Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art, Lesley A Wolff, 2025, University of Texas Press
“Working in McDonald’s made me a Marxist,” wrote the British Nigerian journalist Ralph Leonard.
The point he was making is that his then job embodied the theory of alienation, which explains how workers become estranged from the product of their labour, never reaping the benefits of production.
Indeed, “McDonaldization”, as it has come to be known since sociologist George Ritzer coined the term in 2013, refers to the characteristic way in which fast-food restaurants shape the social and cultural characteristics of an essentially alienated society.
It is no surprise then that, for much of the left, McDonald’s has long embodied American imperialism, given that the rise of fast food can only be truly understood within the context of a globally expansive modern capitalism.
This may seem tangential to a book about food and art in post-revolutionary Mexico, but it is not—because the study of society begins with the study of food. The first objective of human existence, Marx noted, is to produce the means of subsistence.
“All labour,” he wrote in Capital, “is originally first directed towards the appropriation and production of food.”
As the US scholar and former Communist Bertram Wolfe suggested in the case of Mexico, maize is more than just a food, it is the food, “the very foundation of pre-conquest economy and culture”.
The debate about food and Marx is flavoured with dispute and spiced with denial, with many adherents long suggesting that the bearded sage said nothing of value about the plate on his rickety table.
That is true only to a limited extent, because Marx was concerned less about the diet of workers and more about how a food regime reflected the underlying material conditions of capitalist production.
The lesson is that food is not just something we should think about as the stuff of subsistence, it is the original materialist vector that arguably underpins every aspect of social relations. In short, it is the cornerstone of culture.
Food historians have certainly digested this relationship between food and culture with gusto, but often at a theoretically ill-defined level in terms of food as “heritage” that takes little account of the roles food plays in mechanisms of cultural production and hence the explanations for these in social theory.
Lesley Wolff’s Culinary Palettes is a mouth-watering exception, considering the expropriation of food by Mexico’s post-revolutionary artists as one component among others—but clearly an important one—with which to construct a national culture.
Revolutionary nationalism, as the official ideology of the ruling party, the PRI, was called, created a ritual repository of legitimacy for the creation of a modern state overseeing the extension of industrial capitalism in a primarily rural society with an Indigenous hinterland.
The narrators of this state-building fiction were the endlessly creative political elites who took power after the turmoil of 1910-17. Their most potent instrument was cultural (re)invention, and their favoured folk tale was mestizaje.
In a highly original analysis of how food is depicted in Mexican art, Wolff examines the vital agency played by the visual representation of food in the construction of nationalist discourse.
Through their ability to take us back to an imagined cultural year zero, foods occupied a special place in the artistic toolbox as “active agents in the palettes and palates of the postrevolutionary Mexican body politic”.
The author cites the Mexican scholar Roger Bartra, who has suggested that modernity and coloniality collide in those interstices where state ideology “disguises itself with culture” as a way to mask nationalism’s designs for domination.
Post-revolutionary Mexico offers a splendid case study for this observation, because state-building was so transparent. Through the Secretariat of Public Education, José Vasconcelos embarked upon the conscious creation of a new citizenry modelled on the “cosmic race” of a mestizo people in an epic discursive exercise whose ambition was to incorporate Indigenous Mexico into capitalist modernity.
At the heart of his campaign was cultural representation—it is not for nothing that those fabulous murals from the 1920s that adorn the walls of Mexican public buildings owe their existence to state patronage under Vasconcelos. They are nothing if not a testament to the nationalist fervour of the period.
As Wolff notes: “… the state sought to assimilate Indigenous and working-class citizens into the elite, mestizo body politic and to consolidate national narratives through a state-funded mural programme that elevated suggestive portrayals of classical Mexican culture as the bedrock of modern mestizaje.”
She points out how much of the art that emerged during the early post-revolutionary years highlighted the centrality of maize in Mexican history and heritage—a crop associated in the nationalist imaginary with the pre-Columbian origin story, yet in fact recurrently challenged by wheat as the coded signifier for European domination.
Wolffe examines the intimate relationship between the form, value and labour involved in Mexican foodways and works by art’s most recognisable figures such as Rufino Tamayo, Tina Modotti, Diego Rivera, and Olga Costa among others.
She considers through chapters on pulque, Mole Poblano and the watermelon how this relationship evolved from the 1920s to the 1940s alongside the regimentation of notions of indigeneity due to nation-building within Mexico’s post-revolutionary discursive landscape.
It is a process that did not end with industrial capitalism. The ways in which the visuality of foodways persists as a mediator of class, race, gender and nation can still be found in Mexico City today, Wolffe argues, pointing to the aesthetics of the celebrated Mexican chef Enrique Olvera’s signature dish, Mole Madre—a product simultaneously considered traditional heritage and contemporary haute cuisine.
The author writes: “The dish literally depicts these tensions through the two varietals of mole that appear on the plate: one the timeless ‘mother’ and the other a young, seasonal version.
“I suggest that these tensions evoke Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s concept of two Mexicos, one of which consists of the Mexican ‘Indian’, a figure who resides in the deep past, always out of time; the other, the ‘imaginary’ Mexico, is made of mestizo elites who stake their claim in the present.
“Both Mexicos co-constitute one another, reifying the fictions of Mexican nationalism as they enact a performative counterdistinction on the plate.”
Read this and receive articles straight to your inbox by subscribing on Substack
Categories: Mexico, North America