Jeffrey M. Pilcher

Tamales or Timbales: Cuisine and the Formation of Mexican National Identity, 1821–1911 *

Mexican writers of the twentieth century have often imagined cuisine to be a symbol of their national identity, a mestizo blend of Native American and Spanish influences. Salvador Novo, for example, a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua and official chronicler of Mexico City, traced the beginnings of mestizaje to the “happy encounter” between corn tortillas and pork sausage that produced the first taco. The most common culinary metaphor for the Mexican nation was mole poblano (turkey in deep-brown sauce). Authors in the 1920s began attributing the origins of this dish to the convents of colonial Puebla, and in particular to Sor Andrea de la Asuncion of the Dominican Santa Rosa cloister. About 1680 she supposedly combined seasonings from the Old World with chile peppers from the New in honor of Viceroy Tomas Antonio de la Cerda y Aragon. Mole thus represented Mexico’s “cosmic race,” created by divine inspiration and served up for the approval of the Spanish crown.

The human tradition in Mexico

Chapter 1 Introduction, A Map of the System Part 2 I. Independent Spirits, 1750-1850 Chapter 3 Josefa Ordonez: The Scandalous Adventures of a Colonial Courtesan Chapter 4 Anahuacs Angry Apostle: Fray Servando Teresa de Mier Chapter 5 Lucas Balderas: Popular Leader and Patriot Part 6 II. Heirs of the Reforma, 1850-1910 Chapter 7 Agnes Salm-Salm: An American Princess in Maximilans Mexico Chapter 8 Felipe Garcia and the Real Heroes of Guelatao Chapter 9 Alejandro Prieto: Cientifico from the Provinces Chapter 10 Juana Belen Gutierrez de Mendoza: Woman of Words, Woman of Action Part 11 III. Revolutionary Generations, 1910-1940 Chapter 12 Te Amo Muncho: The Love Letters of Pedro and Enriqueta Chapter 13 Rosa Torre Gonzalez: Soldadera and Feminist Chapter 14 Nahui Olin: The Generals Daughter Disrobes Chapter 15 Lic. Moises de la Pena: The Economist on Horseback Part 16 IV. Mexicans in the Global Village, 1940 to the Present Chapter 17 A Public Romance: Maria Felix and Agustin Lara Chapter 18 Josefina Velazquez de Leon: Apostle of the Enchilada Chapter 19 Armando Nava and Los Dug Dugs: Rock Musicians Chapter 20 Gabriel Espindola Martinez: Tequila Master Chapter 21 Index

Mad cowmen, foreign investors and the Mexican Revolution

Abstract ‘Today in Merrie England,’ reported the Mexican Herald on 7 October 1909, gracing ‘the ends of traditional English boards is roasted beef from the plains of Mexico’. The man who sent that first steamship of Mexican meat to England, John Wesley de Kay, president of the Mexican National Packing Company, hoped that his refrigerated beef exports would soon rival those of Argentina and the United States.1 Washington National Record Center (hereafter WNRC), U.S/Mexican Claims Commission, RG 76, entry 125, agency 4850, John W. de Kay Memorial, 3 June 1927, see especially pp. 13-25. This document must be read with caution. Having introduced to Mexico the modern meat packing methods pioneered in Chicago, he exemplified the progress and profits that seemed possible through foreign investment during the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911). But de Kays dream of becoming the next Gustavus Swift or Philip Armour perished with the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when mad cowmen—both disgruntled livestock mer...

Encarnacion's Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California. Selections from Encarnacion Pinedo's El cocinero espanol (review)

Born in 1848 to one of Spanish Californias leading families, Encarnacion Pinedo lost eight male relatives to Yankee vigilantes and soldiers of fortune, who swindled the Berreyesa clan out of a vast estate including the Nuevo Almaden Mine. Although reduced to the charity of her Anglo brother-in-law, Pinedo left a rich bequest to her family and to history in the form of El cocinero espahol, the first Hispanic cookbook written and published in the United States. This splendid edition by the University of California Press offers both an insightful cultural history of early California and an invaluable collection of classic Mexican recipes.

Fajitas and the Failure of Refrigerated Meatpacking in Mexico: Consumer Culture and Porfirian Capitalism

Tourists who visit a Mexican market to observe a butcher at work will readily notice the difference between the material cultures of meat in Mexico and the United States. Instead of thick, neatly cut steaks, wrapped in clear plastic, they will find butterflied strips of meat, corresponding to no known part of a cow, sawed with ragged edges but remarkable thinness, and hung on hooks and rods. Thick slabs called suadero might be steak except for the checkerboards carved across the front, and seemingly random chunks of retazo complete the baroque display of craftsmanship. Although of little use in making Anglo-American roasts or steaks, these cuts are ideal for such delicacies as carne asada (grilled meat) and mole de olla (chili pepper stew). Indeed, fajitas—skirt steak pounded thin and marinated, then seared quickly on a hot fire, and served with salsa and fresh tortillas— are nothing more than a Tex-Mex version of the standard method of cooking and eating beef in Mexico. Moreover, the differences between U.S. supermarket meat counters and Mexican artisanal market displays extend beyond national culinary preferences to reflect the historical growth of industrial supply chains. Indeed, meat provides a case study demonstrating the significance of consumer culture in shaping the development of Mexican capitalism during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911).

