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Industrial Tortillas andFolkloric Pepsi:The

Nutritional Consequencesof Hybrid Cuisines in Mexico

Jeffrey M. Pilcher

InJanuary 1999, neoliberal President Ernesto Zedillo eliminated the long-standingsubsidy on Mexico's daily staple, corn tortillas. It was intended as an efficiencymeasure to improve competitiveness in the global economy, but many sa\\; the decreeas an end to the welfare state that had assured political domination for the rulingparty for most of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, as neighborhood tortillafactories throughout Mexico City began to close - unable to compete, without thesubsidy, against the industrial conglomerate Maseca, a producer of dehydratedtortilla flour - Mexicans feared the end of another era: more than two thousand

years of eating tortillas made from freshly ground corn.1 This essay will examine thetwentieth-century transformation of Mexican cuisine, both the mechanization of .

Native Ameri~an tortilla making and the introduction of Western-style industrialprocessed foods. The modernization of food production has been instrumental indrawing campesinos into the market economy, but it has done so in a halting andincomplete fashion, creating culinary versions of what Nestor Garcia Canclinitermed "hybrid cultures." While this half-baked globalization allowed people toretain elements of rural, often-indigenous identities by "entering and leaving mod-ernity," many paid a high nutritional price, suspended between traditional andmodern diets, eating the worst of both worlds.2

The modernization of tortilla production held enormous promise at the dawn ofthe twentieth century, because Mexico's subsistence diet involved tremendous workfor both male farmers and female cooks. Women labored for hours each morningover the pre-Hispanic metate (saddle quem) to feed their families tortillas. Despitethis backbreaking daily chore, when mechanical mills capable of grinding the moistcorn dough began arriving in rural communities in the 1920s and 1930s, womenpatronized the establishments only with great hesitancy. Their skepticism about thenew technology reflected not a reflexive peasant conservatism but justified concerns

236 JEFFREYM. PILCHER

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similar concern by campesinos following World War II because of the high cost ofhybrid seeds and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, as well as the government'sfailure to supply adequate irrigation, silos, and transportation. Productivity surgedin the 1960s, allowing the government to supply cheap food to urban consumersthereby helping to hold down the pressure for higher industrial wages. As a result'already low rural incomes plummeted further, driving millions of people to the citie~in search of work and adding to the pool of surplus labor. Food policy in Mexico, asin so many postcolonial nations, has therefore sacrificed the countryside in search ofindustrial development. 3

The great challenge for Mexico and other emerging countries has been to realizethe possibilities of nationalism ,and industrialization in a democratic manner thatpreserves the distinctiveness of local cultures. Few areas can claim greater urgency inthis regard than food policy. The history of postcolonial Africa and India clearlydemonstrates the need for democratic governance of. food distribution. Despite arapidly growing population, India has been spared from famine, not because of theagricultural gains of the so-called Green Revolution but rather through politicalmechanisms for assuring that the hungriest people get food. Starvation in Africa hasmeanwhile resulted largely from the actions of armed bands that confiscate and sellfood aid shipments and locally grown crops, leaving people to die.4

Assuring the nutritional health of the poor is equally difficult without respect forlocal cooking traditions. Peasant cultures throughout the world have developednutritionally balanced diets of complementary vegetable proteins, for example,rice and soybeans in Asia, or maize and beans iri the Americas, to replace expensiveanimal proteins. Industrial processed foods such as powdered milk can supplementthese diets in important ways, but the devaluation of traditional cooking throughtransnational advertising and misplaced ideals of-modernity has primarily increasedthe consumption of junk foods based on fats and sugars. The gravest risks lie in thetransition between traditional and industrial diets, as poor Mexicans substitutealimentos pacotilla (snack foods) for vegetable proteins, but cannot afford themeats that supply protein to the diets of the rich.5

