Yes, this is a food blog, not a pinterest account. But throughout my 12 month stay in Mexico, 6 months of which have been spent in a very small rural community called Yaxachen, I have come to understand the rural wedding as a relatively holistic expression of life in the comisaría. That being said, probably the largest component of the wedding celebration focuses on, you guessed it, the food.
Apart from the eating and celebrating, the Yaxachen wedding operates on an unadultered sense of hospitality. I have been invited to 4 different weddings in a six month time span. In two of these situations I have known the bride, although we had only met once. In zero of these situations have I known the groom. Unlike weddings in the United States where guest lists can lead to broken relationships among once close friends should the bride scratch your name out of her perfectly pruned address book, Yaxachen does not discriminate among its guests, not even among strangers.
The congregation inside the church. The outside parking lot was full as well. About 200 guests were estimated to have attended this wedding, something between 5 and 10% of the entire population of Yaxachen.
The US emphasis on the paper products of the wedding process, i.e. – invitations, engagement photos, and “Save-the-Dates”, does not exist in Yaxachen. Like most important life events in the town, weddings are broadcast over loud speakers attached to the top of a car. This car circles the community all day and well into the night, blasting out birthday wishes, listing the homes where food will be sold at night, and of course, screaming the names of the bride and groom and the details of their wedding.
It seems to me that word of mouth may be an even more powerful force in the spread of wedding details throughout the community. In my case and the case of my Italian roommate, Cecilia, a medical anthropologist working in the local schools and clinic, the word of mouth invite was the only one we got. It works almost like an open facebook group (work with me here) – if the group creator invites you, you then have the ability to invite whatever guest you choose. Cecilia was extended an invite from one of the teachers in the elementary school and then asked me to go with her, thereby inviting me as a guest of a guest of a guest.
You'd be hard pressed to spot more than two men inside the church. It seems as though the women are expected to sit through the ceremony and the sermon while the men hang out outside with the young children who get all dressed up to run around and play for a few hours. Except this poor guy. That's boredom if I've ever seen it.
In truth, you can walk by the church during the service and simply head inside. This was my first experience of a Yaxachen wedding invitation – in September, a fellow anthropologist and I peeked into the church just to catch a glimpse of the bride’s dress. We were caught by a woman manning the doors and then eagerly ushered to the front of the church, seated in a place of honor just behind the bride and groom’s families. The pastor made a point to thank us for our support of the young couple in front of the entire congregation. I never knew the bride or groom’s name.
Ulises (17) and his bride, Luceli (16), just before the rings were brought forth.
A few details on weddings in Yaxachen:
- The groom’s family is expected to pay for the entire sha-bang.
- The groom, before asking his bride’s hand, has to present himself to the mother of the bride. At this time, he receives no answer to his request, but instead spends the next week painfully trying to take his mind off of his potential marriage/denial. At the end of this week, his mother goes to the bride’s family and again makes a request for the girl’s hand. If the parents of the bride say yes, a week later the boy’s family will bring 2000 pesos worth of gifts (milk, chocolate, chocolate milk, eggs, bread, flour, etc.) which the girl’s family will use to feed their own relatives in what can be considered an engagement party of sorts. The groom nor his family is invited to this event.
- Most folks in Yax get hitched at 15, 16, or 17 years old. If you’re a girl and you don’t have a marriage prospect by age 18, forget about it. Your new nickname is “abuelita” (little grandma).
- Some families claim that a wedding costs around 30,000 pesos, but of course this depends on the family. In lieu of an average, I’ll cite that number. That’s just under $3000 USD.
- There are always 8 bridesmaids, or damas. Four for the bride and four for the groom. There are no groom’s men.
The far-reaching extensions of hospitality in the case of the Yaxachen wedding are truly remarkable when one considers the issue of food preparation. There are no RSVP’s, no way to measure how many people to prepare for, and the immediate invites continue to grow exponentially up until the moment of the ceremony. How many tortillas do you make? How many chickens must be killed and prepared? How many three liters of coca cola should we import from Ox to quench the guests’ thirst (there are no other beverage options, certainly not any including alcohol)?
Product placement?
Making this problem especially difficult is the extensive cooking process of typical wedding dishes – rellenos negro and blanco, escabeche, and cochinita pibil. Relleno negro, for example, is a dish that traditionally requires two days to prepare. It begins with burned chiles arboles, a type of red pepper with a mild heat to it. On a comal, a flat piece of metal situated over the three stone hearth’s open fire and used primarily for tortilla making, the chiles are slowly roasted and then set on fire for a short moment before they are doused in a bucket of water. The smoke from the burning chiles is potent stuff – if you breathe it in, expect a coughing session full of peppery pain; if it gets in your eyes… well just the thought makes me want to cry.
