Hello everybody, thanks for coming. Welcome. My name is Kaitlyn Spangler. I
am a graduate research assistant of the Women and Gender in International Development at
Center for International Research Education and Development or CIRED at Virginia Tech.
It is a great honor for me to open our session and especially introduce our speaker for today.
So welcome to the WGD discussion series, the second event of our discussion series
of spring 2018. We are happy that you could all join us including those via webex.
We would like to begin first and foremost today to acknowledge that this event is being held on the
traditional lands of the Tutelo and Monacan people who are the original custodians of this land.
Please fill out the sign up sheet that is being passed around, I'm not sure where it's
at right now okay and let us know if you'd like to be added to our listserv which is a separate
column on that sheet if you're not yet part of it. The full calendar and any updates for this year
can be seen on our website and we can send that out later after this event.
There are also some flyers in the back of the room if you prefer a paper copy. The discussion
will last approximately 30 minutes and then it will be followed by 10 minutes of discussion and
question answer perhaps maybe 45 minutes of speaking depending on what goes. So now to finally
introduce our speaker. Dr. Maria Elisa Christie is the director of Women and Gender in International
Development at the Center for International Research Education and Development, CIRED,
Virginia Tech, with a primary role to provide leadership within CIRED to ensure
that all projects and programs are gender sensitive and will have a positive effect
on the most disadvantaged beneficiaries, many of whom are women. Dr. Christie is faculty affiliate
in the department of Geography, Women and Gender Studies, and the government international affairs
program at the School of Public and International Affairs, and the Alliance for Social Political
Ethical and Cultural Thought, or ASPECT, PhD program at Virginia Tech. With more than 25 years
of experience in international development, Dr. Christie has worked with a variety of development
research and non-governmental agencies around the developing world, along with local state
and federal governments in the United States and Mexico. Her multi-disciplinary research and
publications focus on gendered spaces and everyday life in nature society relations
kitchen and gardens women's reciprocity networks agricultural livelihoods and women's empowerment.
So without further ado, please welcome Dr. Maria Elisa Christie.
Okay thank you all for coming. I'm sure you know that we had another speaker so I'm the impromptu
speaker since I direct the series. I had to pop in because our speaker who was scheduled was flying
in from Utah and she had a fever and didn't want to give us all the flu and so it was canceled. So
what I'm going to present now is actually from my PhD research prior to this job so it's not gender
and development but it is gender in a developing context and as the title says we're going to look
at space geography and the environment through kitchen space. By the end of this you're going
to know what kitchen space is and the housewalk garden as well just a space outside of the home.
So I think first we need to understand that I'm talking about a very ancient
culture region where corn, which is going to come up throughout this presentation,
was domesticated over well ten thousand years ago.
And i have a point but the the glyphs on the top left show an offering of corn which is still
in practice today and then the corn I actually have a lot of pretty pictures so I'm going to
just keep talking about the pictures the whole presentation. So these corn that are on the
house there were grown especially for one of the fiestas one of the ritual celebrations that I was
involved with helping cook and then when the corn was harvested they cut all those stalks down and
covered them with tables and tablecloths to invite the community for a special
celebration I'm going to focus a lot on sochi milko which is a very famous place known to
most Mexicans through and many places around the world through its important presence in
uh old Mexican movies and even in soap operas today so and it's recognized by the united nations
as a cultural heritage site so this is a Chinampa which is referred to as a floating island they're
not floating anymore but when the sochi milkas arrived in the valley of Mexico which they were
the one of they were the first of seven original tribes to settle the central valley of Mexico and
china's were built in a lake and so now we have these floating islands that have settled to the
ground because as they planted vegetables they would slowly sink and then they'd build another
one out of different natural products wood dirt and so on so i have this picture which i showed
when i was in Mexico i lived there many years but i was there doing my research i presented at
several universities including national university in mexico vietnam and people from mexico city
don't believe that there's still this happening just outside of mexico city so this china but
these are three brothers who were between their 80s and 90s who were cultivating and had been
since they were kids on this particular cheetah but you see the canal in the background and you
see on the edges of the of the of the chinampa the island are the trees which are our this which are
cypress that were part of what holds the chinampas together they're around all of them but this is
what the canals look like close up so it's a world heritage site but it suffered a lot of degradation
and contamination and what i'll be looking at food is something that kind of shores up
um the cultural identity related to this place and also reflects narratives of nostalgia which i will
not go into but picture i have on the top right the flapique is our it's my neighbor making the
fish tamales so it's there's no corn in it but a tamar basically means carefully wrapped in
nahuatu so usually in corn husks in central mexico often in banana leaves further south
but fish used to be free and you lived on the edge of the canal and so poor people like my
neighbor were able to eat fish two times a day and now she complains it tastes like dirt and
toxic and she has to buy it from the market which means they eat it very rarely
this is my approach so we talked about the culture region of corn so notice that's the big box is the