The rising domination of the Maseca corporation over Mexican corn productionillustrates an equally important point for cultural studies: the homogenizing effectsof national food processing companies may pose as great a threat to locakultures asthe more visible cultural imperialism represented by Ronald McDonald. Withgovernment assistance, Maseca executives are well on the way to achieving theirdream of processing all of the maize in Mexico, removing the "imperfections" thatmany people believe give tortillas their character. Global corporations have mean-while learned that to compete successfully in national markets they need to modifytheir products to suit native consumers. A Big Mac with fries may taste exactly thesame in Mexico City, Beijing, or Oak Brook, but even McDonald's has adapted tolocal markets, either by serving salsa with the fries or by posing the eponymoUSclown as Buddha. No doubt the world will continue to grow more like the Unite.dStates, as the Cassandras of cultural imperialism have warned, but the converse 1Sequally true, as ever more people in the United States eat Maseca tortillas. The rise ofa uniquely Mexican tortilla industry therefore merits careful analysis.

HYBRID CUISINES IN MEXICO 237

From the Metate to Maseca

The modernization of food production in Mexico has been one of the primary toolsfor incorporating subsistence peasants into the market economy. The first step in thisprocess came at the beginning of the twentieth century with the development of cornmills to replace laborious hand grinding of corn dough on the metate. By midcen-tUry, a cottage industry of tortilla factories had automated the skills of patting outand cooking tortillas. Fifty years later, corn processing had been centralized in thehands of industrial conglomerates producing dehydrated tortilla flour. Each changeentailed a loss of taste and texture, to the point that the modern tortilla would bevirtUally unrecognizable to peasant women of a century before. Moreover, agricul-tUral modernization and government policies favoring urban industry depressedrural incomes, ultimately forcing the peasants of Chiapas into rebellion under thename of the agrarian martyr Emiliano Zapata.

Native Americans often referred to themselves as the people of corn, and thebasically vegetarian diet eaten by all but a small nobility in pre-Hispanic Mesoamer-ica clearly justified such identification. Even though maize provided as much as 80percent of the daily intake, when combined with beans, chiles" and squash, it formedthe basis for a nutritionally balanced diet. The complementarity between corn andbeans, each of which supplied amino acids missing in the other, assured a regularsupply of high-quality proteins in the absence of European domesticated animalssuch as cattle, pigs, or chickens. The Aztec empire, with a population that has beenestimated at as high as 25 million people, comprised diverse regional cuisinescomparable with those of China and India. For example, a wide variety of chilepeppers imparted subtle flavors to the moles (chile pepper stews) of the Mixtecs andZapotecs in what is now the southern state of Oaxaca, while along the Gulf Coast inthe Huasteca (the land of plenty), Totonac Indians specialized in creating tamales,dumplings wrapped in cornhusks.6

The labor-intensive cooking techniques developed by pre-Hispanic campesinascontinued to dominate Mexican kitchens at the start of the twentieth century. The,basic utensil was the metate, a tablet of black volcanic rock, sloping forward onthree stubby legs, used to grind corn for tortillas and tamales, chiles and seeds forsauces, and fruits and chocolate to drink. Women spent up to five hours each daypreparing tortillas to feed their families. Work began the night before, when theWoman simmered the corn in a solution of mineral lime to make nixtamal. She arosebefore dawn to grind the corn into a moist dough called masa, and immediatelybefore each meal, she deftly patted the dough into flat, round tortillas and cookedthem briefly over the comal, an earthenware griddie. Elite stereotypes of NativeAmericans as long-suffering wretches owed much to the image of women kneeling,.atthe metate. Tortillas could not be ~aved for the following day, or even the next meal,because they became hard and inedible in a few hours. The dough likewise wouldnot keep more than a day before it began to ferment? '

Hard labor at the metate at least gave women status and identity within the familyand the community. Historian Wendy Waters has examined these social implicationsUsingthe field notes of anthropological studies conducted from the 1920s to the 1940sin Tepoztlan, Morelos. Tortilla making was so essential to domestic life that no

