Which Mexico? Which Mexican Cuisine?
It’s Day of the Dead again. It’s a lovely custom that I enjoyed in Mexico. Many of the customs associated with the Day of the Dead, though, are neither universally nor exclusively Mexican. Placing food in cemeteries, even eating in cemeteries in remembrance of the dead is a custom found in many parts of the world, including China, Japan, and less than a century ago, the United States and England as well. Moreover there are parts of Mexico where the Day of the Dead is either not celebrated or has been celebrated only in the past few years.
In 2011, I took this photo of the altar that Jorge Hernández, one of the security guards for our apartment block, arranged around the guard-house from materials he had assembled from the trash. He had not known the custom growing up in his part of Mexico, he told me, but it was a nice custom and building the altar was a welcome change from raising and lowering the security bar all day.
For these reasons, I get nervous when discussions of the Day of the Dead tip over into assertions about the Mexican character and Mexicans’s special relationship with death. I get concerned when Day of the Dead celebrations are seen as Mexicans being different, or ‘other’ as academics like to say.
Mexicans, like citizens of other modern nations, are constantly re-working and debating what it means to be Mexican. I was thinking about this around the Day of the Dead last year. In three weeks, three events at the University of Texas at Austin presented three quite different visions of what it was to be Mexican, each emphasizing different historical trajectories, different social groups, different parts of the country, different political and economic ideas, and, implicitly at least, different national cuisines.
These three visions of Mexican-ness I heard last year I will call (1) Mexico as mestizo, (2) Mexico as poor and rural, and (3) Mexico as modernizing. To these three, I would like to add a further two: (4) Mexico as urban and urbane, and (5) Mexico as melting pot.
Five different visions do not exhaust the possibilities but they will serve to make some points, not just about Mexico but about national cuisines. Over the next week I will post on each of them.
My account is neither scholarly nor definitive. I do hope it is reasonably informed. During the fifteen years my husband and I lived in the country, we had conversation after conversation with people from different walks of life about being Mexican. Even so I welcome corrections and disagreements.
A starting point for all five is the fundamental turning point of twentieth-century Mexican history, not the world wars that dominate the English-speaking world, but the Mexican Revolution.
The Mexican Revolution began in 1910. Historians are still working on why, but at least one cause was the rapid modernization of the country under Porfirio Díaz (ruled from 1884-1911) and the hardships it caused. When the Revolution ground to a close in the 1920s, it left perhaps one in ten, 1.5 million of Mexico’s 15 million people, dead.
The search for national unity that been pursued through all the post-Independence political changes of the nineteenth century, moved back into full gear.
Very interestng!
Rachel, thank you for pointing out that Day of the Dead rites and rituals are not at all exclusive to Mexico. Only yesterday I read a very telling comment about similar celebrations in Sicily, where sugary figurines, obviously depictions of the departed, are given to children and marzipan fruits play an important role. Of course the Ancient Egyptians also feasted the dead and I expect the Neanderthals probably did so as well. The elements may change from one culture to another but the idea is the same–propitiating, celebrating, remembering, and using the occasion as an excuse for a grand feast.
Yes, and the Mexican bread for Day of the Dead is European in origin.
What a lovely photo of the altar. Well, dear Rachel, I can only concur. After three decades of living in and writing about Mexico, all the while married to a Mexican, I must say, when I read most English-language accounts– and some in Spanish as well– of what it means to be Mexican and the Mexican character, and the meaning of Mexican history, etc, etc I tend to… sigh. The one thing that is ever more clear to me is that Mexico is complex, socially, ethnically, culturally. It is, as one historian put it, as I more or less recall, “a nation of regions.” Immigrants from the Middle East, the US, non-Hispanic Europe, and Mexicans of African descent (yes, there was African slavery in Mexico) have had and continue to be an important influence. Indigeous peoples are legion, and extremely diverse. A wide variety of social classes exists– uncomfortable or even taboo a subject as that may be for some to acknowledge.
As for the Revolution, its nature and meaning have been endllessly reinterpreted– I doubt we will ever come to some Ultimate Truth about it; it is a narrative told and retold in different ways as different things to light, different voices step up the stage… different powers put a light on them and assemble an audience…
Indeed, what I have seen is that the Day of the Dead is celebrated in different places in different ways, and its widespread celebration in many urban areas among middle, upper-middle and upper classes dates in large part from the latter decades of the 20th century– as does the celebration of American Halloween among some middle and workingclass urban Mexicans. As for “El Halloween,” in my experience in my neighborhood in Mexico City– Coyoacán— “trick or treating” is not on one evening– October 31– as in the US, but on random days and times before and afterwards. Costumes sometimes, sometimes not. The local Walmart carries a selection of the usual cartoon character masks and such– or at least it did when I was last there.
My favorite part of this time of year is the bread, dipped in hot chocolate.
PS if I am not mistaken, the chapel to San Felipe de Jesús in the Mexico City cathderal opens on Todos Santos. Inside is the tomb of Emperor Agustín de Iturbide– the Liberator without a country, as one Mexican historian calls him. Even with the gate closed, that chapel is something to see.
Yes, I too sigh. You, though, have been sighning longer than I have. Couldn’t agree more about the diversity, and more especially about the social classes. Put the Revolution up there in a box with World War I as an event for which Ultimate Truth seems very unlikely to be achieved. Your impression about the Day of the Dead having become a middle and upper class celebration only in the last decades of the 20th century confirms my suspicions. In our middle/upper middle class neighborhood in Guanajuato, the children asking for Halloween treats came down from “ranchos” in “el cerro” (as you well know, this doesn’t traslate very well as villages in the hill).
And I wish I had seen that tomb in the Mexico City Cathedral.
Hey Rachel, its Díaz, not Diáz. Can’t wait to read all your essays!
Whoops. Will hop right over and put that right.
Hi Rachel,
Very interesting to read of the Mexican customs on the Day of the Dead. It is apparent that such traditions have been with us since time immemorial. We have an interesting custom here in Greece: on the 40th Day memorial of someone’s death, an elaborate ritual mound of boiled wheat kernels and other ingredients -known as KOLIVA -is taken to the church and spooned out to mourners after the service. It is one of the loveliest and most comforting of Greek funerary traditions which has roots reaching back to antiquity. They are believed to be tied to the well known myth of Demeter, the Goddess of Cereal and her daughter Persephone as well as the Eleusian Mysteries and the Thesmophoria, ancient Greek religious festivals.
The elaborate tray of koliva/boiled wheat kernels is mixed with nuts, fresh green mint or parsley, sugar, breadcrumbs and pomegranate seeds [recalling that Persephone ate seeds of pomegranate which kept her forever bound to the underworld for half the year, i.e. fall and winter.] The wheat berry mixture is piled in a mound, heavily covered with white icing sugar [symbolizing the shroud] and decorated with silver dragees arrange in a cross. This Greek Orthodox tradition is still carried out wherever there are Greeks. I know of no other culture that has such a tradition. The sugar sweets in Sicily mentioned in the comments come close, but don’t forget that Sicily and parts of southern Italy were settled by Greek colonists in the ancient times.
Love this sort of exchange and appreciation of universal traditions. Linda Makris Athens Greece
Thank you for that lovely recounting of the Greek custom. This is a very widespread human reaction to death, it seems. Tracing out lineages and connections will take time.
I have not lived in Mexico, but I have traveled to several regions, and as a result have always been amused by discussions of “Mexican culture” or “Mexican food” — since the food and culture in the Yucatan, for example, has little in common with the food of Oaxaca. (And the language and people, as well: Maya in the Yucatan and Zapotec in Oaxaca. I look forward to reading your insights.