In Spring 2025, PhD candidate Salma Valadez Marquez (Romance Languages, Folklore) shared an eye-opening look into the power of food as both a cultural bridge and a political tool. A 2024 CLLAS Graduate Grantee, Valadez Márquez’s dissertation, Mexican-American Foodways and Lore Beyond the Fictions We’ve Been Fed, explores how foodways preserve memory, identity, and migration stories—while also revealing how history has often been rewritten at the expense of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities.
Spotlight on Doña Josefina Velásquez de León
Central to Valadez Márquez’s talk was the legacy of Doña Josefina Velásquez de León, one of the most prolific cookbook authors of 20th-century Mexico. Publishing over 140 cookbooks, hosting radio and TV shows, and running her own culinary school, Velásquez de León shaped what came to be understood as “Mexican cuisine.”
But her impact was double-edged. While she documented countless recipes in meticulous detail, she also helped create a state-sanctioned vision of Mexican identity aligned with the one-party regime of post-revolutionary Mexico. In doing so, her cookbooks often erased Indigenous and African culinary practices, reframing them as part of a unified “mestizo” national identity.
Cookbooks, Class, and Cultural Narratives
Valadez Márquez emphasized that cookbooks themselves were products of privilege: they required literacy, money, and access to ingredients—making them inherently tools of the middle and upper classes. Through cheap, widely circulated editions, Velásquez de León spread standardized recipes that not only taught people “how to cook Mexican” but also how to be Mexican in ways that fit the state’s modernization project.
Visual imagery reinforced this message. Many of her books featured a white woman in traditional Indigenous dress, dancing or cooking, while the actual Indigenous figures appeared in the background—if at all. As Valadez Márquez noted, these images turned indigeneity into a costume for outsiders to wear, rather than an authentic lived identity.
The Case of Mole Poblano
One striking example Valadez Márquez unpacked was the story of mole poblano. Although mole is an Indigenous dish made from dried chiles and spices—with no European influence—the cookbook lore retells its origin as the miraculous invention of Spanish nuns preparing a meal for a bishop. This myth, prominently published by Velásquez de León, effectively whitewashed Indigenous culinary history.
In Valadez Márquez’s words, “there is nothing mestizo about mole itself.” Yet through lore and repetition, the dish was reframed to fit colonial narratives, demonstrating how food was mobilized as a political tool of erasure.
Towards Decolonizing Food Studies
Despite these tensions, Valadez Márquez resists reducing Velásquez de León to a villain. Her detailed documentation of methods and recipes remains invaluable. The challenge, she argues, is how we return these histories to the communities they came from.
Her call to action was clear:
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Fund the libraries and archives that house rare culinary collections.
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Teach foodways locally, especially in communities with deep Indigenous roots, such as Oregon’s large Oaxacan population.
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Decolonize scholarship by centering the voices of the people whose traditions were appropriated.