JEFFREYM, PILCHER --woman in the village became eligible for marriage 'until she had demonstrated thisskill. Men complimented women by praising their tortillas, and some even claimed tobe able to identify the unique taste and texture of corn ground on their wives' metateWomen expressed affection through their role of feeding the family, offering favorit~children extra helpings of beans or reserving for them the best tortillas. As a resultchildren were sensitive to the size of their portions and to the order in which they Wer'fed. Food served to communicate anger as well as love; a wife could burn he~husband's tortillas if she suspected him of infidelity.8 The symbolic connectionsbetween cook and food, already present in the daily preparation of tortillas, beansand chile peppers, grew exponentially during festive meals, when women spent whol~days and nights bent over their metates preparing moles and tamales. They undertooksuch arduous work to help assure the stability of the entire community - indeedmemories of mole continue to draw modern migrant workers home each year t~participate - and women gained respect and authority as a result.9

Thus, although water-powered grain mills had come into use in Europe before thebirth of Christ, most campesinas still prepared corn by hand in the early twentiethcentury, leading one Mexican politician to exclaim that' "we still live in the StoneAge!"lO Technologically, the need to precook the corn with mineral lime and grindthe dough while still wet made stone mills impractical for producing nixtamal. Thelate-nineteenth-century development of portable steel mills powered by electricitymade it possible to grind masa sufficiently fine to make an acceptable tortilla,although it was still coarser and less tasty than corn prepared on a metate. By1900, more than fifty of these mills operated in Mexico City alone, and they gainedrapid acceptance among urban women. Women still cooked their own corn eachevening, then carried it to the neighborhood mill in the morning to be ground for afew centavos. The adoption of machinery also made it culturally acceptable for mento take over the management of tortillerias, once an exclusively female occupation.ll. Commercial nixtamal mills took decades to spread through the countrysidebecause of both the relatively high monetary cost in a largely subsistence economyand the challenge they posed to women's established domestic roles. Technical flawsin the early mills allowed women to demonstrate their superiority over machines andassert their place within the family. Because villages lacked electricity, early modelsoperated on gas engines, which caused the tortillas to come out tasting of high-octane fuel. Even when gas generators were separated from electric motors, the cornacquired a metallic taste and rough texture. Women could avoid these unpleasantside effects by briefly regrinding the masa on the metate, yet many refused topatronize the mills, indicating deeper social concerns about grinding corn. Gossipin the village of Tepoztlan questioned the femininity of anyone who carried her corn

. to a commercialmill. Many women feared that neglectingthe metate would lead toa dangerous swelling of the joints called "laziness of the knees.,,12

While the arrival of a nixtamal mill often worried village women, it absolutelyinfuriated men. ,Many forbade their wives and daughters from patronizing the neWestablishments, fearing a direct challenge to their patriarchal authority. Without thediscipline .of the metate, some believed women would become lazy and promiscuous.As one old-timer from the Yucatan explained, the mill "starts early and so women goout before dawn to grind their own corn the way they used to at home. They meet

boy';o the d"k aod that', why Hleg;r;macy;, ,""",d by the nlxtamal." To pr~

HYBRIDCUISINESIN MEXICO .239

such danger, the men of one agricultural cooperative that received a mill locked itaway from their wives. In another case, a group of women who attempted toorganize for their right to a mill were physically assaulted by disgruntled men.13

Some of the first rural women to patronize the new mills were those who had fledthe countryside during the decade of revolutionary fighting (1910-20) and dis-covered the convenience of machine-ground corn in cities or towns. Financialconsiderations also helped determine who took their corn to the mill. Relatively

poor women whose families held little land, contrary perhaps to expectations, oftenhad the greatest incentive to pay for machine-ground corn. Although this servicerequired a few centavos, it freed women from several hours of daily work. Theycould use that time to engage in artisanal crafts or to become petty.. merchants,traveling to nearby towns to buy cheaper products, and thus earn enough money tooffset the cost of milling. The acceptance of the mill as a natural tool thereforehelped draw subsistence farmers into the money economy. Wealthier families whocould easily afford the added expense of milling were often the last ones to give upthe metate. Some considered home-ground corn a status marker, a way of assertingthat they lived better than their neighbors because they ate better tortillas. Of course,they could also pay poorer women to do the actual grinding.14

