed over the years. As people who have strong ties with Oaxaca, we would be remiss if we did not present this volume as an opportunity to critically reflect on the disenfranchisement of traditional cooks and farmers from their foods, lands, and culinary heritage. This volume not only presents the archaeological evidence of what ancient Oaxacan communities grew, cooked, and ate but also reveals how, since ancient times, cooks and farmers have experimented with their environments to feed their families. Over time, people developed regional flavors and identities while also negotiating and resisting asymmetrical power structures, from the rise of ruling elites in the Formative period, to the establishment of colonial rule, to the gentrification of Oaxacan foods in the global market. The contributions in this volume bring us to the present and outside of Oaxaca, where Oaxacan communities in the United States are holding on to and transforming their culinary traditions, often rejecting dominant narratives of modernization, acculturation, and what constitutes healthy and prestigious foods. While this book documents parts of the long history of Oaxacan cuisines, there is no doubt that these food traditions are alive and evolving and have an interesting future ahead.

RECIPES FOR STUDYING FOODWAYS AND CUISINE

The earliest archaeological studies about food focused on subsistence regimes, the effects of local ecologies on diets, the relative importance of various plant and animal resources, and the processes of domestication. Such studies built sophisticated taxonomies of plant and animal remains, investigated the culinary equipment used to process them, and identified the specific locations where ingredients became subsistence. The studies drew demographic estimates from algorithms of landscape carrying capacities and nutritional content of food ingredients and then modeled human-ecological dynamics to understand population shifts and environmental change (see, e.g., Flannery 1986; Gleason 1994; Smith 1998). Many of these studies relied on ethnoarchaeology and middle-range studies to develop in-depth understandings of how ancient people could minimize food risk, increase nutrition through processing ingredients, and maximize foodstuffs through landscape management and seasonal mobility.

New attention to the role of food beyond subsistence emerged in the 1980s, as archaeologists incorporated new theories alongside methodological advancements. Tracking formation processes of the archaeological record, cataloguing taxonomies of food elements, and recording details of local ecologies complemented a new attention to the meanings of various food practices and the ways that these practices constructed society. Although often making use of the same basic ingredients, latter approaches asked new questions of the data sets. As we detail further below, several broad pursuits coalesced in food studies: cultural constructions of edibility, culinary elaborations and aesthetics, politics and power, identity and embodiment, and semiosis and meaning.

Classifications of edibility (and inedibility) are socially constituted, as the boundary between ‘natural’ inedibles and the cultural binarity of edible/inedible is a fuzzy one (Falk 1991:759, 761). Edibility is not determined by nutritional value alone, as made obvious when societies have accepted nutritionally marginal substances and/or rejected nutritionally rich substances (Fischler 1980; Miksicek et al. 1981). One finds evidence of food preferences in some of the earliest examples of Oaxacan foodways in the Classic period (see chaps. 5 and 6 in this volume), the Archaic period (see chap. 3 in this volume), and even in the early Holocene, when people in Oaxaca began to engineer landscapes to optimize microenvironments for the plant foods they favored (see chap. 2 in this volume).

Understandings of edibility have been the scaffolding for more complex notions of culturally constituted food aesthetics and preparation. The aesthetics of food, related to tastes and experienced through various senses, offer key insights into social lives (see Hastorf and Bruno 2020; see also chap. 13 in this volume). Tastes become embodied over time (Fischler 1988), and through such embodiment, food aesthetics themselves become culturally embedded (Arnold 1999; Fischler 1980; Sherratt 1987). Earlier scholars took a structural approach to cuisine, drawing analogies between ingredients and langue, and cuisine and parole (Barthes 2013 [1961]; Douglas 1997 [1975]; Soler 1997 [1973]). For the purposes of this volume, we define cuisine as a set of food practices that have some fixity over time and space, though are not rigidly formulated; that are formalized but not static; that manifest cultural preferences, often independent of simple nutritional maximization; that are shared, albeit sometimes unequally; that are elaborated, in processing and/or serving; that comprise both tangible ingredients and intangible ideas; that have a role in the ceremonial as well as the quotidian; and that are patterned, though not reducible to a checklist of attributes. Central in these food practices is cooking itself, as it is in this process of transformation that ingredients become recognizable as cuisine.

