The Language of Food and Culture in Tének

“My pork rinds are thundering here,” “he thinks he is very salsa-y,” “you put a lot of cream on your tacos,” “let’s go for it, it’s mole de olla,” or “my beans are burning,” are examples of the everyday use of metaphors associated with food in Mexican Spanish. The frequency and use of these metaphors in everyday discourse have not yet been explored in the native languages ​​of Mexico.

The relevance of its study lies in the fact that there is a connection between language and culture that, if expressed on the linguistic level, as in Spanish, reveals the importance of the culinary in a given culture. In addition, the study of speech acts associated with the culinary field can naturally lead us to an understanding of the sensory systems of flavors and smells.

For example, the Spanish metaphors: “revenge is sweet” or “this conversation left me with a bitter taste” are expressions that reveal this extension of meanings in sensorial areas, beyond the specifically culinary, explained the academic from the Institute of Anthropological Research of the UNAM, Lucero Meléndez Guadarrama.

The university student is developing the project Culinary Linguistics and its contribution to the anthropology of food. In addition to understanding the internal structure, both discursive and morpho-syntactical, of the linguistic expressions linked to culinary recipes, she is also interested in understanding the relationships that are established with culture; that is, what cultural inferences can we obtain from culinary discourse, and what can we know about the remote and recent history of a certain group, such as the Tének?

It is a Mayan language also known by its name in Nahuatl: Huasteco. It is distinguished by being the only living branch of the Huasteca of that linguistic family, and by being geographically located in the Huasteca zone, outside the so-called Mayan nuclear region, located in the southeast of Mexico and part of Central America (Guatemala, part of Belize, even El Salvador), the expert added.

The Huasteca branch seems to have been the first to separate from the mother language, or Protomaya and from there, in one or several migratory waves, the Tének arrived at the region they currently occupy: the Huasteca in the north of Veracruz and the southeast of San Luis Potosí.

From archaeological evidence, we know that in pre-Hispanic times, their presence was greater, even in the colonial period, their wide territorial occupation was documented through Tének toponyms on maps of the 16th century. Today only “islands” of what was that vast occupation and some recently founded communities in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro remain.

The most widely accepted proposal is that the Huasteca migrated from the highlands of Guatemala, the Cuchumatanes, arriving in the Huasteca possibly during the Preclassic period.

Currently, it is estimated that there are 160 thousand speakers, in the three dialectal variants recognized by the National Institute of Indigenous Languages. It would seem that there are not many, but there are numerous communities where children are no longer learning it; especially in Veracruz, it is clearly threatened and at risk of disappearing, he emphasized.

In contrast, in San Luis Potosí we have some places where there are monolinguals, they learn it as their first language and begin to speak Spanish until they reach primary school, "but this is not the majority of cases."

To analyze the Tének language from a synchronic (at a precise moment) and diachronic (historical and evolutionary) perspective, the linguist and doctor in Mesoamerican Studies uses cooking recipes as “core” oral texts, a “more or less novel field of study, a topic that led me to culinary linguistics and, in turn, to smells and flavors.”

With a comparative linguistics approach, as well as morphology, word formation and discourse, the expert obtains data associated with this discursive genre, finding divergences between oral and written recipes, for example.

In Tének there are terms associated with the verb “to cut” and the types of cuts, related to the object that is sliced ​​or cut. “The type of semantic information that we find encoded in the verbs leads us to establish taxonomic or classification relationships of the world.”

When observing how the associations of eating and food preparation or tasting are composed, particular cultural relationships are revealed. Culinary is linguistically codified and projected in each language, “but if we take it to the cognitive realm, we can see what is common to all humans and what is particular to a group; this also takes us to the realm of smells and flavors.”

And the latter are not universal either, she clarified. The information that is encoded in the word “sweet,” to mention one case, can have a different gradation in the different languages ​​of the world. In another example, the term “spicy” has negative associations in various languages; in other Mayan languages, ​​it is related to pain, while in Tének it is used as a derivative of the word chile.

Culinary linguistics takes us through different ritual practices, said the expert; “when there is a party, what is talked about when food is prepared? This is a very important social space, of community cohesion, where there is always a person in charge, but where some can access and others cannot, where you can speak or not, etc. There is still a lack of studies on this in Indo-Mexican languages, perhaps because they are very intimate areas, such as the moment of preparing food.”

Gastronomy is important because food is basic in a society, it is a fundamental part of how we relate socially. Through culinary discourse, recipes, and what is talked about in the tasting, this interaction takes place and we make inferences of a cultural order that help us understand the dynamics of a current group and project it to the past, Meléndez Guadarrama explained.

In Huasteco, it is striking that there is no significant presence of Spanish loans in the culinary field, that is, vernacular terms are used. This indicates some type of cultural resistance; Speakers know that the meaning encoded in Spanish verbs (for example, to cut) does not have a one-to-one semantic correspondence with their language and prefer their own words; in contrast, the replacement of nominals and quantifiers of the tének with Spanish terms is more frequent than in the case of verbs.

Regarding culinary patterns, Meléndez Guadarrama found that there is also continuity in the preparation of certain foods, such as a drink that mixes corn with sweet potato. In Mayan hieroglyphic writing, not necessarily the same atole has been documented, but rather the combination of ingredients that the rulers consumed. This tells us of a cultural continuity documented from ancient times to the present, of long-standing culinary practices that we can trace back to the past.

Perhaps in the future we will have a displacement of terms and flavors and eventually there could be a loss of linguistic and gastronomic heritage, the specialist estimated.

There are recipes that only older people know, that young people do not prepare or are not interested in preparing, such as a stew made from wasp eggs that the Mayans used to eat. For this reason, documentation work helps to have “photographs” of what is happening at this moment.

Stopping the process of linguistic displacement is complicated in many languages. “What I see in many Tének communities is this phenomenon that unfortunately we cannot reverse,” concluded Meléndez Guadarrama.