Taqueria Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a rough holiday to celebrate abroad. As friends and family gather back home, expats either try to ignore the thoughts of turkey or mount large-scale reproductions of the gluttony, matching local ingredients to traditional recipes. Or, they binge on tacos and beer. With the complicity of my friend Matt, that is what I did.











Tacos, to be fair, take many forms, none of them resembling the crunchy, u-shaped, hard-shelled monstronsities served in middle school cafeterias. The basic idea--a soft corn tortilla filled with something--can become tacos de canasta, tacos de cabeza, tacos al pastor, tacos de mariscos, tacos al carbon, or tacos de guisado. Fillings come shaved off giant spits of seasoned pork, plucked from a cauldron of grease and diced into nuggets that melt on your tongue, flaked from the bones of meat simmered in rich sauces and ladled into the tortilla, or grilled over pungent charcoal and marinaded in their own smoke...








The humble taco is a meal at all hours. Savory and moist, warmed with steam and pulled from a basket on a street corner, it can be a satisfying breakfast. Served at sunny folding tables with plastic stools and topped with guacamole, it makes for a quick lunch. But most often, it is a meal for the night, when cantinas are closing and the warmth of the food and the spice of the salsa cuts the nip in the air.







There is, perhaps, a strange affinity between tacos and Thanksgiving. If the traditional autumn meal is best consumed in the cozy confines of a warm home amongst friends and family, the best taquerias are snug and comforting in their own way. There is a communion among those who slip into these dim nooks seeking a bit of rest and a quick meal; it is in the passing of salsas and the offerings of seats, in the crossed glances and murmured 'provecho's. Huddled around a cramped counter dotted with bowls of salsa, a bare bulb overhead pushing back the darkness, there is indeed much to be thankful for.

Tourism

In the two decades between 1930 and 1950, Mexico emerged as a prime playground for foreign tourists, many of whom descended on the burgeoning Pacific resort town of Acapulco. The effects of this boom were multiplex: developers acquired communal lands--almost always through shady maneuvers, slums housing service workers sprouted outside the shiny tourist districts, new construction destroyed pristine ecosystems, and the country's cultural heritage began a long journey toward commodification.

Over time, Mexico has established a diverse tourism industry, moving beyond golden-age beach resorts--though, as the 1970s creation of Cancun illustrated, never totally abandoning them either--to promote historical sites such as Chichen Itza and Teotihuacan, traditions such as Day of the Dead, and 'typical' towns and cities such as Oaxaca and San Miguel de Allende. This permeation of tourism is both the result of fervent government promotion and a reflection of its importance: around 7% of the country's GDP.








On a personal level, it is difficult to navigate both the moral and aesthetic waters of Mexico's tourist industry. Some tourist kitsch is easy to identify, such as cheap obsidian knives at a pre-colombian archeological site, but elsewhere it is more difficult. The country's renowned culinary tradition was recently awarded world heritage status by UNESCO, but what does that mean for a street-corner taco vendor? The struggle is in the search for authenticity, for something not produced or performed for foreign hands and eyes; an attempt to locate a culture that has not been packaged for export.

Tourism's effect on Mexico is irreversible and ongoing, and it is not wholly pernicious. At best, it produces a syncretism that is as uniquely 'Mexican' as any supposedly 'timeless' cultural heritage. At worst, it produces a steady stream of cheaply made handicrafts and staged performances. At the end of the day, however, the tradition of tourism is inseparable from the country's history.

Revolutionary Resonance: The Centennial

The Monument to the Revolution is a hulking mass of stone and steel that dominates a bleak plaza in the heart of Mexico City. It is an unsentimental memorial to the movement that toppled the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and left nearly 1.5 million dead. Erected on the base of the uncompleted Porfirian legislature, it is a silent reminder that the Revolution borrowed heavily from the past even while it built modern Mexico.











The image of the Revolution, like its monumental representation, has loomed over Mexican life since the fighting abated in 1917. While the state fostered the cults of revolutionary icons such as Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa, literally and figuratively unifying them into a pantheon along with those who had been their mortal enemies, the popular resonance of these heroes and martyrs was often outside the bounds of official remembrance.

















