“I Hate it”

Abstract

In Mexico, the corn tortilla has long been imbued with deep meaning; at particular historical moments, it has reflected indigenous backwardness, national culture and women’s contribution to social reproduction. In one rural community in Yucatán, tortillas, their place in everyday life and their relationships with human bodies have grown yet more complicated. Over the last century, shifting conditions in the region—a decline in agricultural sustainability, the development of a massive tourist industry, the expansion of mass media and new religious diversity—have altered many of the ways in which people engage with food. This paper examines the tensions between the qualities of foods—and the process of tasting by which they are experienced—and the resistance of some Yucatec Maya women to preparing tortillas at home. Consensus about what good tortillas taste like no longer precludes women’s refusal to pat out this staple food by hand. The paper draws distinctions between practices of tortilla preparation and consumption to analyze the links women draw between food, work and class. In doing so, the paper argues that older traditions of cooperation and commensality persist in rural Yucatán despite increasing diversity in both women’s everyday labor and their class aspirations.

Keywords:

• food
• consumption
• food labor
• tortillas
• Mexico
• Maya
• gender

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Food, Culture and Society’s peer reviewers for their immensely helpful critiques. Portions of this material were presented at the Food Networks: Gender and Foodways Conference at the University of Notre Dame, January 26–8, 2012, and the author is grateful for the productive feedback it received there. Research for this article was made possible with the generous support of Utica College, The University of Chicago, the Whatcom Museum Society and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use pseudonyms for the names of the town and all informants. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. I follow the standard orthography for Yucatec Maya, as explained in Blair and Vermont-Salas (1965). I revert to alternate orthographies only when directly quoting other authors’ work.

2. See Laudan (2001) for a now classic critique of the idealization of food cultures of the past, especially peasant food cultures.

3. The categories with which the residents of Juubche’ are most concerned are their own—discussed using terms ranging from paisano (countryman) to mayero or masewal (Yucatec Maya speaker) to yucateco (Yucatecan, frequently used by younger people)—and ts’u’ulo’ob. The category of ts’u’ulo’ob is used to described non-indigenous Yucatecans and other non-indigenous Mexicans, as well as turistas (tourists; unless used in a clear context of tourism—referring to members of a tour group for example—it typically refers to White individuals) and gringos (tourists, usually White). The residents of Juubche identify a few other categories including chinos (individuals of Asian descent) and negros (individuals of African descent).

4. The óol is best described as the emotional heart or life force in Yucatec Maya ethnoanatomy (Bourdin, 2007/08: 11–14; Kray, 1997: 93). Not surprisingly, any disturbance of the óol upsets the function of the body. This leads to the development of koja’anilo’ob (sicknesses), a very general term that transcends the boundaries between what would be in Western medicine mental and physical health.

5. Fisher and Benson (2006: 37) write of their Guatemalan informants’ tasting abilities, “The refined Tecpaneco palate, picking up on subtle differences of flavor that are elusive to the gringo palate, can identify the region of the country a particular batch of maize came from.”

6. Abarca relays similar perceptions of store-bought tortillas from an informant in Jalisco, Mexico. The woman notes the stiffness of reheated machine-made tortillas (Abarca 2006: 31).

7. In speaking of marriage, female residents of Juubche’ form the phrase for “giving themselves in marriage” from the root “síi.” Bastarracha Manzano and Canto Rosado gloss “síi” as the Spanish “regalar” (to gift) (Bastarracha Manzano and Canto Rosado 2003: 216).

8. Today, many households do not even own these grinding stones. Those women who do use them do so for grinding large quantities of spices; some of these women prepare the spice mixture known as xak for sale.