region of central mexico within and i looked at communities and their extended social networks so
i worked in three three three towns communities and then within that i looked at the household
and it's link being part of the community and in the center i have the subject the research subject
and notice i have two women and not one because it is often a collective space
this is actually in a household their two sisters are making the best tamar's ever those are sweet
corn tamales made with sweetened condensed milk and raisins and fresh corn that is grounded
it's just like the most amazing thing i have to say that one of the perks of doing my research is
that i was constantly bringing really good food home because everybody like sends you with food
especially when they knew i had kids and they weren't with me oh let's take some food okay
and i never complain so these are my spaces of inquiry i looked at the three communities
which which as i said were one of the original tribes also founded or one of
the groups in nokotepe which is a narrow way so they have very similar traditions and then
te te kala which is closer it's closer to the state of guerrero which is what
is much harder and has a different history but the same kind of traditions that i'm talking
about here existed in the hands of indigenous people there where again linked to the environment
they hosted a celebration for a neighboring community who came in a pilgrimage to keep
water in the lake so it's very linked to faces of well anyway cosmo vision nature environment
so i brought my baggage of course my ethnicity everybody called me la espanolita i'm from spain
i'm a native speaker so i was this little spaniard my language wouldn't be impossible to do this
research without being a native speaker spanish it was ethnographic research my gender when i hired a
few students at the end to do some tape recorded interviews which they were tape by the way
i couldn't get the men were not able to access the kitchens so the men's students basically
provided no information because the women would sit them down and feed them they would not let
them in to cook with them so it's very gendered definitely had to be a woman to do this research
my socioeconomic status more linked to my education i was not only a white person from
outside but it was an educative person i was a student in fact that's one of the reasons people
wanted to support me because i was a student and more and what i did was participate observation so
i worked with people cooking collecting things from the fields mostly in food preparation
did ethnographic interviews capturing people's everyday life and of in-depth i did participate
mapping you'll see an example of that and it was 11 months of field work so it was
pretty much a year progressive contextualization so i went down with the idea that i would look at
everything that goes into the pot and figure out what was important so if you're paying
attention to women's emotions and importance they gave to things i focus narrow and narrow
so while i brought all that baggage i also brought 15 years of cultural knowledge and also context in
the region just so you know it is not easy even if you're a female even if you're mexican to get into
people's kitchen spaces be there for the household or in the community so and especially with
indigenous communities so the fact that i was a mother was really important and especially i took
it off here in the words but in such a miracle i arrived there three sons when the first one was
like five months old and the day that we got there he was taken away in somebody's shawl to a fiesta
down the alley denise it was a good thing when you have kids you want people to take them away okay
please bring them back later so anyway so so that really helped build lengths of trust that i really
built on later in fact people would say oh you're the mother of those little curlies because all my
kids had curly hair which indigenous people don't have so they were remembered all right so i used
the geography feminist political ecology approach to gendered space and gendered knowledge which is
katelyn wright is still my favorite things to look at in our development projects so this is
an example of gendered knowledge this is donya jose who is with this huge pile of hikamas and
she looked through all of them and i'm thinking oh my gosh this woman is like taking up this guy's
time and what is she doing but she's a regular she always buys from this guy and i said to him
jose i think she's going to find the best hikama here and he answers me she will so um
i don't think any of us know how to select tikkum up but just so you know the ones that you don't
want to do you all know even what hikima is some of you okay we do have a it's a vegetable and it's
crunchy and have it kind of like cucumber with lemon and chili pepper salt but usually when
you go to a supermarket we don't want a damaged produce that's cracked right you probably it's
full of dirt in the cracks well that's when it's sweet because it's fresh it's rupturing
with sweetness so that's the one she wants and the tail was important i remember how the tail
was important but okay so i'm looking at embodied knowledge so that is not the rational brain i'm a
student and i can read articles and write articles and do presentations for you it's actually
body knowledge that you perform that if any of you have ever read a recipe and then failed at
implementing it you have a sense of what embodied knowledge is right i mean if you
learn it you watch people you know how do you beat even egg whites there's a body knot
okay um hairway situated knowledges heroic wasn't a geographer but it's very much used
by geographers so i wanted to look at situated knowledges so really recognizing that people
based on their not just geographical place their gender their race everything have a particular
knowledge that is real that your assumption that objective scientific knowledge can gather
the truth actually obliterates the diversity of experiences and knowledges so and then harding who
is philosopher who looks at whose knowledge whose science whose science whose knowledge thinking for
women's lives so there were several articles and books at that time saying wait a minute we haven't
taken women into account so what did i find just to give you a the conclusion at the beginning so
you know where i'm going so kitchen space and here it is uh you can see that there's nature
in kitchen space right this woman collects both the scrap wood and the natural you know branches
