The shifting meanings of Mexican cuisine and identities

Blog post by Owen McNamara, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
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Just as consumers around the world have begun to realize that Mexican food is more than ‘TexMex’ style tacos and burritos, so too have Mexicans themselves undertaken a critical revaluation of their traditional cuisine. Increasingly, foods and drinks that were previously (disparagingly) associated with Indigenous, rural and poor communities are being reappraised within Mexican society.

These two revaluations are linked. The attention garnered by Mexican cuisine among international gourmands (and acts of institutional recognition, such as UNESCO’s 2010 designation of Mexican cooking as part of humanity’s ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage) have created demand in cities across Mexico for a supposedly more ‘authentic’ Mexican cuisine, not only among tourists but among Mexican consumers as well.

Simultaneous with this boom in interest in native corn and traditional cuisine, the stigma which has traditionally been attached to southern Mexican identities has likewise been rethought. Mexican racial geographies commonly divide the country between a relatively prosperous north, associated with European or mestizo culture, and a poor, Indigenous south. This understanding is supported by the higher prevalence of Indigenous people in southern states (particularly Oaxaca, Chiapas and Yucatán), and the historical investment in infrastructure and industry that has favoured the north, driving migration from southern states towards central and northern Mexico. 

This division is hierarchically constructed, with mestizo identities (and light skinned individuals) held as the national ideal, while Indigenous and southern people are conceptualized as culturally backwards. Based on ethnographic research in Oaxaca de Juárez and the surrounding Valles Centrales, in my Identities article, ‘Now all the world wants to be Oaxacan’: native corn commercialization and changing meanings of southern identities in Mexico’, I explore how these contemporaneous changes in the social meanings of traditional corn-based Mexican cuisine and of southern Mexican identities relate to one another.
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I argue that the growing social value attached to both growing native corn and the preparation of traditional dishes has – at least in the minds of southern Mexicans – acted as a challenge to established racial hierarchies. It is worth noting that the dishes sought out by US and European chefs wanting to experience ‘authentic’ Mexican cuisine are often historically associated with the south – where tropical biomes and Indigenous traditions have shaped a culinary tradition totally distinct from the flavours with which foreign consumers are familiar.

Similarly, the street stalls for which Mexico’s food scene has become renowned disproportionately serve southern cuisine – a result of internal migration patterns in which southerners have sought work in Mexico City and the more prosperous north.

A frequent critique within food studies is that when previously marginalized foods are reappraised by a broader audience, benefits are disproportionately captured by local elites, or even by people who have no connection with the communities who have developed these recipes. This is considered an extractive process, in which people whose economic and racial privilege enables them to repackage ‘traditional’ foods for emerging markets, sidelining relevant communities.

By highlighting the ways in which the revaluation of traditional corn-based foods minimized a historical stigma felt by southern people, I do not mean to challenge this story of extraction and unequal partnerships. Instead, I aim to show that even within extractive relationships there is the possibility for challenging racial hierarchies.

While identifying this ambivalent liberation might be more generous to the commercialization of traditional cuisine than other food scholars frequently are, I note too that commercialization was not happening on southern Mexican’s own terms. Inherent to the growing trade in native corn and popularization of traditional cuisine was a free-market imperative, one that eroded the forms of sociality that have historically underpinned Oaxacan moral economies.
This diminishing stigma attached to southern identities, then, came at the cost of losing the sorts of social practices that made southern identities in Mexico what they were. 

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​Image credit: Hermetic.com

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Read the Identities article:
McNamara, O. (2025). ‘Now all the world wants to be Oaxacan’: native corn commercialization and changing meanings of southern identities in Mexico. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2025.2543662   OPEN ACCESS

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