José N. Iturriaga de la Fuente was born in Mexico City in 1946, the son of a prominent historian father, José E. Iturriaga, and a mother interested in food. After earning a double degree in history and economics, he began a 28-year career with the Mexican government. His career took him to every part of the country, satisfying his own love of travel and inspiring him to read the observations of centuries of foreign travelers to Mexico. This research led him to compile a multi-volume, authoritative bibliography of books and articles by foreign travelers.
In the mid-1970s Iturriaga began the research closest to his heart--street food and home cooking. "My books are the markets," he says. "My archives are the streets." Many of his dozens of books and innumerable articles are about food; all of them are about the people, geography, and economy of his native country.
From 1994 to 2001, Iturriaga was in charge of all Mexican government-funded programs relating to folkloric art and culture, as general manager of the Dirección General de Culturas Populares, an office in the Mexican National Council of Culture and Arts. In his six years in that post he was able to combine all his loves, mobilizing several hundred workers in his department to comb Mexico's 31 states following his longtime personal research method. The mobilization involved serious scholarship, including the unearthing of rare and undiscovered texts. Even more important was the preservation of recipes never recorded in any form, and information about plants and food products that could have easily vanished in the current urbanization and internationalization of new Mexican generations.
The team led by Iturriaga produced a remarkable 54 books on many aspects of indigenous and imported foods. It stands as a milestone--a vital contribution to the understanding of Mexico's gastronomic heritage.

A Country with a Cuisine as Rich as its Languages
The standard U.S. image of American food is the bastardized but enjoyable repertoire of tacos, tortillas, and tamales, with perhaps the occasional mole sauce for chocolate lovers. Mexican food in the United States and much of the world is similar to Chinese food in the world through the 1970s: enormously popular; tasty, satisfying, and inexpensive; a hybrid of a few authentic components with many bland but crowd-pleasing alterations. As with Chinese food, the full regional range of an immensely sophisticated cuisine is barely known outside its native country. China or India, despite being so much larger than Mexico, compare with it in linguistic richness: Iturriaga says they are the top three countries in the world, and that with 62 distinct languages Mexico is second only to India, with 64; China follows, with 54. The number of languages and the hundreds of dialects suggests the variety of dishes and recipes: in Mexico food is the ever-present basis for conversation, exchange, and social interaction.

José Iturriaga knew this instinctually when he first applied the historical skills he had learned from his distinguished father and at university at his ‘books’ and ‘archives’. When Iturriaga began researching street food in earnest, in the mid-1970s, he turned the society's machismo to his advantage, quizzing women at the many markets his work took him to. The women who smilingly served him antojitos--the hundreds of different snacks that comprise Mexican street food--would be surprised and flattered by his curiosity. Where did they get the masa, the soft white ground-corn dough that is the basis for almost all antojitos? How much lard did they beat into the masa to make the fluffy dough that is steamed, along with many salsas and piquant meat fillings, inside a softened banana leaf or corn husk to make a tamal? Which chile went into the salsa? Of course they would reveal their secrets--a man was asking!

In 1977 Iturriaga began writing regularly for a new magazine, Mexico Desconocido (Unknown Mexico); he eventually contributed over 150 articles. These led to his first book on food, De Tacos, Tamales, Y Tortas, published in 1988. Tortas are lesser-known antojitos, flute-shaped baguettes filled with much more imagination, Iturriaga says, than anything the famous French could devise. "The French use just butter and ham or salami," he says. "A torta is like a baguette but better--it has ten things inside. It's very baroque, the Mexican torta."

El Poder Para Poder Hacer
All Iturriaga's interests came together when he was given his post at the Dirección General de Culturas Populares, in 1994. The department had a staff of 700 and offices in nearly every state. It had many programs in, for example, displaying folk art in numerous small community museums, preserving the many Indian languages at risk of extinction, recording folk music, and collecting oral history. Iturriaga wanted the department to start doing systematically and with its enormous resources what he had been doing for 15 years--collect and preserve the idiomatic native cuisines that vary so greatly from state to state and group to group. He began to fund studies of products and foods: for example, two volumes on the salt industry of Mexico, books on coffee, plantains from dominique (very small) to macho (large, of course), acoyo (‘root beer plant’, with a distinctive cinnamon taste), and others. The books that resulted looked disparate, however, ranging from pamphlets to substantial two-volume studies.
Iturriaga knew his time was limited. The government changes every six years, and new leaders invariably make new political appointments, like the one that had given Iturriaga his new post. Why not make his legacy the collection of as much information as still existed on the thousands of recipes that live only in the hearts and hands of Mexican women? Even if in the unlikely event one of his successors shared his same passion, work in even the near future might be too late: those recipes were disappearing with the increasing urbanization and assimilation of ethnic groups, in a process distressingly familiar across the globe. One of Iturriaga's favorite expressions is "El poder para poder hacer": loosely, the power to empower. He would empower the hundreds of people under his temporary command to fan out into villages all over the country and find recipes. In 1997 he and a small team of collaborators sent out a general call to the directors of their 26 regional offices, each of which had an average of 30 to 40 workers: “Start researching food, everywhere you go”.

