Afro-Mexican Cuisine: Getting Started on the Costa Chica
What would Afro-Mexican cuisine look like? I always like to ask that question in advance of digging in to a new cuisine as a kind of test. How much can one infer from the history?
So I go to the question with experience of Ibo cuisine in the Niger Delta where I spent some time plus readings about African American cuisine including Karen Hess’s classic study of the Carolina Rice Kitchen plus bits and pieces about Afro-Brazilian cuisine gleaned from Gilbert Freyre’s equally classic work on The Masters and the Slaves, all topped off with work but more recent investigators such as Jessica Harris and Fran Osseo-Asare.
Will I find bean and rice dishes? Bean fritters (akara balls)? Palm oil? Palm wine? Okra stews? Will there be a tradition of pounded starchy dishes accompanied by a savory sauce? Are they based in African farming techniques? How much of traditional religion still shapes festival foods? Questions like that.
Well, it’s just beginning to be possible to formulate an answer. Although Aguirre Beltran did some pioneering work in the mid-twentieth century, followed by Colin Palmer in the US, it’s really been in the last fifteen or twenty years that studies of African Mexicans has taken off, both in Mexico and in the United States.
Now Francisca Aparicio Prudente of the Regional Unit of the State of Guerrero has published La sazón de la cocina afromestiza de Guerrero, number 56 in the truly wondrous series on Cocina Indigena y Popular of Mexico’s Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes initiated by José Itturiaga, himself a very distinguished writer on Mexican cuisines.
The chief message I’ve taken away as I have pored over the 100 or so recipes and the narrative introduction is that the Afro Mexican cuisine of the Costa Chica of Guerrero is not quite what I expected.
Whoops, my alloted blog time for the day has run out. So quickly, I’ll be giving extracts of this book and commenting on the cuisine of the torrid Costa Chica south of Acapulco plus then move on the African traces in the cuisines of Veracruz and even my own inland state of Guanajuato.
For some photos of the African culture on the Costa Chica plus a great bibliography, click this link.
Sounds like a book I ought to get!
Here’s another bibliographical source:
Rowell, Charles H.
Blacks in Mexico: A Selective Bibliography
Callaloo – Volume 29, Number 2, Spring 2006, pp. 503-511
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Charles H. Rowell – Blacks in Mexico: A Selective Bibliography – Callaloo 29:2 Callaloo 29.2 (2006) 503-511 Blacks In Mexico A Selective Bibliography Charles Henry Rowell The following bibliography is largely a revision of “Africa in Mexico: A Reading List,” which was published in the special Coyolillo issue of Callaloo (27.1, Winter 2004). Like that reading list, this bibliography, a supplement to the readings in this special section of the journal, “will provide the reader with a basic working foundation for understanding the complex life, history, and culture of the people of African descent in the Republic of Mexico.” Aguirre Beltr�n, Gonzalo. “The Integration of the Negro into the National Society of Mexico,” in Race and Class in Latin America. Ed. Magnus M�rner. New York: U of Columbia P, 1970. ——. El Negro Esclavo en Nueva Espa�a. Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1994. ——. “La poblaci�n negra de M�xuco.” Estudio etnohist�rico. Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1992 (1946). ——. “The Slave Trade in Mexico.” Hispanic American Historical Review. 24 (August 144): 412-431. Barrett,…
Great, much more up to date. There is a lot coming out in this area.