Some scholars have highlighted the ways that social and political power is negotiated in the kitchen, council house, and palace. Sutton (2001:5) made the claim that all food practices can be related to commensality and competition. When considering the social and political manifestations of power, scholars have studied food production, food distribution and feasting, personal obligation and reciprocity, the interplay between food and familial relationships, and social differentiation. Archaeologists have framed these approaches in the context of inequality and social stratification (see, e.g., Crader 1990; Crane 1996; see also chaps. 6, 8, and 9 in this volume), as well as political economy (Sheets 2000; Van der Veen and Jones 2006) and broad sociopolitical dynamics (see chap. 6 in this volume). Understanding the economic value of food, as well as how it is unequally distributed, has been the focus of a number of studies (Van der Veen 2003; Van der Veen et al. 2008). Nascent social complexity may even have emerged from the symbolic differentiation of different foods (see chap. 4 in this volume).

Closely related to food politics and food distinction is social identity. You are what you eat is a commonly repeated saying, as people define themselves and others at least partially through cuisine. Food may commemorate people and events and profoundly connect people to cultural memory (see chaps. 7 and 11 in this volume; Sutton 2001). A number of scholars have illustrated how identity and personhood are directly tied to foodways (see, e.g., Crown 2000; Franklin 2001; Janik 2003; see also chaps. 13 and 14 in this volume). Food scholars have explored multiple axes of identity, from gender to age to social position (see chaps. 4, 6, 8, and 11 in this volume) to cultural affiliation (see chap. 9 in this volume).

Food also carries a wealth of meanings from the spiritual to the cosmological. Archaeologically, one can most easily track ritually symbolic dimensions of foods by identifying components featured in ritualized practice (see, e.g., Brown and Gerstle 2002; Morehart and Butler 2010; see also chaps. 4, 7, and 13 in this volume). But cultural logics and ideologies are not only embedded in highly charged contexts. Quotidian foods also carry deeply rooted symbolism. As Mary Weismantel (1988:7) notes, it is because they are ordinarily immersed in everyday practice in a material way that foods, abstracted as symbols from this material process, can condense in themselves a wealth of ideological meanings. Several chapters in this volume highlight the persistence of everyday culinary expressions and their implications for cultural continuity (see chaps. 10, 11, and 12 in this volume).

Following more recent approaches, one can even begin to think about the ways that food is active and agentive in human lives. As the ontological turn increasingly influences the social sciences, foodstuffs, as both matter and message, have been featured in a number of studies that track their interactions with society (see Morell-Hart 2020; Van der Veen 2014). Many chapters in this volume, though not directly engaging with object biography literature, nonetheless map pathways of particular food elements (culinary ingredients, practices, and equipment) as they transform or persist over time (see, e.g., chaps. 10, 11, and 14). Such attention to food biographies, in turn, reveals the direct impacts of food on human society, including ongoing social reproduction through household meals, ritualized activities to ensure harvests, and even warfare resulting from famine.

FOODWAYS IN MESOAMERICA: PAST TO PRESENT

Over the past several decades, Mesoamerican scholarship has contributed key thematic and methodological perspectives to the field of food studies. These contributions include theories of domestication and early agriculture, the role of food in the development of inequality and regional political economies, bottom-up approaches that highlight commoner food practices and the construction of identity through eating, and the place of food in religion and ceremonialism, among others.

In Mesoamerica, the archaeological study of food traces its beginnings to pioneering studies by Richard MacNeish (1967–1972) in the Tehuacán Valley and Kent Flannery (1986) in the Valley of Oaxaca. These studies recovered botanical remains to document the domestication of plants that would become the basis of Mesoamerican diets. Dolores Piperno recovered the earliest evidence of maize in the central Balsas River Valley, a region where maize’s wild antecedent, teosinte, is currently found (Piperno and Pearsall 1993; Piperno et al. 2009). Food studies of the Archaic and Early Formative periods across Mesoamerica have documented the adoption of key ingredients into Mesoamerican cuisines, processes of plant domestication, transitions into full-time maize and milpa agriculture, and the basic subsistence patterns of early villages (Bérubé et al. 2020; Flannery 1976; Hepp 2019; Lesure et al. 2006; Lohse et al. 2021; Morell-Hart et al. 2019; Rosenswig et al. 2015).

Evidence from Mesoamerica also tracks growing social inequality and the establishment of stratified and urban societies during the Formative period. Food studies at urban settlements often document evidence of food surplus and storage, alongside the intersection among food production, feasting, and the institutionalization of social inequality (see, e.g., Ardren 2020a; Brown 2001; Dahlin et al. 2010; Emery 2002). Studies of food production and the circulation of ingredients have further addressed specifics of Mesoamerican trade economies (Sheets 2000; Yaeger 2018 [2010]) and identified marketplaces (Andrews 2020; Martin 2012).