Constant references to its revolutionary provenance remained a central pillar of the rhetorical legitimacy of the PRI, whose very name suggested the institutionalization of the social struggle. The values of the--capital "R"--Revolution remained the central reference point of political discourse, even as the politics they justified drifted farther from those ideals. Former generals found ample opportunities for profit in the permissive years after the fighting ended, and the workers who had received significant guarantees in the 1917 revolutionary constitution increasingly found themselves submitted to corrupt and authoritarian union bosses. Many of these unions still retain an active protest tradition, and used the occasion of the centennial to take to the streets to defend their "revolutionary" rights against government privatization efforts.








For many other Mexicans, however, the centennial commemorates events as far removed from daily reality as the 200-year-old events of independence. Despite the achievements the Revolution brought--and they are not insubstantial--its cultural and political significance is greatly faded. Along with apathy and indifference, there are those who perceive the corruption of the Revolution, and have often looked outside the country for inspiration, mingling Mexican tradition with international symbols.





When I first visited the Monument in 2004, I peered down on a shaft to where an eternal flame was supposed to burn. The flame was out and bits of trash littered the platform. The bronze words on the walls spelled out a message about the meaning of the Revolution. The "D" had long since fallen from "Democracy."

Suspended

Sometimes, all you can do is hang on.

Balloons, and the Political Economy of Marginality

Fruit vendors, squatting communities, balloon-sellers, and taxi drivers are hardly the stuff of political legend. But in Mexico, such economically marginalized populations have long been a staple of urban politics, organized into countless trade unions and civic associations by ambitious politicians and upwardly mobile leaders. The proliferation of this low-level corporatism is not hard to understand in a country where millions live in the gray shadows of the informal economy, their livelihoods determined by the largesse and tolerance of often capricious authorities. For those who must obtain official permits--or achieve the official condonation of their absence--in order to survive, this vulnerability provides a strong impulse to organization, both for those who seek to defend legally-granted privilege as well as for those who must bitterly defend their non-legal means of subsistence. That there should exist a balloon-sellers union, then, is not surprising: how else to defend access to public plazas and confront extortion from police officers? But the price of defending or ensuring such privileges has never been cheap, and Mexico's one-party system was skilled at both incorporating and manipulating these groups, turning them into fiercely loyal clients of the regime. But lost in the chaotic swirl of Uniones, Coaliciones, Frentes, and Sindicatos, is the fact that these groups--prey as they might upon their members--also provided a certain degree of meaningful benefits. Corporatist incorporation into the PRI may have often meant subjugation to the demands of the state, but it was a relationship that only functioned due to its inherent reciprocity, and even balloon-sellers knew how to play the game.

With its roots in pre-Hispanic celebrations and its distinctly non-Western attitude toward death, Dia de los Muertos has become Mexico's most marketable cultural holiday and a staple of middle school Spanish classes in the United States. This mingling of authentic tradition with exportable exhibition, of meaningful commemoration with commercialized caricature, are the marks of a holiday that has increasingly become a transnational event.










Across the country, students of all ages participated in altar building contests, painting elaborate designs with flower petals and arranging candles around photos of revolutionary heroes or famous musicians. The practice of incorporating an offering to the dead of special food and drink occasionally took an ironic turn: it was not uncommon to see a bottle of tequila sharing an altar with a picture of Pancho Villa--a notorious teetotaller.







While public plazas filled with overly-ornate ofrendas, a different scene unfolded in the municipal cemetery in Puebla. A stream of families swirled through the gates and crowded down the central walkway, carrying bunches of marigolds in tin cans. Workers stood amid the chaos, calling out "¿necesita pala, agua?" as they offered their shoveling services to families hoping to tidy up the tangles of weeds creeping over the graves.

In the fourth class section of the cemetery, among the tessellated sprawl of wrought-iron crosses and stone slabs, mariachis plucked out tunes and families hugged. By the grave of a salsa singer, a man replaced batteries in a tired boom box.

















These intimate, personal ceremonies overlapped with boisterous public celebrations. The female icons of Santa Muerte--Saint Death--were paraded through the streets of Puebla in open veneration of a cult that has traditionally remained on the fringes of official Mexican Catholicism and connected to poverty and crime. Elsewhere, oversized skeleton puppets danced in plazas and festive crowds gathered around colorful altars and bought black and white balloons with images of cartoon skulls.


























Not all the public altars were whimsical tributes to national heroes, however. Some were reminders of true grief, such as the horrific fire at a nursery school in Sonora. In the end, the perfusion of death in Mexican popular culture is more than a touristic curiosity or academic fascination, it is a reflection of a society that has lived far too many tragedies and where embracing death is easier than trying to push it away.