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To Carlos and the power of his passions CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction to Mexican foodscapes 1.1 Synthesis 1 1.2 The history of a research problem 1 1.3 Research problem 5 1.4 State of art: Social and cultural approaches to the study of food from abroad 6 1.5 Central concepts 9 1.5.1 Spinoza and Deleuze: Bodies, power and affection 9 1.5.2 Signs as an effect of our affections: Potent and impotent signs 12 1.5.3 Street sandwiches and famous artists: Intersemiotic translation and the dominant 13 1.5.4 Object, representation and experimentation: Land- and foodscapes 15 1.5.5 Gabriel Tarde and the economy of passions 19 1.5.6 Repetition of passion 20 1.5.7 Apposition of passion 21 1.5.8 Adaptation of passion 22 1.5.9 Quantification of passion 24 1.6 Research objectives 26 1.7 Central research question 26 1.7.1 Research sub-questions 26 1.8 Methodology 27 1.9 Overview of chapters 29 Notes 30 Chapter 2 The Mexican body: a body full of affections 2.1. The Corn body 33 2.2 The Wheat body 36 2.3 The Corn-Wheat body 38 2.4 The Tortilla-Chips body 49 2.5. Conclusions 58 Notes 59 Chapter 3 Tex-Mex: deterritorializing the desert and territorializing the air 3.1 El Charro: The first Tex-Mex foodscape in Madrid 73 3.2 La Margarita: Opposition to the Tex-Mex foodscape in Amsterdam 78 3.3. Tomatillo: The adaptation of the Tex-Mex foodscape in Amsterdam 91 3.4. Conclusions 96 Notes 98 Chapter 4 Cal-Mex: The empty beach and the occupied sky 4.1 Cafe Pacifico: The first Cal-Mex foodscape in Amsterdam 101 4.2. The Taco Shop: oppositions to the Cal-Mex foodscape 114 4.3 My burrito: The deterritorialization of the Cal-Mex foodscape 120 4.4 Conclusions 124 Notes 125 Chapter 5 Regional-Mex: The Mayan-Yucatecan foodscape in San Francisco 5.1 Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant: The person, the restaurant and the quasi-object 129 5.2 Home-based restaurants: Tracing social relations between objects, consumers and sellers 140 5.3 Mayan and Yucatecan Restaurants: Hiding and showing Ideas,dreams and visualizations 145 5.4 Conclusions 156 Notes 157 Chapter 6 Mex-Mex: between the rural world and the folkloric city 6.1 The Anderson’s Group: a university for Mex-Mex entrepreneurs 159 6.2 El Tenedor: Quantifying passion at Sí Señor’s 164 6.3 La Mordida: The rise of folkloric Mex-Mex foodscapes in Madrid 166 6.4. El Chaparrito: quotations of the Mex-Mex foodscape in Madrid 173 6.5. Los Pilones: repetitions of the Mex-Mex foodscape in Holland 179 6.6 Conclusions 188 Notes 189 Chapter 7 “Real”-Mex: traditional tortas, Mexican haute cuisine and modern taquerías in Madrid 7.1 D.F. Bar: traditional tortas 193 7.2. El Chile Verde: Mexican haute cuisine 208 7.3 Tepic: a modern taquería 215 7.4. Conclusions 222 Notes 222 Chapter 8 Conclusion 8.1 The historic translation of the inner and outer body types of the Mexican nation 225 8.2 Findings derived from the cases studies 227 8.2.1 Virtual and actual Mex-foodscapes 235 8.2.2 Managers, chefs, waiters and consumers’ engagements 236 8.3 Some implications of my adaptation of Tarde’s economy of passion 237 Notes 238 Bibliography 239 Internet Sources 247 Photos 251 Glossary of Spanish Terms 256 Summary 261 Resumen 265 Acknowledgements 269 Curriculum Vitae 271 Training and supervision plan 272 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO MEXICAN FOODSCAPES A sculpture of a virus, made out of spoons. Charlotte infected me with inspiration for writing this thesis.1 1. René van Corven. Charlotte 1.1 SYNTHESIS This research analyzes how the desire to affect (affectus) and be affected by (affectio) foreign bodies informs the commoditization of food products offered in Mexican restaurants in Am- sterdam, Madrid and San Francisco. I argue that actors’ attachments to passionate networks enable diverse Mexican foodscapes to be enacted. I conceive of foodscapes as intersemiotic translations of landscapes. In these translations, food commoditization is based on relation- ships with entities dwelling in Mexican and U.S. landscapes. In their efforts to enact these affective foodscapes, entrepreneurs arrange entities according to particular themes, genres and chronotopes; they provide coherence to the translations; and they enable their repetition, opposition and adaptation. The resulting foodscapes have the power (power as both pouvoir and puissance) to function as potent or impotent signs, which are able to constitute or destroy relations among bodies by fixing beliefs or contaminating new passions. 