Cultural Appropriation & Mexican Food (Pt. 2: Food, Race, and Power)

Previously, on lost in Mexico. Mexicans are fantastic at cultural appropriation, no? I personally think it's better to think that no food belongs to everyone. Those people that say it are usually very political and they have a mouthpiece and they just go around saying it and everybody thinks, "Oh, lots of people must believe that." And honestly, I don't think they do. So are the celebrity chefs Enrique Oliveira and Rick Bayless Wright? Is the cultural appropriation of Mexican food and manufactured debate? A shouting match on Twitter that's disconnected from reality. Here's what a Mexico's leading food writers, Alonso de la Carba. I don't really give a fuck about that. I think there is a kind of fake debate where Mexican cooks or anthropologists grasp into buzzwords and try to trade them into Mexican problems. As a former debateer who's always had to argue both sides of an issue, I'm usually skeptical when people tell me that something is a fake debate. So for this week's episode, part two of a three-part series, attract down the cooks and anthropologists Alonso was referring to. Renata Lira, a former employee of Enrique Oliveira, who's become one of his fiercest critics. This is not an Enrique Oliveira recipe and he didn't learn to make more less in that culinary and sense of America. Ania Zniagila, an intellectual from the Indigenous Mejé people, who's probably the leading voice against cultural appropriation in Mexico. That will be cultural appropriation because he's selling and he has more possibilities to do that in New York than people from Oaxaca. This episode ripped me out of the high-end chef bubble and into some very real and very heated debates. Enrique Oliveira writes that food belongs to everyone, or is that just a convenient fiction, a free pass for powerful chefs to exploit the culinary traditions of minority groups? What responsibilities do foreign chefs like Rick Baylor's have to the Indigenous communities that they took their recipes from? And then there's the really hard question for Mexico and all countries with tortured histories of colonization. Is the appropriation of Indigenous food, something we should celebrate, a way to unify people from very different backgrounds, or is it exploitative, a way for elites to cherry-pick parts of Indigenous culture for their own use, while leaving systemic inequalities intact? This episode is ostensibly about food, but it's also about so much more. This is Lost in Mexico. Act 1. Is this even a debate? If you listen to the first part of this series, which you should, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the cultural appropriation of food was a non-issue, a complaint that defies reality. After all, so many dishes now consider traditional, authentic staples of one culture, Vietnamese banh mi, Indian biryani, Japanese ramen, are actually a fusion of ingredients and techniques from different cultures. So there's an intuitive appeal to Enrique's argument that food belongs to everyone. But is it really that simple? Does the fact that we've regularly borrowed from other cultures in our cooking mean that the cultural appropriation of food isn't a big deal? If the activists are right, am I now not allowed to make pad thai? That's a purely hypothetical question, as I've never cooked in my life. But moving on. I think that some people don't consider about cultural appropriation, if that it has to do with privilege. This is Renata Lira. She's a cook and food writer who was briefly Indrika Olivera's communications director before becoming a trenching critic of his in her blog, Atole. Renata's smart, direct, and happy to ruffle some feathers. It's about a culture that is a dominant culture, mostly, you know, white, a white culture that is profiting and like significantly profiting from the cultural ideas of a minority. After listening to our last episode, Renata sent me a message explaining that her old boss had missed the point about cultural appropriation. The Kosoel Pastor are the result of a typical case of cultural assimilation, not cultural appropriation. A group of Lebanese migrants comes to Mexico. They bring with them a brilliant traditional way to cook Wilmingt called Shawarma. The Mexican culture, happy, absorbs it, and enriches it furthermore with its own cultural elements. It paints it with new condiments, serves it in a corn tortilla, covers it with minced vegetables, adds asmaltos of acid, dresses it with spicy salsa, and with a gracious and precise finishing movement tops it with a sweet and sour bite of pineapple perfection. The Takua El Pastor is like a hall to encolters. It is the food of the people. It is the result of a horizontal process of acculturation. Cultural appropriation has to do with privilege, with white, malerian, the Western-minded, vertical privilege. So for Renata, there's nothing wrong with hugs between cultures, people sharing ingredients, techniques, and recipes, and creating something new and beautiful, or not so beautiful in the case of my hypothetical paddai. And it's hard to disagree. Indian food would be a hell of a lot worse without chilies from Mexico, and Irish food unimaginable without potatoes from South America, they're probably equally tasteless. What she's frustrated about is powerful chefs, usually white, rich males, extracting fame and profit from the culinary traditions of Indigenous communities, and the generations of female cooks who develop those recipes. And her main target is Enrique Golvera. In part one of this series, we discussed Enrique's world-famous dish, the Mule Madre, a reinvention of Wohaka's classic Mule