and things that just fall off the trees and then the scrap that metal sheet is her comal where she
cooks the tortillas so i found that it is a key and gender side of social and
cultural reproduction so we'll see what that means look at reciprocity networks for social
and then cultural what you think is right what you learn what you reproduce and it's embedded
in nature society relations which is kind of the overall description of what geography is
it's gendered space where many women in central mexico spend a lot of their time
now some people will say well why are you looking at women in kitchens when women want
to get out of kitchens right i mean interested in women's empowerment but people don't want to
be in kitchens well some people do and the fact is in any case that women spend a lot of time
a lot of time in kitchen so it's worth understanding their experience there
so and putting women and food preparation at the center let me understand some really
important things to both households or communities families and communities
the other thing is that kitchen space is a site of adaptation and innovation so women are the
innovators but at the same time they have to keep things the same they have to figure out how to use
other ingredients because some are too expensive or because they're no longer there's no fish
anymore they're too expensive or because now they have a job and they have less time to do things
so it's very important that cultural resistance is in women's hands this example this photo i don't
know if you can see those little ears tied on the handles of that pot so products cooking at the mud
let's see a lot of them these little things see so the corn husks break them into little strips
and those are called orejas ears and because tamales has anybody here try to make them all
there's an embodied knowledge challenge how did they how'd it go okay you made them okay
tamales are really hard to make right they're very hard to make and so the idea is that if there's
discord if there's children running around if the cook is angry if something breaks
they're not gonna cook right so one of the things you do to increase your chances of them
cooking right is um to cover to cover their ears with corn that protects them
so um so this is a one of the this is the first participatory mapping result that i had where i
asked women where do you prepare your food and i was surprised when she said well okay
which kitchen and she specifically said the modern normal kitchen or the smoke kitchen
so this smoke kitchen is actually on the edge of that first corn field that i showed you with the
corn husk drying there and you can i don't know if you can see but the normal modern kitchen
has part of it outside it has the it has the water outside where you wash dishes and vegetables and
so on and also one of the things that struck me is what i looked at as gendered aesthetics
you see the woman has a very pretty little kitchen right she made a lot of detail on
her curtains she has flowers she really likes her kitchen and she cooks really yummy things
she drew it yeah she drew it i didn't drive whoops sorry it's hard to go back in fact now
it's gonna be hard to there you go yeah she drew and i didn't i then i repeated that same prompt
to other people so where do you prepare your food so i wouldn't say oh draw me your indoor
kitchen and your outdoor kitchen but this started this really important finding that there was this
duality this overlap and it wasn't a dichotomy i couldn't say okay here's
your normal or sometimes people call it my indoor kitchen in my outside kitchen um so
kind of already said that so cultural identities are continuously changed so this um cultural
resistance is also you know innovation and change so the house lock garden i wasn't the first one to
look at that as an important place clarissa kimber in the 60s was the first to look at it as a place
of um critical social networks and cultural inheritances um and then winkler antoinette
winkler prince who actually came to speak at one of our discussion series um looks at in brazil
the importance of garden products and from the household garden for exchange among migrants in
brazil so the house lock gardens play a really important role in creating and strengthening and
maintaining these social networks although i look not at plants but at the food that's produced in
there that is also exchanged i'm not the only one that gets their little package to take home
and what was surprising to me is that it provides a space for community participation
including immigrants and such a miracle while it's reproducing the sense of place and what is
authentic such a milk in fact the people have been continuously uh in in uh let's see the
blob of mexico city which was 28 kilometers away originally has like blopped over it and people
less and less work on the land still people work on the land and in particular there was one period
i don't remember when it was i was going to look it up last night like maybe in the 70s
where mexico city stole all the water such canals actually ran dry and it interrupted
the generation a little transmission of agriculture and one of the men that i
interviewed said let me tell you spanish so cuando nacero mi sijjos de estaba la mesa
for a few people who speak spanish so he said yeah my kids would never go do agriculture
when they were born the table was already set they didn't realize how many
dawn to dusk hours they had to spend in the field to be able to eat so they're going to
work for a salary they're not going to or driving taxes which is a lot of sociables do
all right so those gendered reciprocity networks in food preparation are built over
long times for cooking sometimes it's weeks cleaning the rice cleaning the chilies peeling
the tamarinds as well as in the end making the tamales and actually cooking the things
this is an example of oh i didn't tell you the migraines okay so so as so chamikas are less
and less engaged in agriculture though some newer generations have gone back to the land
basically migrants from indigenous communities estado de mexico oaxaca
guerrero who fled to mexico city in this world urban migration that everybody knows about who
don't find work then kind of bounce out to the agricultural communities on the outside
and bring in not only the labor but that indigenous cosmo vision and belief in
you know saints celebrations that are linked to the agricultural calendar and so their ideology
and labor are key to this strengthening of these fiestas that are presumably very sociable and
