Culinary Palettes

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.

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.