Tejate: Theobroma Cacao and T. bicolor in a Traditional Beverage from Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

Although cacao is most familiar in industrialized Western societies in the form of a processed solid confection, for most of its history the seeds of Theobroma cacao have been most commonly used as ingredients in beverages. Today, in some of the more traditional communities of Mesoamerica, cacao continues to be used primarily in traditional local beverages. One such beverage is tejate, from the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico. Tejate is a culturally and socially significant beverage, and because it is made with maize and frequently consumed in some rural households, its nutritional contribution may be meaningful. However, tejate preparation is labor intensive and this, combined with changes in the Central Valleys, is leading to changes in the persistence and geographic distribution of this important form of cacao consumption.

Keywords::

• beverage
• cacao
• maize
• Mexico
• Oaxaca
• tejate
• Theobroma
• traditional food

Acknowledgments

We thank the three Castellanos sisters who taught us so much about tejate, Edith Aquino of the Flor de Tejate organization, and all of the farmers and market vendors of Oaxaca with whom we talked; for comments on drafts of this manuscript or suggesting sources of information, Flavio Aragón Cuevas, Jeanine Gasco, Elisabeth Randall, Ricardo Salvador, Kirsten Tripplett, Barbara Voorhies, Marcus Winter and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB for funding. Thanks to Barbara Kerr for permission to reproduce Figure 1.