ABSTRACT
In January 1999, neoliberal President Ernesto Zedillo eliminated the long-standing subsidy on Mexico’s daily staple, corn tortillas. It was intended as an efficiency measure to improve competitiveness in the global economy, but many saw the decree as an end to the welfare state that had assured political domination for the ruling party for most of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, as neighborhood tortilla factories throughout Mexico City began to close—unable to compete, without the subsidy, against the industrial conglomerate Maseca, a producer of dehydrated tortilla 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 the twentieth-century transformation of Mexican cuisine, both the mechanization of Native American tortilla making and the introduction of Western-style industrial processed foods. The modernization of food production has been instrumental in drawing campesinos into the market economy, but it has done so in a halting and incomplete fashion, creating culinary versions of what Nestor Garcia Canclini termed “hybrid cultures.” While this half-baked globalization allowed people to retain elements of rural, often-indigenous identities by “entering and leaving modernity,” many paid a high nutritional price, suspended between traditional and modern diets, eating the worst of both worlds. 2
