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ABSTRACT
This article explores chef Virgilio Martínez’s culinary exploration of Peruvian biodiversity and his claims of ‘discovering,’ selecting, classifying, and transforming local, ‘unknown,’ Indigenous ingredients and knowledge into high-end global cuisine. Taking Martínez seriously as an artist and cultural agent, I suggest that his work can be understood as a form of what I call the settler-colonial sublime, art that conceals and obscures the erasure and appropriation of specific Indigenous peoples and practices. As with all hegemonic projects, there is room for counter-narratives, and I consider the possibility for the emergence of other-than-colonial relations. Nevertheless, reading Martínez’s culinary artistry alongside the provocative performance art of Elizabeth Lino in Cerro de Pasco helps reveal how the skill and artistry of Peruvian chefs like Martínez work in tandem with a ‘gastropolitical complex’ of political, cultural, and economic forces to obscure ongoing entanglements with coloniality.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to Cristina Alcalde, Florence Babb, and Amy Cox Hall, the guest editors of this special issue, for their generous and incisive critiques of multiple versions of this essay. I am also grateful to Lydia Heberling, Sebastián López-Vergara, José Antonio Lucero, and the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and generative comments on this work. Research for this project was supported by a Royalty Research Fund at the University of Washington, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities offered the necessary support for analysis and writing.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. See the restaurant’s website at <https://www.centralrestaurante.com.pe/>.
2. See the restaurant’s website at <https://www.milcentro.pe/>.
3. See their website at <https://materiniciativa.com/>.
4. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘sublime,’ accessed 2 July 2020 <https://www-oed-com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/view/Entry/192766?rskey=QBfptv&result=1>.
5. The conflict also included other subversive groups, like the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA). For more about this period of political violence in Peru, see Conaghan (Citation2006), Degregori (Citation2012), Stern (Citation1998), and Theidon (Citation2014).
6. While Quechua is considered the most numerous Indigenous nation in Peru, there are many others, such as the Aymara, Asháninka, and Machiguenga, all of whom were targeted by Sendero Luminoso.
7. For more on the agrarian reform in Peru, see Aguirre and Drinot (Citation2017) and Mayer (Citation2009).
8. While the war with Sendero and the authoritarian policies of Alberto Fujimori had a brutal impact on most Peruvians, the bracketing of this violence as exceptional sometimes serves to obscure the fact that this was a particularly harrowing episode in a longer and devastating history of coloniality, racial violence, and dispossession.
9. See Acurio’s inaugural speech at the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima in 2006 (reproduced in Acurio Citation2016).
10. All translations are my own.
11. This contest was a private initiative (significantly, not backed by UNESCO), organized by the New Open World Corporation (NOWC). More info can be found online at <https://about.new7wonders.com/our-mission/>.
12. This video is available on Lino’s blog at <https://laultimareina.wordpress.com/miss-cerro-de-pasco-2/promocion-turistica>. The website also provides historical background and links to legal documents. Importantly, the historical landscape Lino spells out in her website reminds us of the city’s history of Indigenous sovereignty and dispossession, the centrality of mining to its foundation, and the legacies of labor struggles and environmental degradation. Just as importantly, Lino reminds us that in the early 20th century, Cerro de Pasco occupied a privileged place in the nation. It was once Peru’s second-largest city and a place where European dignitaries strolled its streets; it later contributed to the fortunes of American families with the last names of Morgan and Vanderbilt. As the wealth of outsiders grew, the pit grew larger, swallowing the houses and neighborhoods of local residents. See Dajer Citation2015.
13. On her official sash, ‘reina’ is misspelled as ‘reyna,’ a mistake made by the tailor who crafted the sash for Lino. Rather than have another one made, she kept wearing that mistake, and wore it proudly. Perhaps this is one more way that she ironically calls attention to the contradictory nature of Peruvian triumphalism and its tendency to celebrate what is often clearly a mistake.
