Tag Archives: unit3

11/10/23

The tortilla discourse – Mexico’s policy

Tortilla discourse describes the time around the 1900s in Mexico, mainly about the national policies and the false belief in food choice. It is the period led by Porfiriato, who denigrated the consumption of maize and tortilla, instead, the wheat from Europe. It classified the races into 3 kinds: wheat corn and rice, and saying wheat consumption is supreme, involved the concept of ethnocentrism that believed the colonizer, the Western world is always correct.

The detail of the policy is ridiculous, one of them outlining that the daily required protein level is twice higher than today’s standard when the government finds out the national level of nutrition is insufficient. Later they found out, that wheat and maize do not have significant differences in providing nutrition. It reminds me of the story of tomatoes, a poisonous fruit that causes death turns out is the using of lead-rich plates. From another aspect, the government wants to address the problem of inefficient Indigenous workers in factories and ascribe the causes to wrong food choices. However, the truth is the government failed to convert their thoughts of the industrialized world. According to the article, Indigenous people at that stage didn’t have any ambition for money which was far different from their cultural value.

It triggers me to think about what is “modern” economy and what is the appropriate way to create a society which could integrate Indigenous and settlers as well as development. The main reason is the unequal tie between former colonizers and the Indigenous. The case of South Africa shows the relationship. The apartheid was definitely not the right way but after the reconciliation both South Africa’s economy and safety decreased. The structural reason behind this is some legacy of apartheid exacerbates social inequality, however, people usually consider it as “their” problems, rather than seeking solutions and ignoring what the former colonizers did before.

In contrast, a positive policy emerges in the form of José Vasconcelos’s rural schooling idea. This program not only eliminated illiteracy but also solidified Spanish as the official language, significantly enhancing the overall educational quality of Mexico’s population. The ripple effects of this initiative extended to the later 1960s, marking a period known as the “Mexico Miracle,” characterized by sustained economic growth and development.

11/9/23

Kneading Poetry

This weeks poems present how the act of food and intimacy can be used by queer Latin American women as a way to use traditional spaces and acts, such as making food, as a way to express themselves within and contrary to heterosexual expectations and prejudice. The poem that stood out the most to me, was Moro-Gronlier’s Compulsion: A Chronology, as the structure has a very specific syntactic structure, with each final line ending in a determiner phrase. The first six stanzas end in a first person singular pronoun (I, My) while the eighth and ninth stanzas end in a third person singular pronoun (He), with the final tenth stanza regaining the first person singular pronoun (I). The way that Moro-Gronlier structures this poem with the determiner phrases switching between a first person and then third person and finally first person again, gives the interpretation that the male heterosexual relationships that Moro-Gronlier describes takes away the joy and freedom that she experienced in her childhood and with feminine relationships, with food and intimacy and only when she takes back that intimacy with food and sexuality does she partly regain that freedom, but not completely.

I find the terminology that Moreno-Gronlier provides in the preface to her collection to be useful when analyzing the relationship between queerness and food within Latin American patriarchal societies. While the origins of the word “tortillera” may originally have been used as a a means to attack lesbian women, within Latino/Latinx communities, the imagery behind the word is also why it has been reclaimed by queer women. Since the space of making tortillas in the Latin American household was occupied by women, and is a space for women to gather, it is easy to see why the idea of a space and occupation created for women, could be used as a way for self-expression by queer and lesbian women. In Gaspar de Alba’s poem Making Tortillas, she uses the description of making tortillas to show  how intimacy can be created through shared touch. The descriptions of soaking and grinding the maize are woven between the act of spreading our the maize over the metate, which requires the use of the tortillera’s strength and entire body to create the tortilla, which could represent how Latin American queer and lesbian women show strength against societal prejudice, or how commitment to the lengthy process of making tortillas is similar to the creation and sustaining queer relationships.