Culinary Palettes
Culinary Palettes
The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art
How the visual culture of food, cookery, and consumption played a central role in the making of postrevolutionary Mexico.
Postrevolutionary Mexico City was a site of anxious nation-building, as rampant modernization converged and clashed with the nation’s growing nostalgia for its pre-Columbian heritage. During this volatile period, food became a meaningful symbol for a Mexican citizenry seeking new modes of national participation.
Culinary Palettes explores how the artistic invocation of food cultures became an arena in which to negotiate the political entanglements of postrevolutionary Mexico. Lesley Wolff casts a nuanced eye on the work of visual artists such as Tina Modotti, Carlos González, and Rufino Tamayo, who nurtured the symbolic and performative power of iconic foods such as pulque, mole poblano, and watermelon. Through analysis of a wide array of visual evidence, including paintings, architecture, vintage postcards, menus, and cookbooks, Culinary Palettes demonstrates how these artists positioned their work within a broad visual landscape that relied upon the power of Mexican foodways in the urban and national imagination. In the studios of modernists, Wolff argues, artistic production, foodways, and Indigeneity proved to be mutually constitutive—and at times weaponized—agents in articulating competing claims to a new nationhood.
Culinary Palettes is an exciting book that takes the scholarship on post-revolutionary Mexican art and culture in a promising and creative new direction. It situates the intersection of visual studies, art history, and food studies as they pertain to post-revolutionary Mexico and the visuality of foodways—in art, cookbook illustrations, menus, tourist ephemera, restaurants, home economics manuals, and advertisements that were essential for imagining the nation.
Culinary Palettes offers sharp readings of Mexican modernity since 1940, a period of intensive but uneven development, entailing processes of industrialization, migration, and consumerism. Wolff’s notion of ‘foodways as visual praxis’ and emphasis on embodiment and cultural labor make a strong contribution to a still-emerging scholarly literature emphasizing tensions between materiality, visuality, and coloniality. As a scholar of Mexican art and as a passionate student of Mexican foodways, I found this to be a very creative and exciting work of scholarship for the fields of art history, cultural studies, and food studies centered in Mexico.
Lesley A. Wolff is an assistant professor of art and design at the University of Tampa. She is coeditor of the volume Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art.
- List of Illustrations
- Prologue
- Introduction. Entremeses
- Chapter 1. Bebidas: Pulque, Breast Milk, and the Nation
- Chapter 2. Guisos: Mole Poblano, a Blend of Colonial Labor and Modern Leisure
- Chapter 3. Frutas: Mr. Watermelon/Señor Sandía and the Roots of Corporate Capitalism
- Conclusion. Bocadillos: Concentric Colonialities, or a Tale of Two Mexicos
- Appendix. Recipes for Mole Poblano or Mole de Guajolote
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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