you're very clearly an outsider when you're an outsider the young woman in front of this who's
in front of her mother her mother-in-law behind was married to such a meat gun so she's brought
into the network of preparing food and then that's the ground there's actually four generations there
this woman who married her son and this is the
grandmother and then there's her little boy who hangs out while we work
so long-term commitment not only the amount of time that you spend cooking but the promesas the
commitments people actually sign on for up to 20 years in advance that their family is committed to
hosting the fiesta in the future and if it's a family commitment in fact widows are not allowed
to sign on um because you have to have an extended family that will support that commitment people
plant a special plot of corn they are raising pigs or cows to use in the fiesta so it's a long-term
commitment and like i say women have to adopt the changes to keep this going this is one of
my favorite pictures there's february 2nd people take their corn to be blessed before planting
and they take their children and their baby jesus with new clothes and they and the corn so it's
a real example of syncretism of the indigenous cosmo vision combined with the catholic uh faith
that the spaniards were very clever in in kind of syncing up with things that were already going on
in the place tamales this is the only taman that has what they call a belly button corn and beans
are the core of the diet in central mexico you don't really that in chile and you really don't
need anything else vitamins iron protein so the historian the historian for such amiko told me
this is this is this is the belly button because it links people to the earth it sustains people
all right here's an example of women adapting to changes this fiesta with these huge pots
um was for 500 people those pods are this big i know caitlyn you've heard the story
but so they decided at the end to to uh this social media was full of alleyways because of
the canals there's no there's some main roads but then you have to go on these narrow alleyways so
they decided they weren't going to let everybody come all the way through the alley to this house
and everybody's welcome anybody who is uh you know believes in the baby jesus or the saint
of the neighborhood you it is very wrong to turn people away as they say because they're too poor
so and they don't come because they're poor for free food i mean they i mean probably some people
do like like we hope to entice students to come with our free food in the back of the room which
please take some when you leave um but people come and pilgrimages for special specific religious
celebrations so they decided that they want to take these out well these pots were way too heavy
to carry out and they had i guess you call them a tricycle right that that that you carry stuff
on and i said well why don't we film tricycle and then they were like great idea and then i
got on the tricycle to bike it out there and they're like no women cannot ride a bicycle so
i was on the tricycle and zooming out to the end of the alley when my neighbor told me that before
i got to her house which was three quarters of the way to the end everybody knew that the white
person was riding the bicycle down the alley and everybody was like open the door to watch
so there's also the change in material so you see the plastic instead of the clay lids for
making the rice and then the enamel which is very popular because the solder comes by
through the neighborhood and can like torch it and keep fixing it until at a certain point it
can't be used anymore so it's gendered space men and women both have roles uh men have more roles
outside of cooking like uh doing the fireworks painting the walls if they're like white washing
the neighborhood but they are in charge of meat women were never in charge of meat so making the
garnitas here this is the pig that was slaughtered the day before
and uh which is with beef which is kind of like barbecue but a traditional thing put on uh what's
it called cactus pink anyway men do the meat and the alcohol women are doing corn vegetables
and some of the drinks like i said with tamarind or jamaica so here's an ecological link so through
people's participation in the household garden including slaughtering the pigs with everybody
there for the fiesta the next day people are very conscious of their role in the life cycle
so it's very important ecologically on the left are the little piglets that are now orphaned
because we had the pig that you saw the man cooking the day before so notice that there's
a lot of corn there so those tortillas are some of them are collected by neighbors as well as
slop somebody will go down the alley with the buckets and people will save their their waste
to send to whoever does have animals and this is my other neighbor donalibo and her rooster
is in that little that's in her backyard which they use that little hou that little
shed to raise pigs they have different animals when they were going to have a
quinceanera or communion or something that would require a particular celebration so here's an
example of generational transmission the little boy with his grandmother and if you see this comal
right here unlike the scrap metal one that we saw in the beginning is actually traditional
and it's made of clay and it's much better and then the the little girl is carrying these are
corn husks one inside the other which uh again referring to embodied knowledge i was always
helping or trying to help but sometimes people wanted me to stop what i was doing and write
because they wanted to take notes so i would tell others about the importance of their celebration
so while they it's hard to get in they also like didn't want my hands sticky with tamar in there
take notes but one of the things i helped with that didn't require too much knowledge
i thought was separating these corn husks in order to make tamales but those corn husks
you soak them in water you separate them and even that is hard to do i was breaking them i
felt so stupid which is not a bad thing as i told katelyn before going into the field that
revealing your stupidity when you're an educated outside person is actually a great way to break
down barriers uh where they think you know you think better than them three generations
those are you can see the size of those um big pots this is morley which you haven't tried it
you must this is my last quote so it's one of my ethnographic quotes this is maria soledad she says
