| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation uses cuisine to examine the role of women in creating Mexican national identity. The national cuisine that exists today centered around Precolumbian foods such as tamales and enchiladas received acceptance by Mexico's upper and middle classes only after World War II. Precolumbian civilizations developed a highly-refined cuisine based on maize, beans, squash, and chiles. Nevertheless, sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors rejected their foods, and Mesoamerican culture in general, preferring to build New Spain on a European model. The natives influenced the new culture, but only surreptitiously. For example, when Spaniards refused to eat corn confections, Indian women ground tortillas and chiles in European stews. The result was a mestizo cuisine, but throughout the colonial period and into the nineteenth century, Mexican elites took their inspiration from European fashions and denied Indian influences. Porfirian leaders even hoped to transform native eating habits, weaning them from corn, which they considered nutritionally inferior to wheat. This campaign, deriving from the "tortilla discourse," was an attempt to transform the lower classes into imitations of the bourgeoisie. Post-Revolutionary rural modernization plans, including educational missions and the Green Revolution perpetuated this emphasis on wheat. Mexico's urban middle class finally embraced tamales as part of the indigenista cultural movement, which culminated in the 1940s. In so doing, they created a truly national cuisine. This study challenges theories based on Old World models by revealing that the popular sectors had a large role in the formation both of cuisine and nationalism. | |