The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (review)

Every semester, the challenge begins anew to convey the history of a nation as complex and contradictory as Mexico in a lively enough fashion to keep students awake yet without exoticizing the people. Teachers will find a tremendous wealth of material in this new anthology, allowing them to choose selections supporting a wide range of historical approaches, and at a surprisingly affordable price. The volume is weighted toward political history, but intriguing women and workers also rise up from the pages, making this a valuable resource for undergraduate surveys and a fascinating read for anyone interested in Mexico.

Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (review)

to be active up to the present, at least in part because the state had inadequate resources to provide modern medical care for all. Moreover, many people preferred an integral approach to healing that also drew upon their faith. In contemporary Latin America, the continuing vitality of both medical ideologies has resulted in a system that might be described as medical pluralism. Many people consult healers, but also go to modern hospitals. Healing cults have developed around saintly figures who had also been physicians, such as Venezuelas Jose Gregorio Hernandez and Costa Ricas Ricardo Moreno Canas. Sowells necessarily brief overview of the contemporary scene does not permit him to tackle the intriguing question of why Hernandez and Moreno inspired cults while Perdomo did not. Perhaps Hernandez and Moreno, as men of science and of faith, figuratively represented both ideologies while Perdomos history located him solely on the side of the empirics.

Goods, Power, History: Latin America's Material Culture (review)

An old cliche states that clothes make the man, but just what they make him is not always so obvious. In the hierarchical society of eighteenth-century Lima, casta women flaunted sumptuary laws by wearing expensive clothes and jewelry that were supposedly reserved for the Creole elite. Yet at the same time, merchants from Lima used the coercive powers of the colonial state to compel Native Americans in the highlands to buy cloth and other goods; ultimately, these forced purchases became so onerous that they helped incite the Tupac Amaru rebellion. As these Peruvian examples illustrate, the history of consumption in Latin America is a complex and vital subject that calls out for further study. Elegantly written and with the vision of a Braudel, Arnold Bauers survey of material culture from pre-Hispanic times to the global era provides an ideal starting point for such an undertaking.

Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910 (review)

excluded from full citizenship, it is difficult to sustain Buffington’s view that “the opposition of criminal and citizen . . . became the fundamental dichotomy within modern Mexican society” (p. 4). Many other groups, such as children, women, and, at various times, illiterates, servants, and vagrants were also denied full civic rights. Their exclusion was not always cloaked “behind a veil of criminality” (p. 8), as Buffington claims. Indeed, it is unclear what he means by the term “citizen.” He ignores suffrage laws that might have some bearing on the definition of citizenship. He asserts that by constructing the Indian as “the Other,” anthropologists helped keep Indians from actively participating in the nation—even though the anthropologists he studies wrote precisely around the time when Indians gained new civic rights, as the Revolutionary state awarded suffrage to all men and incorporated peasants into the body politic through the corporate party of the PRM.

Book Review: The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America

ers, a dichotomy with an important dimension of gender difference. Frederik Pedersen, working with rather similar case material from the fourteenth-century York courts, considers the ambigu ous ways in which the canonical abstract concept of maritalis affectiotranslated into the tangi ble claims of litigants in marriage cases. Kathryn Ann Taglia examines northern French synodal legislation from the later Middle Ages and argues that embedded within the strictures in this leg islation regarding sacramental provision for the young (emergency baptism by lay people of infants in peril of death, first communion, and confirmation) lay a cultural construction of child hood as a series of liminal sacramental stages, as well as concern with defining boundaries of ecclesiastical authority over these transitions. Other authors in the collection use different courts’records to ask somewhat similar questions: for example, in Timothy Haskett’s case study of a contested will in the mid-fifteenth-century English court of Chancery (a legal venue that Sheehan also studied) and Margaret Kerr’s catalog of husbands’and wives’appearances in Eng lish royal criminal courts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where (she observes) theo retical limitations on married women’s legal rights were eroded by custom and legal evolution during the period. Some of these papers range rather more broadly in terms of sources and address somewhat different problems in family and gender history. John Carmi Parsons, for example, offers in effect a prosopographical study of the caregivers—wet nurses, governesses, a “vast surrogate family” (p. 311)—of English royal children in the thirteenth century, permitting some tentative conclusions about constructions of childhood. Constance Rousseau, from the correspondence of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), seeks to uncover the rhetoric of family, a “familial model of behavior” (p. 331), in Innocent’s dealings with European royalty. David Pelteret attempts a deconstruction of Bede’s writings to uncover some nuances of his attitudes toward women, arguing for a “misogyn y . . . of a more covert and insidious kind” (pp. 44-45) than that of Bede’s contemporaries, while Audrey Douglas uses some remarkable sources (including a communicant list from 1533) to delineate some aspects of household and women’s lives in preElizabethan Salisbury. Dyan Elliott’s lucid and compelling essay returns to a paradox of a different kind: in order for medieval female mystics’experiences to be accepted as valid they had to be “textualized,” to reach written form via a (usually) male clerical scribe (“compulsory heterotextuality”: p. 53) and via a series of conventional disclaiming exercises. Diverse and inevitably uneven as any such collection must be, this volume is nonetheless a fitting testimonial to its dedicatee and throughout demonstrates both the much-more-thanconventional affection that Father Sheehan inspired among his students and the important influ ence his work has had on medieval social history. For any reader interested in examining the state of the art on the history of the medieval Western family, it is an excellent starting point.