Women and Chile at the Alamo Feeding U.S

Women and Chile at the Alamo Feeding U.S. Colonial Mythology Suzanne Bost Guillermo Gómez-Peña (1994,28) apt- ly characterizes the ambivalence toward Mexico in U.S. popular culture in terms of food and violence: “The current media war against the Latino cultural other is intercut with eulogies to our products. Blood and salsa, that’s the nature of this relationship.” “War” between the United States and Mexico has long been cast as a desire to consume the “other” within the Anglo-American body and nation. From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the current obsession with “Latin” culture, U.S. national, cultural, and economic forces have viewed Mexico as a commodity to incorporate. Blood circulates with salsa and tequila throughout this history of (neo)colonial ingestion. The U.S. desire to consume Mexico has always been contested by anticolonial- ism as well as by xenophobia (defending national and corporeal purity), but Manifest Destiny and NAFTA have had their way thus far. I will focus here on one site where the contours of this battle are drawn: the Alamo. The competing national claims that converged at this Texas mission have been encoded in popular culture as desire that is simultaneously alimentary and heterosexual. This intersection of food, sex, and cultural plunder is apparent in U.S. corporate manifestations, such as Taco Bell, whose advertisements appeal to heterosexual masculinity by establishing a metonymic relationship between women and tacos and by framing this romance within a mission-style architecture reminiscent of the Alamo.1 This setting—like other Taco Bell ad campaigns highlighting border crossing, patriotism, and revolution—associates U.S. consumption of Mexican food with the historical framework of colonialism, but coding (inter)national relations in Nepantla: Views from South 4.3 Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press 493 494 Nepantla terms of fast food, flirtation, and adorable chihuahuas trivializes the political reality.2 Eating tacos is a matter of national and sexual conquest, such advertisements seem to suggest, appropriating Mexican culture to demonstrate U.S. machismo. The “quiero” in Taco Bell’s famous slogan, “Yo quiero Taco Bell,” reflects this convergence of appetite, love, and appropriation in U.S. packaging of Mexico.3 It is no wonder that many estadounidenses are eager to “make a run for the border.” Over the past century and a half, a proliferation of representations—from Augusta Evans’s novel Inez: A Tale of the Alamo to Fiesta San Antonio and the films of John Wayne—has engendered and racialized a mythic Alamo that satisfies Anglo-American expansionist fantasies. The central role that women and chile have played in the formation of this myth corresponds with U.S. (neo)colonialist efforts to incorporate Mexico nationally and economically. U.S. patriotism remembers the Alamo as a fiesta to displace the historic U.S. defeat there and to reclaim the Alamo for its own pleasure. Yet remembrances that fracture these racial and sexual myths, such as Sandra Cisneros’s provocative story “Remember the Alamo” (1991), which I analyze at the close of this essay, offer strategies for resisting the colonial consumption patterns reenacted there by hungry tourists. Methodology: Touring and Consumer Colonialism Tourist Experience #1: Mexico North and South of the Border I have visited “Mexico” in many different places—from Epcot Center’s “Mexico” in Florida to the San Antonio missions and “Old” Mexico itself—and been struck by a common scene in all of these locations involving white tourists, spicy food, and pleasure. An American Mexicanism—a term I derive from Toni Morrison’s “American Africanism” to signify an “American” (or, rather, U.S.) mythology of what Mexico represents—repeats this pattern both North and South of the border.4 In San Antonio, tourists in sombreros float on dinner barges behind the Alamo. In the restaurant that forms the center of Epcot’s “Mexico,” mariachis sing “¡Ay ay ay ay, canta no llores!” [Sing, don’t cry]. In Oaxaca, an elderly woman begs for coins in an outdoor restaurant while a U.S. tourist raises his tequila in a toast to Mexico: “They just love to party here!” I have been think- ing, in particular, about the relationship between food and colonialism, the role of fiesta in U.S.