Paper short abstract:

Based on the results of extended fieldwork this paper focuses on the workings of heritage politics in a local context of (post)colonial yet transnational society of Oaxaca (Southern Mexico).

Paper long abstract:

In 2010 Traditional Mexican Cuisine was inscribed on UNESCO Intangible Heritage List. Recognition of Mexican food and foodways as cultural heritage has contributed to the emergence of culinary tourism as a strategy for local development in several regions of the country and further boosted the already existing tourism of this kind in other parts e.g. the state of Oaxaca which cuisine is considered to be the most sophisticated in Mexico. Over the last decades this Southern state has become the site of booming culinary tourism industry owning to both state-led development strategies based on promoting cultural and ethnic tourism as well as numerous private enterprises.

The key element for its success are native women who provide government officials, professional chefs and cookbook authors with vast knowledge of the 'ancestral, ongoing, community food culture', regional products and techniques of cooking. At the same time Indian women are still widely perceived as skillful but passive and subordinate exotic 'others' and their knowledge appropriated and commercialized for the benefit of mestizo or foreign chefs and cookbook authors, and they are usually marginalized in the public celebrations of Oaxacan cuisine.

Based on the results of fieldwork carried out in 2011 and 2014-15 in central Oaxaca this paper focuses on the workings of heritage politics in a local context of (post)colonial yet transnational society. I scrutinize gender (along with ethnic and class) aspects of heritigization of Oaxacan foods, negotiations and contestations between different groups engaged in Oaxacan culinary tourism industry as well as open conflicts over heritage representations, politics and rights.