Tasting the Patria (Chica): Regional and National Culinary Identities in Latin America

This paper offers a comparative perspective on the process of cultural formation in the construction of national and regional cuisines. Beginning with Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson's work on cuisine as a discursive cultural field, I examine the social contexts of culinary formation in three countries, Mexico, Argentina, and Cuba. The three countries represent the vast social diversity within Latin America through the histories of settlement, migration, politics, agriculture, and trade, yet the resulting national cuisines show remarkable structural similarities, suggesting that these national culinary cultures are the product more of transnational processes of class formation and literary production.

            The paper will begin by surveying the literature on national cuisines and nation formation more broadly. It will also consider the historical structures of food production in the three countries. In considering the development of national cuisines, three historical periods stand out as crucial. The early nineteenth century is distinctive for the globalized nature of literary production. Parisian publishing houses published many Mexican national cookbooks during this period. The Argentine national cuisine, moreover, was defined in exile by the figure of Juana Gorriti. Finally, the Cuban national cuisine was being defined in the 1850s, even before Cuba gained its independence from Spain. In the mid-twentieth century, female authors from all three countries produce their own national culinary ideals, which were still largely creole in nature, setting the tone for middle-class life by harkening back to the colonial era, even as they adopted modern technology imported from Europe and the U.S. Finally, in the late twentieth century, a moment of globalization in culinary tourism, national cuisines began to harken back to mythologized pre-Hispanic pasts as markers of international distinction.