Partaking in Culinary Heritage at Yaxunah, Yucatán during the 2017 Noma Mexico Pop-Up

Abstract

In spring of 2017, celebrity chef René Redzepi opened a pop-up of his famed restaurant, Noma, on the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. During its run, Noma Mexico worked closely with the town of Yaxunah, a Yucatec-Mayan speaking community in the peninsula’s interior, hiring women to make tortillas and acquiring local ingredients for the restaurant. For us—two archaeologists interested in past and present Maya food and agriculture who have worked in the Yaxunah community for years—this made the 2017 field season a compelling time to engage in culinary heritage. We share on-the-ground perspectives from our work with Yaxunah community members during a decisive spring for rural Yucatán’s globalizing food system. These perspectives offer a candid contribution to this special issue’s archive of community-based and heritage-engaged archaeological work in the Maya area.

Walking Rural in Tzacauil, Yucatan, Mexico

“…Members of the Yaxunah community have their own walking understanding of ejido lands—they are the land's living inheritors and, for many, their livelihood is tied to the land. As part of my work documenting environmental and agricultural history at Tzacauil, I spent time walking Tzacauil with six Yaxunah farmers and gardeners (Fisher and Ardren 2020). The informal name given this walking by the community members was xíimbal k’áax , a Yucatec Mayan term that describes the practice of walking the forest to select a parcel for milpa cultivation (Figures 4–7).…”

Comunidades patrimoniales como articuladoras y conservadoras de la cultura maya: el Centro Comunitario Uj-Ja’ Síijo’ob de Canicab (Yucatán, México)

“…Podemos establecer el comienzo de este proyecto en el Centro Cultural (Yaxunah Centro Cultural, 2018), que se inaugura en octubre de 2010, un lugar de exposición, reunión y estudio abierto a la comunidad, y que ha ido evolucionando y adaptándose a las necesidades de los pobladores. Siendo el Centro Cultural uno de los principales ejes de la comunidad, se desarrollan en Yaxunah otras propuestas de éxito que atraen a personas de todo el mundo, pero que han permitido a su vez afianzar los lazos de unión y sentido de pertenencia de la comunidad y propiciar a su vez un desarrollo económico y cultural sostenible (Ardren, 2018;Fisher y Ardren, 2020;Tegeler, 2016).…”

Leaving the Quiet Jungle Path: Introduction to Maya Anthropological Archaeology

“…In the Indigenous Maya community of Yaxunah, Yucatán, another kind of alternative tourism-culinary tourism-mingles with heritage politics and archaeological practice. Chelsea Fisher and Traci Ardren relate how globalization has impacted the heritage of a local community by relating how in 2017 a world-renowned celebrity chef hired tortillamakers and sourced local produce from the community for a high-end pop-up restaurant in Tulum, specifically examining how "neoliberalism and so-called sustainable development" are "inextricably linked" [4] (p.489) with presumably unintended consequences. The community's involvement with the pop-up restaurant transformed the local food landscape that spring-and continues to reverberate globally through a recent Netflix special and an influx of "foodie" tourism, even during the pandemic.…”