Foods were, and continue to be, important components of Mesoamerican ceremony, whether featured as offerings for divinities or repasts for the dead (McNeil 2010; Monaghan 1995; Morehart 2011; Morehart and Butler 2010; Vail and Dedrick 2020). Foods connected people to their ancestors and therefore to the use rights of sacred landscapes (McAnany 1995). Some food offerings were even presented as proxies for human blood to feed hungry deities (Scherer and Houston 2018; Tiesler 2020). Mesoamerican scholars have identified ritualized foodstuffs through the analysis of ceramic vessel residues and rich imagery. In the Maya region, the vivid scenes of courtly life depicted on murals and polychrome vessels, as well as in the epigraphic record, have enabled nuanced studies of elite foods (see, e.g., Reents-Budet 2000; Taube 1989), especially cacao-based drinks (Beliaev et al. 2010; LeCount 2001; Powis et al. 2002; Reents-Budet 2006). In turn, scholars have used residue analyses to identify theobromine, a distinct chemical marker that helps to determine which vessels were used for drinking cacao (McNeil 2010; Soleri et al. 2013).

The examination of late prehispanic and early colonial codices has also been productive in that regard. These sometimes depict scenes of food consumption, including figures drinking pulque or frothy cacao (Tokovinine 2016), which provide clues into the kinds of vessels that were used and the settings in which these drinks were consumed (Lind 2015). Ethnohistorical sources, chief among them the Florentine Codex, detail which foods were eaten in the Basin of Mexico, how these foods were prepared, and how their preparation was taught. The Florentine Codex provides so much detailed information that Nahua food customs are sometimes projected across other parts of Mesoamerica (Gumerman 1994).

In addition to studying feasting and the food remains found in public, ritual, funerary, and palatial settings, Mesoamerican scholars have carefully documented food and food-related activities in non-elite households. Some of this research has compared dietary patterns of commoners to elite houses and feasting settings (Masson et al. 2020; Middleton et al. 2002). Household food studies have also dealt with questions about household resilience in the face of changing political and environmental conditions (Aimers and Hodell 2011; Yaeger 2020), and about commoner resistance to asymmetrical power structures.

There is also a growing interest in exploring issues of regional, ethnic, social, and gender identities as reflected in dietary patterns (see, e.g., Ardren 2020b; Fernández Souza et al. 2020; García Barrios 2017). Such approaches have become possible as data from decades of study accumulate and provide the opportunity to identify dietary and food-related patterns within single communities and households (Casar et al. 2017). As Mesoamerican scholars have demonstrated, residues of foodways can offer great insights into broader questions of identity.

There is also a rich corpus of ethnohistorical research into how Indigenous communities and their diets were transformed by Spanish colonization (Caso Barrera and Aliphat Fernández 2006). Through food, Indigenous communities sometimes radically changed under processes of imperialism that introduced cattle and sugar production to Mesoamerican lands to satisfy Spanish culinary preferences. Initial forced production, and later selective culinary integration, resulted in extreme agrarian changes and transformations to local cuisines. But Indigenous people also fought for their biological and cultural survival. Because Indigenous foods, and the rituals and social contexts in which they were consumed, were maligned, discouraged, and sometimes outlawed, the continuation of prehispanic dietary and agricultural practices sometimes indicates active Indigenous resistance to acculturation (Chuchiak 2013; Martínez Tuñón et al. 2018).

THE SCOPE OF THIS VOLUME

Sidney Mintz (1986) claimed that his influential book Sweetness and Power was ultimately not about sugar but about the rise of capitalism. He instilled in anthropologists the idea that we study food to learn about something larger than itself (Mintz 2017), an insight that remains central to contemporary food studies. This volume, the first to address food practices across Oaxaca through a long-term historical lens, presents a variety of studies that demonstrate how food is a window through which we can understand something larger than itself.

Temporal depth is a strength of this volume, a luxury afforded by a history of sustained and multifaceted archaeological, historical, and ethnographic research, representing the full spectrum of human occupation in Oaxaca, from the early Holocene to contemporary times (see fig. 1.1). In food scholarship, long-term historical perspectives have been most enriching, since these are the contexts in which the dynamic nature of food practices are revealed. This is true even when things change to stay the same amid social, cultural, economic, and political transformations. Oaxaca is both a promising and a challenging setting for long-term explorations of food dynamics. It is promising because the social, cultural, and environmental diversity found in the region prevents scholars from applying an overly simplistic, essentialist lens on Oaxacan food. Yet Oaxaca remains challenging because of the urge that we experience, as scholars, to make sense of it in its