we used to have a lot of pigs everything bothers us nowadays she complains lamenting the fact that
there are no more pigs not only because they were good to eat but because now she has to throw away
food scraps we used to have a lot of pigs but the thing is that since it bothers the neighbors and
all that before the smells did not bother them everyone had pigs but now everything bothers us
it says the same people but now they're children and it's like they do not want animals anymore
so notice she changes from them to us which is actually part of the interesting thing
and it's one of the communities that was more rural but the one that was um not social media
while i was there the neighbors the the people from mexico city who had weekend houses there
kept trying to pass an ordinance to ban pigs and it never passed maybe by now it has but
because those people the outsiders not the indigenous laborers who come but the people
from the city the wealthier people who come and want to partake in the fiestas because it's
the men also do the music so fireworks music but they you know they complain about the smell of the
place but when they're creating the traditional fiestas and the traditional food they want to
be there to eat it one of the resistance one of the conflicts here is also between evangelicals
and catholics because evangelicals don't believe in dancing and drinking which is part of the
fiestas that are celebrated but the people say but they come and eat so all right this is a cultural
resistance and adaptation that one of the men at one of the fiestas told me so what do you think of
what it means blondie what do you think of our traditions beautiful aren't they whitey
or whitey or blondie whatever so our traditions will never die they will only keep getting better
so traditions yeah living culture and that's it i actually made it true let's see i think
thank you all right now it's questions discussions discussion series
are comments
yeah good money listen did you look at all into the amount of time these women were
spending in the kitchen space well so i did no quantitative research i didn't write down but
i spent a lot of time with them sometimes for months at a time and sometimes for days so i
don't remember if my notes actually i didn't like make a table to say the amount of time but i also
realized that the fiesta is starting to communicate where i live for over 11 over
a period of 11 years were really important because the amount of time that people spend and there was
always a fiesta somewhere in such a musical and people cooking and people raising their pigs
to have for their fiesta literally every day so when i said i was going to look at everyday life
i meant cooking in your home for your people in your household but also the fact that you're
always planning for the fiesta and somewhere in the in the community you're hearing fireworks
that again is men's job and you know oh the ninop is in this barrio now so yeah right what was your
aha moment like when did you feel like you were finally if you ever did like part of the community
okay i know exactly one because it was so striking uh so in one of the fiestas some people like i say
they're very close and such they're sochi mirkas and the indigenous people in ogutepec which is
also mestizo and it also has people from the city who want to buy a house there so but they're still
the people from oklahoma and they know who they are and they know who aren't them so in such a
miracle they were putting down a tree to block the the alley to get into the fiesta and i was
there and i was wanting to leave and they said oh you can come in and you can leave you know you're
part of us so that was like i don't think that'll happen again but it was like oh thank you yeah
you showed about the traditions when uh the person said our traditions are great and they will only
get better do you believe that and let me put some context why i'm asking this when i think about the
kitchen space and i think about me growing up in my hometown in lebanon uh we had my father
my father's cousin was the expert in making fig jam so everybody who wanted to do thick jam they
would go to her and she had an outdoor kitchen and when she's done she would call all the kids to eat
the best part which is the scraping from the pot and that was so awesome and all the kids of the
neighborhood would be there i have not seen that happen in in the past 30 years and this is just
to show part of the tradition that don't exist anymore so are we losing some of that
neighborhood feeling family gatherings and is that really good how do you explain that so in such
americo i do not think that those traditions will ever die they're changing and like i say now they
have to use you know they're still using clay pot to cook rice because you can't cook that amount
of rice and other things or at least at this point we'll come up with something sometime but
each neighborhood like competes with other neighbors there's barrios i think there's 13
barrios traditional batteries and streaming but then the government built one more but that's
not one of the traditional barrios so it's it's the honor of the barrio at stake and then also
the family like yeah my grandmother's molly is the best you want to bring her to the fiesta to cook
for the the neighbors you know the the fiesta that i had there was the fiesta de los barrios which is
actually one of the fiestas in aquatic that's the fiesta of all the neighborhoods so you it's
one house does it for everybody in all the budgets but i can't imagine especially the
promesas that people make that are signed up for years like they're not gonna they're not gonna not
host the saint and the ninopa which people host for a full year
with having to serve coffee and tamales or or coffee and bread every night for the rosary
you can't keep people out who've come to want to pray for the new yorker
i just can't imagine and in fact a couple years ago because juan one of my sons still lives there
i went and did some interviews in such a miracle and i didn't update i was looking at my notes in
the pictures but um which was probably like 10 years after this maybe more maybe 15 years
and you know what's changing is that old people are dying and some of the younger people don't
want to put the amount of work like the picture of the three women with the big pots of mole the one
closest to us was a actually a college student who wanted to who's really interested in my work she's
