A Review of Mesquite Pods to Mezcal: 10,000 Years of Oaxacan Cuisines

Mexican culinary nationalists have enshrined Oaxaca as the “land of seven moles,” the diverse chile stews that provide an Indigenous counterpoint to the supposed cradle of creole gastronomy, Puebla, with its chile and chocolate centerpiece, mole poblano. Although the count of seven moles is an invented tradition, Oaxaca’s culinary roots indeed reach deep into the past, as is shown by the essays in this splendid collection. The volume also effectively illustrates the advances of the archaeological study of food, from an early focus on the processes of domestication and subsistence regimes. The contributors, predominantly archaeologists drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, view cuisine as a critical point of human interaction with the environment, as a broad assemblage of cultural beliefs, practices and identities, and as a field for social stratification and conflict. 

Mesquite Pods to Mezcal: 10,000 Years of Oaxacan Cuisines, edited by Verónica Pérez Rodríguez, Shanti Morell-Hart, and Stacie M. King (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2024)

The volume’s first section exemplifies exciting new archaeological research on the archaic roots of cuisines. The opening chapter, by Aleksander Borejsza, Arthur Joyce and Jon C. Lohse, offers an innovative natural history of barrancas, steep ravines carved into the Oaxacan landscape. Digging through the sedimentary layers, the authors demonstrate that these riverbeds were formerly gentle meadows where Paleoindians hunted and gathered more than 10,000 years ago. Farmers later constructed elaborate terraced fields along these waterways, and only colonial depopulation and livestock grazing eroded them into dangerous flood zones. In the next essay, Shanti Morell-Hart and Éloi Bérubé describe the culinary cultures from an Archaic Period (8000-1600 BCE) site near Mitla. Botanical analysis reveals a wide range of plant species, many still familiar to Oaxacan cooks today, including amaranth and epazote, diverse beans, squash, cactus fruit and maguey, as well as striking differences, most notably, the consumption of foxtail millet instead of maize. Victor E. Salazar Chávez and Jeffrey P. Blomster round out this section with an analysis of food politics in the Mixtec Alta region during the Early Formative Period (1600-800 BCE). Comparing public and domestic meat consumption, they note that when households did have meat, they grilled it, generally a high-status, male method of cooking. By contrast, public ceremonial meals featured broths and stews, usually low-status, female preparations, but perhaps forerunners of the moles that came to dominate modern ritual life. 

Turning to the Classic Era (300-900 CE), the authors in the second section reveal the early emergence of culinary regionalism in a period marked by urbanization and sociopolitical integration. Gary M. Feinman and Linda M. Nichols attribute much of these early differences to ecology differences, including access to animal habitats and lower levels of maize consumption in the arid eastern arm of the Valley of Oaxaca, although there was also considerable trade within the region, both of exotic luxuries like cacao and of the staples maize and maguey. Verónica Pérez Rodríguez’s survey of urban foodways and Jennifer Saumur and Aurélie Manin’s study of a lower class Mixtec woman highlight the growing stratification of Oaxacan diets through differential access to meat. A chapter on Zapotec funeral rites by Robert Markens and Cira Martínez López combines archaeological data with ethnographic accounts to show that despite the colonial shift from household burials to cemeteries, Day of the Dead rituals preserved longstanding native traditions of feeding the ancestors. 

The resilience of Indigenous peoples forms the focus of the third section on the upheavals of the Postclassic Era (beginning about 1000 CE) and Spanish colonialism. A chapter by Marc N. Levine and Kathryn Puseman emphasizes the mobility of Indigenous peoples through the case of a community of migrants from the Mixtec Alta to coastal Tutepec who maintained their cultural identity by largely rejecting local seafoods and instead consuming highland tortillas, tamales and atoles. Stacie M. King and Shati Morell-Hart meanwhile provide original evidence of the infrastructure for cultural persistence in the form of a pre-Hispanic seed bank with more than 120 different plant species tucked away in the Oaxaca’s southeastern sierra. The authors conclude that small quantities of selected seeds indicated intentional preservation rather than granaries, garbage dumps or rat middens. A final chapter in this section, by Éloi Bérubé and Jaime E. Forde, notes that Mixtec elites in one community retained their maize-based diet during the colonial era, although it is unclear whether this was an expression of resistance against Spanish culture or simply poverty that made the commercial crop wheat unaffordable. 

The final section shifts from archaeological research to anthropological perspectives on the foodways of modern Oaxaca, while still placing them in deep historical context. Nelly M. Robles García discusses the foods of traveling merchants, called tamemes in Oaxaca, an occupation that persisted through the mid-20th century and included the author’s grandfather. Their basic ration of clayudas, tortillas carefully toasted to be strong, flexible, and resistant, have recently been gentrified for tourists. Dried chile, meat, beans and sweetened coffee rounded out the travelers’ diet. A chapter by Anya Peterson Royce provides a compelling ethnographic account of market vendors and caterers in the Zapotec community of Juchitán on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. These culinary professionals, who specialized in dishes such as breads for the Day of the Dead, fried tortillas with various toppings (garnachas), chocolate-flavored maize gruel (bupu), and of course mole, do a booming business across the festive calendar and also helped connect their customers with the natural world. The book’s final chapter, by Daniela Soleri, María del Carmen Castillo Cisneros, Flavio Aragón Cuevas, and David A. Cleveland, uses tejate, a foamy cacao beverage made with heirloom maize, to examine selective resistance to globalization among labor migrants to the United States. In Zapotec communities of Oaxaca, farmers save their home-grown maize to make tejate and purchase commercial varieties for making tortillas. While exporters in the United States sold those same heirloom varieties to upscale restaurants and consumers, the price was prohibitive to migrants in California, who made tejate from commodity maize. Nevertheless, the authors rightly conclude that the drink, and the heirloom corn used to make it, depend for its survival on stewards within the Zapotec community rather than gentrification.  

With novel scholarly insights on beloved traditions, this book holds much of interest, not only for archaeologists and food studies scholars, but also for aficionados of Oaxacan cuisine. It offers a worthy companion to Traci Ardren’s Her Cup for Sweet Cacao: Food in Ancient Maya Society (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020), both published in the Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies. Together, these two collections provide the basis for rethinking the archaeology of food throughout Mesoamerica, hopefully inspiring future volumes on the Valley of Mexico, Michoacán, Veracruz, or even the Gran Chichimeca.  

Jeffrey M. Pilcher is Professor of Food Studies and director of the Culinaria Research Centre at the University of Toronto. His books include ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and most recently Hopped Up: How Travel, Trade, and Taste Made Beer a Global Commodity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).