Actually Bayless does use phrases like real Mexican cooking
to describe what he cooks a couple times in the course of the interview. But it’s hard to tell how much of that is reflective of his own views and how much of it is just matching the language his interviewer keeps using. But, in any case, the intent in using the phrase white boy
was not to be insulting. (For reference, I’d use the same phrase to describe myself.) I don’t consider it insulting to be described as white when one is white, and if Bayless is insulted by being referred to as a boy
I’ll take it back and refer to him henceforward as a white man.
I’m sure that he is indeed a very good cook.
Sergio,
I certainly agree with you about the tremendous variety of kinds of food served in Mexico and that most Estadounidenses have never encountered much of anything other than norte?@c3;b1;o cuisine (or, in a very few cases, some extraordinarily popular regional specialty from elsewhere in Mexico, e.g. chicken in mole poblano), and that there are lots of wonderful dishes that many of us miss out on because of it, and that it’s nice to see restaurants trying to introduce other kinds of Mexican cuisine. I’m all for that, and more power to Rick Bayless, as far as I’m concerned, for putting together what sounds like a very good restaurant. I just think the way that all this gets described in the interview is weird, and reflective of a way that a lot of white folks in the U.S. have taught themselves to think about food, and about cultural identity. Including especially white U.S. Progressives
who like Barack Obama and very much want to think of themselves as sophisticated connoisseurs of both food and foreign cultures.
Josh,
I’m aware of the Estados Unidos in the full legal name of Mexico (you may notice that I included an English translation in the course of the post). But estadounidenses is something Mexicans call us, not something Mexicans call themselves, even if it could in principle have been coined to refer to residents of the U.S. of M. with equal justice; whereas Americans
is in actual usage systematically ambiguous between residents of the U.S.A. and residents of the continents of North and South America. I could use some other term, like gringos,
but Estadounidenses
is fairly neutral and sounds more like a real word than English translations like United-Statesians,
whereas other words are either ungainly or derogatory.
Of course you’re right that people shouldn’t be named for their governments. But that’s no less true for Mexicans
than for Americans,
and to the extent that it is true, it’s also just as good an objection to calling people Americans
as it is to calling them United-Statesians.
There really isn’t much of anything that people from San Antonio, Ypsilanti, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, the Bronx, Oahu, Sitka, Occupied Portland, the UP, Atlanta, New Orleans, Lowndes County, rural Maine, etc. all have in common with each other, except for the shared fate of being forced to obey, and being counted as citizens
by, the same continent-spanning multinational Washingtonian empire. Calling us all Americans
comes to naming people for their governments just as much as calling us all United-Statesians
does, because America
as a country doesn’t mean anything in particular other than the territory controlled by the U.S.A.
(It’s like calling Kafka, Wittgenstein, and Mises all Austro-Hungarians,
or calling Adam Smith, Daniel O’Connell, and Gandhi all British,
as if that were somehow different from describing them as subjects of those respective empires.)
Of course, we shouldn’t be called United-Statesians, because there’s no good reason we should be named for our government.
]]>I half agree with your post. You make a good point – and I am glad you dispeled that myth from my mind- that most of what is called “Tex-Mex” is actually common food in northen states of Mexico. I also agree with you that the “fusion” presentation of food from a country is usually considered “the food of the country” while ignoring the diversity of dishes and that such essensialist conception of food is elitist and dangerous.
But I think some critics of what is usually sold as “Mexican food” in the US (and the rest of the world) have a point in that such hardly represents the whole variety of food of the country. And not cause is not the food the bourgoeis eat in Mexico City, but cause Mexico has an enormous variety of dishes (and I am talking about food eat by people all social clases) in almost every region that people hardly know, and that are very good and in many cases better that what is cook in the north.
]]>It reminds me of the P&T Bullshit episode on “The Best” where they serve the cheapest food they find, dress it up as expensive gourmet food and fool a bunch of restaurant patrons.
]]>However, why do you insult Bayless by calling him a “white boy?” He certainly isn’t a boy, and nothing I’ve read by him expresses the attitudes about northern/Tex-Mex food you’re objecting to either. (On an unrelated note, his recipe for mango and lime sorbet is awesome.)
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