a sociology student at the university of morenos and she said you know my back really hurts this is
not because you have to stir molly but you have to not stop stirring it with a big wooden spoon or a
little like scorch and a lot of ingredients that you hand ground put in there so um
and then they've got one of the households is like well their daughter now works at a pharmacy so she
doesn't have as much time so of course there's so many that's why i call it social and ecological
challenges to things continuing but in some places like such a musical i do not think they'll die i
just can't imagine it uh in te te kara show you different factors affecting things dying
i spent a lot of time and made you know close friends with some of the people in tech
one woman in particular is merada who i had come to my house she had been
a college student she'd been a law student actually stay at my house in in guadalajara
and at one point she tells me have you noticed anything special about our community and i'm like
i don't know that you have like they're right in the middle they're actually more
of an agricultural region well anyway a lot of them still grow things for market
and she says that we don't do the fiestas you're interested in i was like because i
was looking more at everyday life there in households and i was like what why
she said because we're jehovah's witness and that community had been increasingly
um converted you know people were increasingly converting to jehovah's and so
and actually since i have a few minutes left i'll tell you a very good story her father all
her father's friends had died because and when i lived in mexico before i went back to do my field
work i remember there was a really important incident where the state of morelos which
is in uh makes or sells sugarcane for alcohol and of course they have their own stills so there had
been a batch of poison rum that a lot of men gendered space died and in this case
uh one there was a man who died not of alcohol and so all his friends were drinking around his casket
except for martha's father because he was jehovah's and so all of those friends
died and so the story was you know that guy took all his friends with him to the after world
her father was left then jose one of the women who's picking selecting the hikamas her she was
catholic her husband had converted to jehovah's and she tell me i was not i am not jehovah's
but they're very good people why did you say that because her husband who was an alcoholic and beat
her constantly when he became jehovah's he stopped because that was not okay and when he was dying of
cancer his jehovah's community was with her every day taking care of him so things are changing and
then the indigenous women in that community who was the one who did the traditional fiestas as
things grow it's harder and harder and if there's less people to help you because you can't do those
fiestas without those networks that let you have a whole lot of people working together and her
situation was that the reality of mexico was uh right behind her property was the drug lord's land
who was known as el senor de los cielos the lord of the skies and she was very nervous about me
being there and so her and in fact i got a letter saying i was a student doing this research and i
was approved by vietnam i had that from the big mexico city university where i had a local advisor
and that was the only time i had to use it i was like well i am a student i'm working with vietnam
and she she actually couldn't read she grabbed it looked at it forever and then got somebody from
her household to look at it before she would love me and she was very nervous and my interpreter
that was with me martha said this woman is freaked out because because of the drug lord which is very
killing people and so those things affect you too right you don't want to be you don't want
to call attention you know there's just so many different factors but social media i don't think
so now whether they're going to be getting better i don't see how they could get any better but it's
just kind of fun that the guy was this old man who was drinking his you know um is he drinking
and he's like this is only going to get better so i mean just the idea
that culture is living right culture doesn't just live in a museum that's like the past so
i'm sorry she doesn't make fig jam anymore i know me too
yeah a quick question maria lucia about the multiple generations the slide that had the
little boy in did you observe like at what point does the gendered female space kind of eliminate
the little boys and when did the girls come into the kitchen space i think the little boy is there
because she's watching him he's obviously not helping her but a lot of the guys i did interview
guys not boys but young men as well and they complained that that they were not allowed in
kitchen space they were not they were not allowed to learn to cook except for because it was one
of my questions i did have a semi-structured interview guide you know that i asked people
and then had conversation around those points and one of them was about well can men cook and
you know whatever and they would say well men need to learn to cook the basics beans and eggs in case
their wife is sick it was never because men should cook in case their wife is sick and he needs to be
able to feed himself where the men were cooking was when molle was being sold on the street
so in aucotepec when they had their fiesta since it's become increasingly a bit not the
big which is on the outside of puerto vallarta itself increasingly has like a bedroom community
starting an earthquake in 85 a lot of people left mexico city for a lot of reasons and
you know live there and are not part of the community but they like to buy food and they're
not invited to those close communities unless they're a patron and are you know sponsoring the
musicians or the fireworks whatever so there's ways that they can get involved but people will
have booths along the road and when i was eating molly for one of the fiestas there the women said
can you believe that these plates are selling for like five dollars on the street and it's all men
who are cooking and selling that right so the women are the home cooks but um yeah when it's
not just that all girls get to get it either i mean it's usually the grandmother not the mother
and usually they pick one of the kids female kids to be their helper so it doesn't
get handed out to everybody thank you anybody want to share something stop asking me questions
you know i want to ask about criminitas um no i have a question about