1.2 THE HISTOry OF A RESEARCH PROBLEM In 1996, I visited a Mexican restaurant in the Netherlands for the first time. At that time, I was living with a Dutch family as an exchange student from Mexico. A few months after I arrived, the family with whom I was staying took me to a restaurant in The Hague called Alfonso’s. Affective Foodscapes in an Economy of Passion I was experiencing some culture shock at the time, and my Dutch family thought that eating Mexican food would help me feel better. When we entered the restaurant, the first image I saw was a human-size cactus smiling and wearing a hat. I remember laughing at the image, which was unlike anything I had ever seen in a Mexican restaurant before. This was my first time visiting a Mexican restaurant abroad, and in fact, it was my first time in a specifically Mexican restaurant: restaurants I had gone to before had simply been restaurants in Mexico. Alfonso’s was decorated with icons that I knew from cartoons like Speedy Gonzales and American western movies, not from daily life in Mexico. I also saw an image of a drunken fat man wearing white cotton clothes and a straw hat, and carrying a gun. Once we were sitting, family members asked me for food recommendations. I remember not recognizing many dishes on the menu, and I had a hard time making suggestions. During the meal I also had some difficulty trying to explain how the foods should be eaten. I spent a long time comparing the food that we were eating to the food that I was used to eating at home. At the end of the day, a dinner that was supposed to help me overcome culture shock in fact made me felt even more anxious: I was now experiencing cultural tension between Mexico and the Netherlands, but also struggling with questions about what was supposed to be the culture of my own country. This tension was reinforced during the year that I lived in the Netherlands. On many occasions, people in bars asked me for the “right” way to drink tequila. Sometimes they would express skepticism about my explanations and offer an al- ternative procedure. Other times they accepted my instructions and tried to drink tequila the Mexican way. However, I never explained to anyone that, in fact, I learned to drink tequila “the Mexican way” in the Netherlands. I was confronted with similar tensions in private homes. Sometimes people would prepare Mexican food for me and ask my opinion about it. Other times, I would make Mexican food for them. Most of the time they seemed pleased to be eating Mexican food made by a Mexi- can. However, I did not actually know how to cook before going to the Netherlands. I learned through telephone calls and letters with my family and friends. On a couple of occasions, people from the student exchange program that I was with (AFS Intercultural programs) asked me to participate in a talent show to share my culture with the other exchange students. The first time I was not sure what to do. Kelly, an exchange student from California, and Marilia Elisa from Venezuela, did not know what to perform either, so we sang the Mexican pop song “La Bamba” together. Since the song was very popular in each of our home countries, we decided that, somehow, it represented all three of us. The next time that I had to perform in the talent show, I was better prepared. Someone loaned me a colorful poncho, and I sang a popular Mexican song. People liked my performance. They believed in my Mexican-ness. However, what they did not know was that I had never dressed like that in Mexico nor had I sang such a type of songs. In one year living in the Netherlands I learned how to enact the Mexican body: I learned how to eat, drink, dress and sing like a Mexican. 2 Chapter 1 Introduction to Mexican foodscapes 2. Yearbook of AFS Intercultural programs, the Netherlands, 19972 Thanks to those awkward Mexican dinners, tequila-training parties, and silly Mexican performances, I became curious about how people used to attach my Mexican body to certain objects (e.g. cactus, food, tequila, songs and ponchos), knowledge (e.g. how to drink tequila), and affections (affectio). I became interested in how following those simple attachments I was able to qualify myself as Mexican in the Netherlands. I also started to wonder how the same phenomena extended to restaurants. It seemed that displaying certain objects (e.g. anthropomorphized cactuses, or a drunken fat man in white cotton clothes and hat and carrying a gun) was enough to mark an establishment as Mexican. Somehow, in both cases (my own self and the restaurants), Mexican-ness was produced by attachments to objects and images of a foreign land. By extension, attachments associated our hybrid bodies to affections related to Mexican-ness: happiness, informality, relaxed behavior, etc.