Who is a “Cocinera Maestra”? Culinary Heritage, Neoliberal Multiculturalism, and Gender in an Oaxacan Zapotec Community

• In Event: The Transnational Politics of Food Heritage in Bolivia and Mexico

Abstract

In 2010 Traditional Mexican Cuisine was inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage List. It has contributed to the rise of culinary tourism in several regions of the country, including the state of Oaxaca, whose “native cuisine” is considered to be the most sophisticated in Mexico. Consequently, this southern state has become the site of a booming culinary tourism industry owing to state-led development strategies based on promoting cultural and ethnic tourism as well as numerous private enterprises.
In many native communities, these strategies—based on the logics of neoliberal multiculturalism—have led to the privatization of culinary heritage (what UNESCO describes as the “ancestral, ongoing, community food culture”). This trend favors a few cocineras maestras (individualizing, appropriating, and changing community foodways into business opportunities), and consequently (re)produces inequalities and relations of power along gender, class and ethnic lines. Based on fieldwork carried out in 2011 and 2014-15 in central Oaxaca, this paper focuses on the workings of neoliberal heritage politics the local context of one Zapotec community, Teotitlán del Valle. I scrutinize vernacular aspects of the heritigization of native foodways, including the negotiations, contestations, and open conflicts over heritage representations, politics and rights between different groups of indigenous women (from elderly fiesta cooks to owners of cooking schools and celebrities such as celebrated cocinera maestra Abigail Mendoza), within the broader context of Mexican cultural politics of food as heritage.

Author

• Renata E Hryciuk, Uniwersytet Warszawski