so are those exclusively prepared by men and so are we they so carnitas aren't just on holidays
those kinds of things like what is the sort of gendered separation of yeah you can buy
it at the market any day but you're not going to make carnitas unless you're going to kill a kid
so when they were so those are the men making them in the household that was a fiesta yeah
because it's a huge it's a whole pig you would never have a pig for just a family at home
that was at home that was a remember there's like this wouldn't make them for your like
home like just your family dinner i don't know of anybody that did i mean carnitas is like
well as it is carnitas is an adaptation a lot of people resented it because carnitas as you get
poorer which is one of the things that happens you can have things that have more sauce and so
carnitas you cook and you can cook and green salsa so you can add more water more tomatoes
and have less meat and still make people happy so carnitas was a new thing to be part of fiestas and
the chinampas that are supposed to be for vegetables such amirko the name sachimiko means
floating flowers and such milka was always um the chinampas were used for flowers in the aztec wars
i mean so vegetables and flowers are part of you know ancient tradition or you know actually
ancient not ten thousand years ago but since eighteen hundreds twelve hundreds
eight hundred twelve hundreds uh but people were starting to to have their cows and pigs on the
chinampas which a lot of the people said were very much against that because that pollutes
the canals because you're having all the poop from the pigs and the cows and so it was new
that meat was part of the traditional fiestas but you have to kill a whole pig to make carmitas and
so they were always for fiestas and people would raise them with a plan that would be for
whatever fiesta so by the market so the market vendors that are selling like people like plates
or whatever they're are they the indigenous people are they like the middle generation or who tends
to be so mexico is you know is uh very much misty i mean social medias there are lots of indigenous
people that are sochi mirkas and they actually look like i would like be able to spot a social
media in mexico city um so they're very much a specific ethnic group but there's also i mean
mexico as a whole has had you know spaniards and even germans mixing with indigenous people since
the 1600s so but i don't know i didn't i didn't work with the people who were selling it on the
street and big was known for its street food for their fiestas but such a mirko i should say was
known for is known and has been known for its market huge market has three markets one of
them is the market of flowers and then two marks where people can go and eat traditional foods
in the market any day there'll be little like restaurants inside the market i just wondered
if it was sort of the so it's also a tourist right the canals are also oh the canals yes
the special canoes that they use with flowers on who was kind of like who was sort of capturing
that there's plenty of people it's kind of driving out the people that were already there
no no i think they're locals that are that are cooking yeah it's because even so so the canals
there's like a it's like a taxi collective all that he needs all those canals everybody knows
each other and i can't i have not done a study on the tahitis actually would be a really cool study
he wants to do that but um but it's uh i can't imagine somebody being able to get a tragedy who's
not part of i mean that's got to be the control of having your spot is probably i would bet maybe i'm
wrong maybe people sell their spot but i don't know i would bet it's very community controlled
yeah how how would you compare the fiestas and mexico with the fbs fiesta's in spain um because
it seems like there's a lot of similarities to and um like the california portuguese population have
a lot of fascists um which would be the similar concept where you have the fiesta elites to um
like my family my brother-in-law his family like carries the saint and the augustine festival every
year and so there's a lot of these traditions were brought over for portugal so how how do
these compared to the some of the festivals that happened in spain so i'm from spain but i left
when i was three and i have family there and i've gone back a lot and the only fiesta that for and
i'm from sevilla is the semana santa which is huge it's like one of the biggest fiestas in the world
and each church has their own figure either the jesus or the the jesus and the virgin mary or both
that they carry on their back with a group of you know like 20 people guys under him and go around
it's a procession but even with that it's not a neighborhood it's now there might be neighborhoods
that have a saint that's the neighborhood saint i didn't study them i don't know but like you know
sevilla is not an agricultural community anymore so i just don't know i'm not gonna pretend i do
yeah i just have a question about when you like in making the argument that kitchen space when
you kind of touch the beginning that it's not always this disempowering space for women to be
in the kitchen and regardless they spent a lot of time there what kind of resistance or what kind of
i don't know criticism or other conversations you have with other scholars or people in the
community and making this argument that it's not automatically this disempowering thing to
be in the kitchen for hours or how did you make that argument against people well so i wrote an
article called kitchen space gender territory in central mexico in which i argued against all the
literature that had this idea that women should not spend any time in kitchens and it was feminist
not from mexico in fact from like the west and what i'm valuing is their knowledge and the time
that they spend in kitchens and you know i didn't ask them if they were empowered but it was very
clear the honor they received in those community fiestas um so maybe every day cooking is harder
and less recognized although the women would also say you know they you know that what they hate is
for people to just eat and not tell them it tasted good so um it's floyd county yeah but i think that
for the fiestas you don't participate if you found it disempowering and like my neighbor senora ester
she had not participated in decades she would go and get food they actually her sister donna liba
who had the rooster would bring her a little plate home because she did not like fiestas
