Culture, Gender, and Flavour in the Conservation of Chile Pepper in Mexico, 1970s-present

Abstract

Chile peppers (Capsicum spp) connect worlds through their primary characteristics: flavour and spiciness. As a crop that has shaped cuisines, tastes, and intercultural exchanges throughout the globe, chiles are linked to identities, symbolisms, senses, and emotions. Therefore, chiles are ideal vehicles for reflecting on diversity and tradition, understanding how these concepts are framed, who validates them, who maintains them, and with what practices they are maintained. In this thesis, I explore how chile conservation has been led and shaped in Mexico in the last forty years by communities such as agricultural scientists, ethnobotanists and agroecologists, policy makers, and women cooks or cocineras. The thesis reveals how conservation historically has been institutionally envisaged and enacted and offers alternative pathways for conservation amid growing socio environmental crises. The dissertation makes two main contributions. First, it adds to existing historical research on agricultural science and crop conservation in twentieth-century Mexico by accounting for how gendered knowledge, such as the culinary expertise of Mexican cocineras, has been excluded from successive projects of agricultural development. These projects include both those linked to the Green Revolution, as well as the counter-movements which developed within ethnobotany and agroecology as a response to the industrialization of Mexican agriculture. Second, this work shows that other modes of relating to and caring for crops – in this case those carried out by women cocineras – enact practices that are vital for the preservation of biocultural diversity and the attainment of food security. Therefore, this thesis offers a reminder that ultimately women and their culinary and embodied practices have sustained chile diversity – and with it, Mexican lifeways – even as other actors and institutions claimed this responsibility.