Mexico and its Food as Poor and Rural

This is a series on the links between visions of Mexico and Mexicans and interpretations of Mexican food.  The first three were prompted by events I attended in Austin, Texas.

The first in the series was on Mexico as mestizo and Mexican food as a blend of Spanish and indigenous traditions prompted by an exhibition on Mexican art at the Harry Ransom Center.

Mexico as poor and rural

The second of the three events prompting these posts was a talk about the rural poor. Albert García Maldonado–himself the son of farm workers in the Central Valley of California, Ph.D. in history from UC Berkeley, and now teaching at San Jose State University–explored how and why Mexican men signed up to become seasonal contract laborers (braceros or “arms”–as in English one might say “hands”) when World War II sent the United State scurrying for labor. The guestworker bracero program lasted from 1942 and 1964. I won’t steal Alberto’s thunder by giving his answer to why Mexicans signed up to become braceros.

Nor will I explore the history of rural Mexico in light of global patterns of population growth, urbanization, and land ownership and re-distribution.  All those are topics dear to my heart and I long to expatiate on them. They are not, however, relevant to this series of posts.

Mexicans arriving in the United States under the Bracero Program. 1942. Dorothea Lange.

What is relevant is a two-fold result of the bracero program.

First, the patterns of migration of rural men (and sometimes women) established by the braceros continued until about 2006, creating an image of Mexico as poor and rural in the eyes of many Americans. As we shall see, the assumption that these migrants were ‘peasants’ was and is misleading.

Second, the migrants themselves created a particular kind of Mexican food in the United States. Later aspects of it were transferred back to Mexico.

Where the rural migrants to the United States came (and come) from

The braceros were far from representative of the rural population of Mexico. Instead they were overwhelmingly from just four of Mexico’s 31 states–Guanajuato, Jalisco, Aguascalientes, and Querétaro, and perhaps parts of Zacatecas and Michoacán.  I lived in Guanajuato, the capital of the state of Guanajuato for more than a decade.

These states made up the Bajío (Bah-hee-o), the long, high, mountain-rimmed, east-west plateau about 150 miles north of Mexico City.

The Bajío had always been a place of passage. In pre-colonial days it was at the frontier between the settled indigenous communities to the south with their great cities and the nomadic peoples of the desert to the north.

In colonial times, it had been the point of intersection between the colonial heartland to the south and the distant territories in California, New Mexico and Texas to the north. East-west, it lay on routes between the great silver mines of Guanajuato and Zacatecas and the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.

For hundreds of years, the Bajío was economically progressive. The historian John Tutino argues that it was the birth place of global capitalism, thanks to the trade in its silver that created a global economy from China to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was frequently in the vanguard of political movements such as independence from Spain. History is always complex, and at the same time, the Bajío was and is a Catholic stronghold, sometimes called the rosary belt.

Some years after the Mexican Revolution, mainly in the 1950s, and overlapping with the bracero program, many of the old estates (haciendas) were finally divided up into communally farmed plots (ejidos, pronounced eh-hee-dos) under state control and assigned to former peons (agricultural laborers).

When we lived in Guanajuato from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s, the ejidos remained but growth of population and the aspirations of the people meant that many were moving to the city.  Mexico is now 80% urban and the Bajío is an urbanized area.

The migration north continued along the old tracks. Buses would go round the Bajío every March. Young men would be enticed to sign up (and pay) to go north.  Advised to take minimal possessions to ease the border crossing, they would vanish. Family members would await anxiously for them to get a cell phone and call home.

Every December, when work in the States largely dried up, the airports in the Bajío would sprout signs welcoming the migrants back.  The rule of thumb was that seven years working in the States would be enough to buy a plot of land outright for a house, escaping the ejido. Another seven years and there was enough money to finish building that house.

Inevitably though some stayed in the States.

Then in the mid 2000s, the cost of going north became greater, the opportunities in the Bajío expanded and the migration slowed.

Mexican migrants to the States versus mestizaje

The point about the above discussion is that most of the migrants who came from the Bajío did not conform to popular American views of poor, rural people nor to cross-border ideas of mestizaje.

Most were of thoroughly mixed heritage, indigenous and European, many with a dash of African or (I think more often than is realized) Asian ancestry.

Most did not speak an indigenous language.

Most never wore indigenous dress.

Most had generations of forebears going back centuries who had worked in large-scale commercial agriculture, industry, or mining.

Mobility was nothing new to them.

And not all of them were poor and rural.  One young man who helped us with our Spanish had run away from an unhappy home in his early teens, worked with relatives who were rooferos in Chicago, put himself through high school, returned, obtained a Ph.D., and ended up teaching in a university. Another friend had trained as an architect at the University of Guanajuato, went to Houston, returned, and opened a restaurant (of which more later).

Migrants from the Bajío and Mexican cuisine

From the mid-twentieth century until the early twenty-first century, some of these entrepreneurial individuals from the Bajío stayed in the States.

Some opened small restaurants to serve their own cuisine and to make a bit of money.  From Texas to California, they proclaim their origins in the Bajío.  Just in Austin, there is Taqueria Chapala (from a lake in Jalisco), Taqueria Los Jaliscienses (Jalisco again), El Zacatecas, Casita Guanajuato, and La Michoacana, a growing chain of grocery stores.

Thus a largely male migrant cuisine deriving from the Bajío mixed with cuisines that date back centuries along the border, described by Melissa Guerra in Dishes from the Wild Horse Desert  (2006), and with cuisines that date back to the late nineteenth century such as “Tex-Mex,” the subject of Robb Walsh’s Tex-Mex Cookbook (2004).

The cuisine of the Bajío migrants is close to the Mexican food that Jeffrey Pilcher pursues in  Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (Oxford, 2012) where he argues that Los Angeles was essentially the home of the taco. It’s much the tradition that Gustavo Arellano describes with such vigor in Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America (2012).

It’s very different from the elaborate cuisine of the proponents of mestizaje described in the last post. (Indeed the artists, anthropologists, and other intellectuals involved in promoting Mexico as mestizo tend to dismiss the Bajío as “not the real Mexico” looking instead to Oaxaca in the south of the country).

Forget moles and pipianes and adobos. Instead think tacos, carne guisado, carne asado, and fajitas, the latter popularized in the 1970s in the Houston restaurant, Ninfa’s.

Completing the circle, migrants from the Bajío took this kind of Mexican food back to their homeland.

Our architect friend Martín came across fajitas when he was in Houston in the late 1980s.  When he served them in his restaurant in Guanajuato, he was pleased to discover that his American customers reported that they had found real Mexican food, while his Mexican customers preferred the fajitas to most of the other American food they had tried. A win all round.

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• Shortly after writing on Mexico as mestizo and on mole as the archetypal dish of the promoters of mestizaje, an article on rival twentieth-century interpretations of the great Mexican sauce, mole, as either indigenous or as mestizo by the fine scholar, Sandra Aguilar, popped up in my feed. She was using cookbooks, not art, as a source but if this is a topic that interests you, here’s another place to look.

• ← “A meal both more politically American and more philosophical than many of us give it credit for.”
• The Loveliest Night of the Year →