Negro, or Black Mule. Enrique grew up in Mexico City, and he told me that he only found out about the Wohaka tradition of reheating Mule when he spoke with Ricardo Muñoz, the authority on Mexican gastronomy he heard from in the last episode. Enrique's never denied that he celebrated Mule Madre is inspired by the Wohaka dish. I don't believe that I created Mule, the recipe that we like is the Black Mule from Wohaka, and our recipe of the Mule Madre is based on Black Mule recipe. But that hasn't stopped chefs and food critics from lavishing praise on Enrique, treating him as the sole author of this dish. I think the dish that Enrique will go down to culinary history for above all others is his take on Mule. It's so good, it's so intense, it's so complex, and yet it's so simple. But in order not to tell me that Enrique shouldn't be lauded as the visionary creator of Mule Madre, she said that he was using his power as an elite, Western educated chef, to profit from the culinary labor of Wohaka and women. Because this is not an Enrique's recipe, he's made him famous, but Mule is not something that was in his culture or anything. He didn't grow up making Mule's, and he didn't learn to make Mule's in the culinary institute of America. It was somebody else that made that Mule, and then he created all those disnarrative around that Mule, which was genius, and the idea of putting it like one in the center and the other one, it has a very artistic, interesting part to it. But I think it's controversial because of that, because there's key story behind it that's not being credited for. Enrique could be accused of having it both ways. He says, "Food belongs to everyone," and is careful not to claim that he created Mule, while getting Netflix specials for being the visionary behind the Mule Madre. No matter how humble he sounds in interviews, he's still profiting from the creativity of people who get little to no recognition outside their communities. After all, when was the last time a traditional Indigenous cook was recognized for their artistry in the Western press? But then again, what is Enrique supposed to do? Does he need to give credit or a cut of the profits to every person who contributed to a dish that is evolved over hundreds of years? Or just stop selling Mule altogether? And then there's the question I've been wrestling with over the last few months. Can a Mexican chef like Enrique Olvera be guilty of appropriating a dish from his own country? Act 2. Can a Mexican appropriate Mexican food? Let's assume for a moment that Enrique Olvera is wrong. Food doesn't belong to everyone, and only people who are a part of a culture can profit from that culture's food. Where does that leave Enrique? He's a Mexico City chef who's become world famous for adapting Mule developed by Indigenous communities in Mojacca, one of the poorer states in Mexico. Is he guilty of cultural appropriation? Some would say that that's a no-brainer. He's Mexican, so of course he has the right to profit from a classic Mexican dish like Mule. He's not some gringo trying to elevate a dish that he first tried to food truck on single-domaio. Even though many more les were first developed by indigenous groups, it's now described as Mexico's national dish, an eastern by people from very different backgrounds at major celebrations, like weddings and baptisms. And it's probably fair to say that food is a unifying force for many Mexicans. Something that bridges the deep divides between different classes, races and cultures. And everyone can share. When you walk past any tacos down in Mexico City, you might see a construction worker about to knock off work, a doctor still wearing his scrubs, and a lawyer in a suit and tie, all lining up for the same 10-bess or taco, bubbling away in a pool of fat. Lalo placencia, a chef in gastronomic researcher, told me that although Mexico has many problems, when you eat a taco of carnitas or a taco chicharrón with a banner, that's it. You know, the problem is over, it's forgotten. And that is something that I think a few countries can enjoy. So that's one side of the argument. Enrique can do whatever he wants with Wajacán Muelle, even though he isn't Wajacán. If anything, he's a Mexican hero, helping Muelle achieve the international recognition it deserves, and lightening the wallets of rich tourists. But some people think that Enrique's success is yet another example of Mexican elites taking from indigenous culture for their own benefit, without doing anything to address the racism and economic inequalities facing indigenous groups. To understand this argument, you need to know a little bit about Mexico's complicated, but fascinating racial politics. Mexico, in many ways, is as racist as society as the U.S. This is Feh Navarrette, professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and author of racist Mexico, an accusation. Race or skin color is a very important factor in inequality in all aspects of life. Just as in the U.S. blacks have shorter life spans, they have shorter life expectancy, they have less than a quarter of the average wealth of white families. In Mexico, darker people have about a third of the chance of going to university as lighter, skinned people, indigenous people have two or three years life expectancy, less. 99.9999% of the time being white in Mexico is very convenient. People assume you know more than you do. People assume you are better educated. People assume you're wealthy, they treat you better, they let you in everywhere. You have so many advantages. So far, nothing all that surprising. Even lighter skin is an advantage in most countries. I still cringe when I think about the fair