Political as well as economic issues influenced the reception of mechanical mills inrural Mexico. Established caciques (political bosses) often enriched themselves byasserting monopolistic control over nixtamal mills, while aspiring populist leadersused them as a form of patronage to organize supporters. President Lazaro Cardenas(1934-40) used grants of nixtamal mills to encourage membership in the officialparty and to discourage rival church organizations. Women learned to phrase theirrequests for cooperative mills within the dominant developmentalist discourse; forexample, the women of Rancho Las Canoas, on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro,Michoacan, formed a Women's Anticlerical and Anti-Alcohol League to petitionthe president for a corn mill and in this way to liberate them from the "bitter, blackstone with three feet called the metate.,,15

Tortilla production was mechanized further in the postwar era with the develop-ment of an integrated factory comprising a nixtamal'mill that ground the corn, arotating press to form it into the proper shape, and an "endless comal" conveyer belt tocook it. Mexican inventors had first attempted to duplicate the subtle skills of thetortillera in the late nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1950s that theyresolved all the technical problems to mass-produce an adequate tortilla. By the1970s, these small-scale factories, capable of producing a few thousand tortillas perhour, operated conveniently in urban barrios and rural communities throughout therepublic. Tortilla aficionados clearly recognized the difference between hand-pattedand factory-pressed tortillas. Relatively wealthy peasant women, who could afford todevote themselves exclusively to domestic work, rejected machine-made tortillas as"raw" because they stuck together. While ordinary campesinas began to purchasetortillas for everyday consumption and used the time saved to earn outside income, themetate and coma I came out for festive occasions, when only a philistine would eattortillas that "tasted like electricity" because they had not been cooked over a wood-burning fireY

The arrival of nixtamal mills in the countryside transformed the lives of MexicanWomen, freeing them from hard labor at the metate while drawing them into the

240 JEFFREYM. PILCHER

money economy and often into political organization as well. The male a~tivity ofgrowing maize underwent equally dramatic changes as the government shifted itsgoals from an agrarian revolution to the Green Revolution, emphasizing large-scalecommercial agriculture to support urban industrialization. Land reform had culmin-ated under President Cardenas, who distributed nearly fifty million acres to campe-sinos in the form of communally owned ejidos. Nevertheless, the very magnitude ofthe reforms, together with financial crises and a fierce conservative reaction, pre-vented Cardenas from providing the infrastructure of machinery, irrigation, andcredit necessary to make even the most favorable of ejido grants into viable com-mercial operations, and this neglect only grew worse under subsequent adminis-trations. In 1943, a team of agronomists sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundationarrived to supplement Mexican programs aimed at increasing farm productivity,which had been ongoing since the 1920s. Within two decades, the use of hybridseeds, fertilizers, and pesticides had doubled the production of Mexican corn andquadrupled that of wheat, but the profits accrued primarily to affluent commercialfarmers who had the resources to benefit from the technological improvements.17

Historian Enrique Ochoa has shown how the Mexican State Food Agency,founded in 1937 by Cardenas to help small farmers compete in the marketplace,was diverted to support the goal of industrialization. Political crises, ,particularlyurban inflation and food shortages, invariably disrupted'rural development plans, asbureaucrats purchased staple crops from a few commercial growers in the PacificNorthwest and imports from the United States rather than from large numbers ofsmall ejidos in central and southern Mexico. The construction of grain storagefacilities around urban centers and in ports on the Gulf of Mexico perpetuatedthis bias in the 1950s. The agency provided cheap food to the cities in order towin populist political support while at the sal)le time containing union demands forhigher wages, thereby indirectly subsidizing private industry. For example, theagency supplied low-cost corn to the politically powerful nixtamal millers in MexicoCity, who then sold tortillas to the public at fixed prices, gaining substantial profitsfor themselves in the process. By the 1960s, decades of official neglect led impover-ished farmers to begin taking up arms and demanding a return to agrarian reform.The government responded by repressing the rebels and then extending the welfareprograms to supply industrial processed food to the countryside as well. This expan-sion into food processing to provision the new rural stores prompted cries ofsocialist intervention by business leaders, who nevertheless continued to profitfrom agency supplies of subsidized raw materials for their own factories.18