The department was launching a full-scale program on gastronomy. "If you stick a pin in a map of France or China," says Adrian Marcelli, an anthropologist and philosopher who had long worked in the department and who became Iturriaga's right-hand man in the program, "you will find very interesting things in gastronomy. The same is true in Mexico."
They told workers to first ask every mother and grandmother they could if she had any old books or notebooks with recipes. This resulted in the Colección de Recetarios Antiguos, a twelve-volume series of historical cookbooks and manuscripts, most of them never before published, with three more ready to be printed by the time Iturriaga left office. Knowing that the department already had an active program in collecting folk music, Iturriaga assigned a woman to work full-time collecting folk songs related to food.

After two years the researcher had found more than 500 songs with gastronomic content, and the lyrics were published in two volumes. The staff also produced under Iturriaga's direction two illustrated maps of Mexico, the first of Indian languages. The second was a map of indigenous and popular foods: illustrations of antojitos, including sweets and drinks; basic varieties of beans, and chiles; and the plants Mexico helped give the world--corn, tomatoes, chocolate, avocado, chile peppers, and vanilla, as well as the turkey, which was first domesticated in pre-Columbian Mexico, long before assuming post-Columbian significance north of the Rio Grande.

Everything Under the Sun
For nearly four years about 200 people worked intensively to interview several hundred people, mostly women. The researchers included university anthropologists and illiterate villagers. Iturriaga and Marcelli and their team members sorted through the many proposals they received, looking for the ones that would not duplicate previously published material. Specificity always came first--the micro over the macro, Iturriaga says.
Subjects ranged across the country and the Mexican population: mushrooms, including hallucinogenic ones; ‘exotic’ animals that were used for food such as crocodiles, armadillo, rabbit, deer, frogs, squirrels, mice, snails, boar, rat, raccoon, and tlacuache, Mexico's sole marsupial; the many insects that have been an important part of the Mexican diet; comprehensive guides to tamales and tortillas; drinks and sweets from the region of Tabasco; sweets in Puebla, probably the region most renowned for its cuisine; edible flowers; a book on cactus pears.
By the end of three years the project on gastronomy resulted in 54 books, all published in the same format and under the general title Indigenous and Popular Cuisine of Mexico.

Those taken from Indian groups were published in both the original language and Spanish. Roughly half the books were on individual Indian tribes such as Zapotec, the many Nahuans (modern Aztecs), Huichol, and the Mayan groups Tzeltal and Tzotzil. There were books devoted to unusual groups that settled small pockets of Mexico: 50,000 Mennonites in Chihuahua state, for example, wearing the ‘plain dress’ of all members of the northern European Reformation group and baking breads and cakes and making cheese. Another book was on the little-known ex-slave group called the Mascogo, who in the early 1800s allied themselves with the Seminole Indians of Florida and in the mid-1800s prospered in the hills of Coahuila. The other half was on mestizo food--mestizo, or mixed Indian-Spanish, peoples make up at least three-quarters of the Mexican population. In contrast to other Latin American countries, a relatively small number of Spaniards settled in Mexico, and widespread intermarriage began right away.

In the end the volumes had no real organizing principle. The books were edited and published in the order they arrived. "The worst enemy of good things," Iturriaga kept telling Marcelli and his other collaborators, "is perfect things." Marcelli would oversee research method; Felipe Guevara would continually edit text and co-ordinate between the researchers, the central Mexico City office, and the printer. The concentrated effort to produce as many volumes as possible in such a limited time is more than impressive--it is astonishing.

There were a few black-and-white photographs in a few of the books--on iguanas, for instance, the eating of which is now outlawed but carries a long tradition. But for the most part the books were handsomely designed but very modestly printed. The decision made at the outset was to keep the price as low as possible. Profit was never even a consideration: the books were sold for what they cost to produce, and of course the federal government had sponsored the research. Most of the books cost between $1 and $4. The response was immediate and grateful (roughly 300-500 libraries and schools were given complete sets), especially from scholars and cooks but also from the general public. Today it is virtually impossible to assemble a complete series. Many of the printings, usually of 2,000-3,000 copies, have sold out, and there is no money available to reprint them. As Iturriaga predicted, his successor was not interested in continuing the project on gastronomy. There was material assembled for a projected 20 additional books, with five recipe books ready to publish. They remain in the department's archives, along with a ready-to-print illustrated map of folk art. Iturriaga dreams of republishing the series with a more rational order. Most of all he dreams that the project will continue where it left off when such a powerful and well-functioning machine was suddenly stopped.

After he left the culture ministry Iturriaga became active in a government council that assesses environmental impacts of industry and property development. He continues his travels, often accompanied by his wife, Silvia, a former developer of curricula for teaching labor union workers. Unsurprisingly, given his immense productivity, he has already written two books on food and the environment, a bibliography of foreign travelers' comments on the environment, and he enlisted fellow council workers to prepare an illustrated map on the biodiversity of Mexico. Even more unsurprisingly, Iturriaga says he sleeps just three hours a night.

Why the Slow Food Award?
Like a stone in a pond, the ripples of Iturriaga's work at the Popular Culture Ministry are just being felt widely. College students are writing theses based on the historical cookbooks in the series of 12. Giorgio de Angeli, restaurateur and Mexico City Slow Food leader, and his wife, Alicia, a prominent local food historian, are preparing in collaboration with the National University of Mexico a 120-hour curriculum based solely on the Iturriaga series. "The world must be divided," De Angeli says, "into Before and After José."


Corby Kummer