and lovely skin whitening ads plastered all over billboards in India. But what makes Mexico different is the governmental insistence that it is a post-racial state. Since the Mexican revolution in the early 20th century, the official national ideology, Misti Sahe, has suggested that all Mexicans are Misti-Sos, a mixture of indigenous and Spanish. The biggest idea is that Mexico, unlike the US, can't be a racist country because everyone is mixed and there are no separate races. But the facts are damning. Dark-as-Gin Mexicans earned 41% less on average than light-as-Gin Mexicans, according to a Vanderbilt University study. And the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy has reported that nearly 70% of Mexico's indigenous population lives in poverty. And then there are the cultural divides. Here's Renata again. We have a wide dominant culture here, European, and then we have all these cultural minorities. We're all said to be Mexicans, but then there are so big differences. Like sometimes the dominant culture doesn't have anything to do with cultural minorities. They don't speak the same language. You know, they don't have the same customs. They don't have the same way of life. They don't have the same worldview. So how does cultural appropriation fit into all of this? Some people argue that the Mexican state has had a long history of using indigenous symbols to build a shared mestizo identity, while simultaneously denying indigenous people real equality. Mexico was not created through a pact with the people's nation who were to constitute it. This is Yasnaia Aguilar, a linguist and activist for the Mehe people, one of Oaxaca's largest indigenous groups. Yasnaia lives in Ayutla, a mountainous town in Oaxaca that hasn't had drinking water since an armed group took over its spring over three years ago. Instead, a small minority created the nation by attempting to make indigenous people disappear into a new category called mestizo. As they oppressed them, the nation took elements from their cultures. It placed them in a large basket called Mexican culture, from which the population can take the contextualized elements and call it a homage to their roots. Yasnaia told me that the Mexican state had a long history of using indigenous imagery to build national pride. I think the representations in Diego Rivera's iconic murals, while erasing indigenous people in the present. Her comments really struck a chord with me. I'm from Australia, a country that has long celebrated indigenous symbols, boomerangs, didgeridus, the dream time, without reckoning with centuries of dispossession and ongoing discrimination. Fair told me that food was a way for culturally white elites to feel connected to indigenous Mexican culture without having to address the systemic racism against indigenous peoples. I think the food is one of the main elements of pride of indigenous origin. We are mestizo because we may speak Spanish and we may have studied at Harvard and we may be neoliberal economists and all that, but we love our Mexican food. That's a kind of cultural appropriation too. White and mestizo urban modern elites look at this food as a kind of comfort identity affirmation. We are proud of our Mexican of our indigenous past. We are all proud of the pyramids and the Aztecs and all that, but in the present we don't look at Indians in the same way. We look down at them because they're primitive, because modernity is only associated with white and Indian and becoming mestizo. So what's all of this got to do with Enrique? Well, although he doesn't look as white as some of the actors on Mexican del novelas, see episode three, it's probably fair to say that he passes as white and during privileges that are inaccessible to non-white people. In Mexico, many of the people who wouldn't pass as white in Europe actually are white within Mexican society because the scale is different. In general, Mexicans have darker skin, so having a light skin in Mexico makes you pass as white when you would be seen as brown in the US. That happens a lot. Passing as white in Mexico, it's not only about your skin color. For instance, in Mexico City, you can tell the social class and the education level of anybody just by listening to 10 words in Spanish. It's like Britain. The accent betrays class origin immediately. You always know when someone is from Oxford, you always know when someone is from his London. So and also ways of dressing, personal appearance and bodily attitudes are very important. For Enrique's critics, he's a culturally white elite who was taking advantage of opportunities that are inaccessible to the indigenous communities that inspired his most famous dish. His more than marvaret is yet another example of a wealthy overnight taking and commodifying products from indigenous groups without giving adequate credit or recognition and without fixing the structural inequalities confronting many indigenous people. So where does that leave Rick Bayless, a white chef who's made his name selling traditional Mexican dishes in the US? Act 3. What makes someone an appropriator? On Twitter and TikTok, cultural appropriation critiques can be pretty simplistic. If you look white and try to do something with another culture's food, you're automatically a cultural appropriator, case closed. But the activist I've spoken to over the last few months, Mexicans who are deeply immersed in racial and social justice movements have a much more nuanced take. Generally, they have three concerns with fire and is selling traditional Mexican dishes in fancy restaurants in the West. The first is that something is lost when dishes that are collectively owned