-Mexico intertwinement, and my own complicity when I am a tourist. U.S. tourists consume Mexican culture as a desirable commodity— Cinco de Mayo parties, chile, margaritas—while this consumption is supported by a history of war, Mexican poverty, and borderlands violence. Certainly this is no clear binary of victim and oppressor: Mexico, too, promotes its image as a 495 Bost . Women and Chile at the Alamo pleasure destination, and not all U.S. tourists are blind to the contortions behind this image. Though I like to think of myself as a “posttourist” in Mexico, savvy to its constructs and implications, it is impossible to move between the U.S. and Mexico, either internationally or between communities in the United States, without being in some ways complicit with these asymmetric consumption patterns. Can estadounidenses ever be anything but tourists in their engagements with Mexico? Am I a tourist when I eat tacos in my hometown? I begin with tourism to interrogate tensions within my own methodology as well as to outline the shape of what we might call “consumer colonialism.” Tourism and colonialism both depend on the “otherness” of the site being consumed and overpower “the other” in similar fashions. A tourist eats the other’s food, buys the other’s products, takes in and processes elements of the other culture, but generally retains the same contours of self that she or he had on leaving home. And so with colonialism: though the colonizer’s “empire” expands (actual geography historically, economic property in consumer colonial terms), part of the colonial project is neutralizing the otherness, the threat, the resistance of the colonized object, making Jamaica part of England (and not the reverse), Mexico part of Spain (and not the reverse), and Mexican culture a U.S. commodity (and not the reverse). This conversion is facilitated by folding the other within the body, nation, econ- omy, or photo album of the colonizer. The Alamo, and the tourism industry that has been built up around it, are particularly subject to this dynamic as Anglo-Americans compensate for their initial failure to “consume” Mexico at the battle there. The cultural hype surrounding the Alamo in Texas— memorabilia, fictionalized representations, streets everywhere named for the U.S. heroes who died there, even Anglo-Texan bravura itself—are en- gines of the continued “processing” of the Alamo within the U.S. national body. Thus, around the Alamo—as well as in many other sites of U.S.- Mexican conflict—we find a cultural and touristic continuation of U.S. war with Mexico. In “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” María Lugones (1990, 400) differentiates “loving travel” from the arrogant, agonistic travel of “a conqueror, an imperialist.” Touring implies a certain imperviousness to the object being studied and a rigid method (following guidebooks and maps) rather than the “openness to surprise” of Lugones’s loving traveler, who “does not expect the world to be neatly packaged, ruly” (ibid.). Though travel ideally could transform preconceptions, the type of tourism I critique here feeds on, rather than challenges, the otherness and 496 Nepantla objectification of the site being toured: it consumes asymmetrically and re- inforces the “arrogant perception” of the consumer. (The implied arrogance and gluttony of the tourist help to explain why few tourists are proud to be recognized as such.) In his study of tourism in Mexico, Daniel Cooper Alarcón (1997, 157) suggests that a first-world tourist “does nothing but consume and spend discretionary income,” his or her sense of superiority bolstered by the “native’s” assumed backwardness. Carole Boyce Davies (1994, 24) distinguishes between tourism and “serious engagement based on mutual respect.” I would argue that mutuality between superpowers and their neighbors is usually just rhetorical; unequal stakes, resources, commitments, and needs unbalance exchange. The United States has a long history of turning to Mexico (either across the border or within the United States) to test the boundary between pleasure and pain. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry (1985, 12) asks: “How is it that one person can be in the presence of another person in pain and not knowit—not knowit to the point where he himself inflicts it and goes on inflicting it?” This question could apply to the impervious, consuming tourists in San Antonio, Epcot, Oaxaca, or even to the United States itself, as a prosperous nation alongside Mexico: both the tourist and the dominant nation, often unknowingly, contribute to the pain of the other merely by enjoying their own privileges.5 Beyond this unwitting complicity, however, perhaps pain is part of the “fun” of Mexican culture for some U.S. tourists (and, as we will see in the consumption patterns surrounding the Alamo, the displacement of Anglo pain is central to San Antonio tourism). In a continuation of an American sadism begun in the nineteenth century, Mexican suffering often highlights U.S. “fiesta.”6 Even this painful underside of tourism satisfies the quasi-romantic stereotype of Mexico as home to poverty, drugs, disease, violence, and abjection—as a repository for all of the signs of unhealth that the U.S attempts to purge from itself and to fence off in its image of “South of the Border” (or the south side of San Antonio). Tourists are told not to drink the water there.

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