The burned chile water mixture sits for about an hour. The chiles are then put through a meat grinder, along with all spice, whole cloves of garlic, whole peppercorns, cloves, salt, and the individual spice decisions left up to the señora’s discretion. This chile… mush is then split into two fractions. One half will be put in a pot with a chicken and boiled while the other will be combined with a mixture of ground pork and chopped up boiled egg whites. The latter fraction is then padded and formed into a ball, called the bút*, which features the tiny surprise of a hard boiled egg yolk in the center. The entire thing resembles an ostrich egg made of grayish-black ground pork, with the hard-boiled inner yolk adding a sense of eerie irony to the whole image.
The chicken-chile mush fraction of the dish is left to sit over night, meaning that the bút isn’t prepared until the next day, just before the dish is heated up and served with hand made tortillas. The caldo or broth has the type of peppery spice that hits the back of your throat in a playful surprise and the full-bodied chile flavor of the dish is unlike anything else I’ve ever tried. All of the incredible flavors are made all the more interesting when contrasted against the black, relatively unappealing look of the chicken, soup, and ground pork ostrich egg. Admittedly, I had to work up the guts before I could put black chile soup in my mouth and not fear regretting the decision. But having done so a thousand times now, I often list relleno negro as my favorite Yucatecan specialty, although that list is subject to feature a different dish depending on the day of the week and my palette’s mood.
Because I ate all my relleno negro before thinking to take a picture, here's a picture of the pot it would be cooked in. To give you a sense of how much food would be needed to feed all the wedding guests, the women estimated that five of these size pots would be used for the relleno negro. Mind you, they will also serve relleno blanco and typically one other dish. 2 large pigs, 50 chickens, and 10 turkeys were put to death for my gastronomic entertainment.
Amazingly, everyone ends up fed at the wedding celebration. The Yaxacheneco’s ability to feed huge numbers of people on almost nothing is a continual surprise for me. Families of 10 or more are somehow sustained on tortillas, thin broth, and one or two chickens a day. Ignoring the logistics of the situation, families will always invite you to eat with them. Always. They will share the last of whatever food stores they have, even in the food crisis months of August and September. It should be no wonder then that the wedding, one of the largest social events held in the community, seeks to feed any and all who attend.
The condition for a gringa's invitation to dine with Mayans is to put your tortilla making skills to the test. Your tortillas will be heavily critiqued, you will be laughed at, and 4 year old girls will put you to shame.
Many physical anthropologists argue that a distinctive characteristic of human life is our practice of food sharing. Over shared meals, humans reinforce kinship relations, gender roles, power structures, and communication. In Yaxachen, where many families’ daily work is nothing more than an effort to put food on their table, food sharing can be interpreted as the center of family life. Men work long and hot hours in their milpas to grow their family’s corn share, selling what little they can at an extremely low price (thanks to the competition of subsidized US corn sold at even lower prices, which many a Mexican campesino has informed me tastes like mierda [shit] in comparison to their own). Young girls in the community are held back from school past an elementary education so that they can stay at home and help their mothers with the washing, cooking, animal slaughter, and tortilla making – the activities that make up the very rigorous schedule of a woman’s day in Yaxachen. Although the types of food preparation activities are highly specialized across gendered lines, each family member is expected to do their part to keep the family unit alive, literally.
As far as the Yaxachen wedding is concerned, food appears to be plentiful, with the groom’s family pooling together their financial resources to put on the whole production. Although petty politics and gossip run rampant in the community (another blog topic, for sure), no one is excluded from the celebration. No one feels uninvited, no relationship – friendship, kinship, gringa-ship, or otherwise – is unaccounted for. It seems that the Yaxachen wedding aims to celebrate the creation of a new family unit in a town where the family unit is of utmost importance. Perhaps that is the key difference between them and us – perhaps the exclusivity of the US wedding is merely a projection of the exclusivity of our varied and numerous social circles. Therefore, in my opinion, the Yaxachen wedding does a better job at maintaining the social bonds of the community at large. The only thing they’re lacking is an open bar.
The new couple being introduced as husband and wife! Although the attendees laughed at me when I said it was common for wedding guests to cry during the ceremony, one thing definitely translates cross-culturally - weddings are happy times!
*Not an actual Mayan spelling, just how the pronunciation sounds to unpracticed ears.