by a community central to its rituals and traditions are translated to a Western culture that celebrates the individual genius of celebrity chefs. Take the more le madre, a collectively owned dish that is converted into a dish attributable to one person in Rigolvera. He has Yasnaia again, talking about the traditional mihe dishes she grew up eating. For us, there is none and after who say this is my vision, this is my invention by myself because I am a genius. A traditional cooker is only a person who knows that community knowledge about how to prepare a special dish and how many chilis and ingress you need to prepare a mole for 1000 people, for example. But that elements are translated into another system where the individual genius like a chef is inventing some dish from nothing and that's not true. Capitalism and Western culture has an obsessed relation with the idea of author and individual genius. The second concern is cultural theft. Guillermo Martinez, a sociologist and doctoral candidate told me that he was concerned about the behavior of chefs like Wic Bayless as it fitted a pattern of Americans exploiting Mexico's cultural heritage. I do have a problem with this. I think this is part of a larger practice that is a consequence of American imperialism in Mexico. So Mexico has since the post-war been seen as a place of resources for the United States and as a place of consumption for Americans. We get this relationship of Americans taking and benefiting from things of Mexican origin and Mexican culture. If you have an indigenous person who is doing the work and then you have an unindigenous person that's making the money, this is kind of like classic colonial exploitation that has always been going on in Mexico. And the final point, the issue I've heard again and again is that white foreigners, people who benefit from privilege after privilege, have a responsibility to try to fix some of the major inequalities facing the communities they draw their recipes from. Luis Hernandez, who runs a nomad cook project in Wajaka, said that foreign chefs have a responsibility to be politically engaged in the struggles of the communities they benefit from. That's a big problem. I think that if you want to work in a responsible way as an outsider, you have to have a political posture about this. If you don't have a political posture about this, if you are not like, "Oh, this is a thing that's happening." Like, I'm acknowledging, I'm aware of this, and I'm actively fighting against it, then you are part of the problem. Luis told me that foreign chefs like Wikbeilis couldn't hide behind the excuse that they were promoting tourism to places like Wajaka. Tourism itself could be very harmful. A lot of people say, "Come to Wajaka, right? Wajaka is like a destination and you are going to bring business to Wajaka and you're supporting the slash, helping the local, the local, the locals, right?" But very few people really think about who is running this business of tourism in Wajaka. Are you supporting a group of entrepreneurs? A big capital? Are you supporting who? People working in the hospital in industry, where there's way to say, "cooks." They make a very small wages here. What this person is really getting from that promotion? So, if promoting tourism isn't good enough, what can foreign chefs do to redress inequality? I asked Luis if he thought chefs like Wikbeilis should give Indigenous communities in Wajaka a share of their profits. Definitely. Yeah, like, of course. I think that's also a big problem, right? Like, "Hey, I'm going to these places. I make a book. Hey, pay to the people that are in your book. Give them a call." If you had a chance to speak to Wikbeilis, what would you say? I don't know. I will ask people like him, "What are you actually doing to fix issues like income inequality, economic racism?" When you go to restaurants in Wajaka City, touristy restaurants, who would you see eating in these places? You don't see Indigenous people eating there. The people are serving, people are waiting. I think it's important to have in the Spanish we call it "consciencia" and a classic, sort of like class consciousness. Yeah, like because I mean, it's also very easy for a rich person to overlook these things. Even like I would ask Rick, how is he even fixing that or working to end his own context? In our next episode, the final part of this series, I put these questions directly to Wikbeilis. Is he a responsible outsider or someone who's unjustly profited from the cultural creations of Indigenous communities? All I ask is this the scratch past the surface of that and look at how transparent I have been because I'm not trying to say this is my stuff or aren't I great because I know how to make these things or anything like that. And I head to Wajaka, the birthplace of the Mule Maveré, to see what some Indigenous cocineras, the guardians of traditional Mexican cooking, think about chefs like Enrique Olvera and Rick Beilis profiting from their communities creations. I would be frustrated if a foreign person came and said it's a traditional Wajaka Molle and doesn't use ingredients that should be used for a Molle. Please, if you are going to serve it in your restaurant, give it the place that Molle deserves and give it respect. Thank you for joining Lost in Mexico. To never miss an episode, hit subscribe in your podcast app and follow us on Instagram @lostinmexico.podcast. We'd love to know what you think. Please leave us a review through Apple podcasts and send an email to [email protected]. Special thanks to my executive producer, Karen Ayer. We'll be back soon with the final part of this series. I'll see you then.