14. For more on extraction in the Andes, see Bebbington (Citation2009), Bebbington and Bury (Citation2014), and Li (Citation2015).
15. See the Interviews in this issue for more on Lino’s work.
16. The following three sections draw from Chapter Two of my book (García Citation2021).
17. See Orlove (Citation1993) for a fascinating discussion of geographical representations of Peru in the late 19th and early 20th century that not only created the category of ‘the highlands,’ but also linked Indians to highland Peru, while gradually erasing Indigenous peoples from representations of coastal and jungle regions.
18. See also Babb (this issue) on the significance of Murra and verticality for thinking about gender and race in contemporary Peru.
19. In addition to heading Mater, the chef’s sister also manages all of his restaurants in Peru.
20. There are also those who are increasingly spending extraordinary amounts of money to travel to ‘extreme’ locations and experience culturally infused food (Mishan Citation2019).
21. Indeed, during field research in Lima I met several people who had traveled to the capital to eat at Central, Maido, and Astrid & Gastón (the three Peruvian restaurants on the ‘50 Best’ list at that time) and had no plans to travel beyond Lima.
22. The websites for Central, Mil, and Mater were updated as I revised this article. The website quotes and images I analyze here refer to earlier versions, all accessed on or before April 2019.
23. It is worth noting one additional thing about this image. While Martínez seems to be looking out into the distance, he is looking into a glass door that acts like a mirror, and in effect appears to be looking at himself. During this moment of self-contemplation, Pia León, Martínez’s wife and Central’s head chef until a few years ago, is working in the kitchen. It is hard not to read this, almost too easily, as yet one more representation of gendered labor. While these gendered dynamics are of course more complicated, this brings to mind a moment in the Chef’s Table episode, when Nicholas Gill tells viewers that ‘[Martínez] has Malena and Pia to bring structure into the restaurant, so he can be the dreamer, and explorer.’
24. Mater’s website, now an important site for showcasing Martínez’s culinary research, was also much less developed, until recently hosting only a blog. Moreover, at Mil, every meal begins with a tour of Mater Iniciativa’s offices and research projects.
25. Significantly, Roxana Quispe Collante, a Quechua scholar of Peruvian and Latin American literature, recently (2019) defended her PhD thesis in Quechua at the Universidad de San Marcos, becoming the first person to do so. Her dissertation, on transfiguration and Quechua poetry, was also written entirely in Quechua.
26. While the Mater site no longer centers this image, the phrase ‘Afuera Hay Mas’ remains a central guiding mantra. See also Martínez, Martínez, and Vargas Tagle Citation2019.
27. Quoted in Dixler Canavan Citation2018.
28. D’Angelo stopped working at Mil in 2019.
29. Despite talk about the importance of context, D’Angelo told me the architectural firm had to bring ichu, the grass used to construct Mil’s rooftop, from other parts of the Andes because it does not grow near Moray. This brings to mind the gastropolitical emphasis on ‘Peruvian authenticity,’ carefully choreographed and performed for the nation and world. See also García (Citation2013).
30. This raises questions about intellectual property, as it remains unclear whether a family, the community, or Mil would ‘own’ these new varieties.
31. Wolff might do well to read the many works of Native and other scholars who critique precisely these kinds of ‘decolonial’ claims and who have offered numerous interventions on Indigenous and decolonial research methods and practices (e.g. Simpson Citation2007; Smith Citation1999; TallBear Citation2014; Tuck and Wayne Yang Citation2012; Wilson Citation2008).
32. This YouTube video is an excerpt from an episode of ‘Culinary Journeys,’ a CNN Travel series that is no longer available online.
33. See more on this at <https://www.peru.travel/?internacional>.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
María Elena García
María Elena García is an Associate Professor in the Comparative History of Ideas Department at the University of Washington. She is the author of Gastropolitics and the Specter of Race: Stories of Capital, Culture, and Coloniality in Peru (University of California Press, 2021).