‘Las penas con pan son menos’: Race, Modernity and Wheat in Modern Mexico

• Sandra Aguilar-Rodríguez ^[1]
  1. [1] Moravian College

     Moravian College

     City of Bethlehem, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Bulletin of Spanish Studies, ISSN-e 1478-3428, ISSN 1475-3820, Vol. 97, Nº 4, 2020 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies), págs. 539-565
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In post-revolutionary Mexico, wheat became the gateway to modernity, the element that would transform indigenous peoples into mestizos and the working class into middle class. Growing wheat or transforming its flour into bread was believed to be a way to introduce peasants into the money economy. Meanwhile, having bread or cakes represented the adoption of cultural practices associated with the middle and upper class. This article explores the consumption of wheat bread and cakes, the values identified with these foodstuffs and how changes in eating practices were propelled in mid twentieth-century Mexico. Wheat consumption, I argue, symbolized the process of mestizaje which meant the adoption of western and middle-class practices by the poor and the peasantry in order to modernize the nation. Therefore, modern Mexicans began to eat sandwiches and celebrate birthdays with cakes instead of corn-based meals such as tamales and atole.