and it's because she had to she went when she was young and was forced to cook
rice and she didn't know how to cook rice and she was like embarrassing it was a lot of work
and she was like i'm not going to do that so she didn't do that but she cooked in her house
and had this extended family kid's sheet adopted people on the street
and she was very known for her cooking just not in the fiestas she didn't have to do that
she'd have to adopt you know many people who's who needed to be adopted so yeah i actually think i've
won that battle one thing that's important to know is that when i did this which was 2001 and
it's really old nobody was studying kitchen space or food like i think if you read the literature
now plenty of people are looking at food ways and culture and you know attachment to place
what is it what is it called you know looking at farmers markets and it's linked to the economy
and the food and the culture nobody was doing that so i think people have a more empowering
view of kitchen space now although it might be because it's more you know it brings in money
so it's kind of a we have the room for another half-hour if anybody wants to hang out oh good our
cameragrapher um have you ever read conan yes i reviewed the book when it was a manuscript
and i have an article that plays with komarov basically argues that it's not a fable because
on the book when it came out it says fable on the back of it so if you like give me your email and
i'll send you the okay i think that was in english i'm not sure yeah i read it no i mean my article
i'm not sure if it's english or spanish i read the novel in my introduction to hispanic literature
class i'm not very familiar with mexican culture but i thought it was interesting when you're
talking about how important it is that everything goes right when they're cooking that certain
condition i can't remember like can't be angry or right and and that novel the main character
tina is cooking something and she cries and the people who eat that foods all are crying a flood
of tears yeah at the wedding and i just always like i said i'm not familiar with mexican culture
but i just found it very interesting but that's not made up enough well i'll tell you something
my wife can cook very well the last two times she's cooked something that she spent a lot
of time cooking it was horrible it was burnt and dried and she was really stressed and busy and i
told her you know what don't cook when you're mad ever again so i think there's actually something
to that but yes it's definitely part of the belief that you that like even the kids running around
that can make the tamales go bad but yeah i think has a lot of a lot of truth in it yeah rescue good
and it's a movie too people who want to see it like water for chocolate
so um yeah definitely the kitchen is a very special place is where i remember my grandmother
my mother spending lots of time there where important things are disgusting in the family
and preparing the food is really you know the way that the woman have especially the ones that don't
work like maybe at the time of my grandmother when she'll never work outside the house just to
take care of your family they give the best food the best nutrition so it's um i i feel like also
power because it's like you're always looking forward to go to it home with at least when
i grew up going outside it was like because we couldn't go home it wasn't like now like you are
just go for lunch somewhere no you look forward going to your house and have your meal so it's
providing and space and good food so that the family also you know
you know have a relationship it's social right every day yeah yeah so that reminds me and it
kind of goes to what you're saying in the bake one of the grandmothers that was cooking said young
people these days aren't learning to cook they're eating there's a lot of you know cocina economica
there's like cheap and it's not tourist food but there's a lot of women who will cook in their
house or right on the sidewalk by their house and you can you know i don't know it would be like
what it would feel like to spend three dollars and you go and you have you know it's very limited men
you'll have the soup of the day and maybe two main plate options and then dessert and then
you get lemonade or one of the fruit juice waters that you drink often in mexico and it's so cheap
that this woman was saying they just go and get in plastic bags tied or not and they just go and
buy food and bring it home to their husband so they were definitely decrying the loss of
people investing in and wanting to cook but you know what they don't have to cook they don't want
to since that's an option and it's it's not like here that you have to pay ten dollars to go out
for lunch for maybe seven at the least oh the other thing about a place for discussion so one
of the things that i found it is very important gendered space where people share their problems
and and one of the fiestas in sochi musical they were discussing domestic violence and a particular
woman who was being beat up by her husband that the other women were like in a corner him in
the alley next time they saw him so it's really important place for solidarity which is a power
i'm just going to officially close this out since normally release it does it
but um thank you all so much for coming uh we will be sending out a short survey via
email please please do it it really helps us your opinion is very important to us of course
and it also helps us bring other outside speakers and also just know what we're doing right what
we can do better we actually listened to some people trying to get some mics for this one and
so it's important that's the main point of that um the event video will be available in
a couple weeks thanks to our videographer on the wgd and the libraries website um
i think it's vtechworks.live.bt.edu can send that out as well or it's also on our website
um help yourselves through the plethora of bagels and coffee and cream cheese in the back there's
a recycling bin right outside if you do take water for the plastic water bottles and have a
wonderful day thanks for coming and um hope you can join us next time for dr basundera baturai
coming all the way from australia she's a nepali woman um does some really awesome work with gender
and development so please check that out in mark i think it's march 9 no 15th don't don't quote
me on that it's in march um and we'll send all the information several times thank you