The creation of a dehydrated tortilla flour industry illustrates this mutuallybeneficial relationship between state-owned and private enterprises. In 1949, thefederal government established the first masa harina or nixtamal flour mill, calledMaiz Industtializado, SA (Minsa) in Tlalnepantla, Mexico, the site of giant cornsilos for the Mexico City market. That same year, Roberto Gonzalez opened a rivalf:;tcility.in Cerralvo,. Nuevo Leon, under the trade name Molinos Azteca, SA(Maseca). The two firms collaborated on research and development for more thana decade before arriving at a suitable formulation that could be turned into tort~llamasa with just the addition of water. By the mid-1970s, tortilla flour productionsurpassed 500,000 tons, 5 percent of all the corn consumed in Mexico, with themajority of the market going to the private firm, Maseca, in part because the

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powerful corn millers used political channels to slow the growth of the state cor-poration, Minsa.19

Government officials justified support for the industry by pointing to economiesof scale, since cornmeal could be produced, transported, and stored more cheaplythan whole corn. Centralized production also limited the risk of irregularities withinneighborhood tortill9 factories in addition to offering nutritional benefits. For thenominal cost of $10 a ton, Maseca could enrich its masa harina with enough proteinand vitamins to satisfy minimum daily requirements, but the company has neverthe-less resisted implementing the strategy. Although vitamin and protein enrichmentwould make little difference in taste beyond the already significant change fromfreshly ground to dehydrated corn, the politically powerful company feared that anyadditives would undermine its market share.2O

By the end of the millennium, the dismantling of the State Food Agency byneoliberal governments left the masa harina industry poised to dominate Mexicancorn markets. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988~94) first cut the subsidy tocorn millers in an attempt to target welfare assistance. In its place he established aprogram giving poor people tortilla vouchers called tortivales, which were quicklydubbed tortivotos by political opponents who accused the government of using foodto buy votes. The president also privatized the state firm, Minsa, selling it to a rivalconsortium of Maseca. Finally, in January 1999, his successor, Ernesto Zedillo(1994-2000), eliminated the tortilla subsidy completely along with price controls.The nutritional consequences of this policy remain to be seen, although standards ofliving for poor Mexicans have already slipped dramatically in the past twodecades?l Nevertheless, the demise of family-owned tortilla factories has alreadybecome clear. Alma Guillermoprieto graphically explained that "when the privatiza-tion program of Mexico's notorious former President Carlos Salinas delivered thefuture of the tortilla into their hands... [the tortilla magnates] served up tothe Mexican people the rounds of grilled cardboard that at present constitute thenation's basic foodstuff.,,22 Many would apply that same description to the pro-cessed foods offered by multinational corporations, alJd while the reception of thosefoods has followed a unique trajectory, the effects on Mexican nutrition have beenequally grim.

The Other Pepsi Generation

The Tzotzil Indians of San Juan Chamula may never appear on television commer-cials in the United States, but they nevertheless form part of the Pepsi Generation.While Mexicans usually celebrate religious festivals with beer or tequila, in thishighland, Chiapas community toasts are invariably made with Pepsi-Cola. TheTzotzil devotion to soft drinks illustrates the ubiquitous presence of industrialprocessed food in even the most remote indigenous regions - and the fact that thecacique controls the Pepsi distributorship. The arrival of Pepsi and other junk foodshas brought tremendous changes in food consumption, with serious nutritionalConsequences for the lower classes, yet cultural imperialism has not overwhelmedtraditional Mexican cooking. At worst, a form of hybridization has taken place asM.exicans have incorporated foreign foods into established eating patterns. Balanced