Mexican Staples with Filipino Heritage
Today I read an article by medical anthropologist Dr. Gideon Lasco, writing for Sapiens, an online magazine of sorts for all things anthropology. He explains how tequila and mezcal, long associated with Mexico, owe their existence to Filipino distilling techniques. In the same vein, the Filipino fermented coconut drink tubá also made its way to Mexico but was transformed into a strawberry drink with peanuts… still refreshing on a hot day.
This reminded me of guinatán, another Filipino-inspired dish found in Mexico. Gatá is Tagalog for coconut milk. Ginataán refers to something cooked in coconut milk. While Filipino ginataan is more of an adjective, as it is paired with whatever is cooked in it (ginataáng baboy, for example is pork cooked in coconut milk), ginataán by itself can also refer to popular snack or dessert ginataáng bilo bilo – sticky rice balls cooked in coconut milk. To confuse things further, ginataáng bilo bilo is the same dish as biningit; the former being from the island of Luzon and the latter from the Visayas region.
Anyway, back to guinatán from Mexico. I heard about it from an online session of the Philippine International Quincentennial Conference discussing the connections between Southeast Asia and Latin America forged during the Spanish colonial galleon trade. Dr. Paulina Machuca presented about guinatán in the Costa Grande de Guerrero region of coastal Mexico, where guinatán refers to dried fish cooked in coconut milk. She co-authored a journal article about it, but it is in Spanish and I am unable to understand it… although I’m guessing her presentation at the conference was a summary of the article’s findings. Anyway, guinatán is mentioned in this English piece on food in the Guerrero region so you can read more about it there.
What’s the point of this blog post? Not much – I just wanted to put these two tidbits together as examples of cross-cultural food exchange facilitated by the Spanish colonization of both Latin America and the Philippines. As Lasco writes in his article: “Anthropology and its cognate disciplines have played an important role in decolonizing the way many of us view the place of cuisine in shaping national and global histories.” While we often hear about what colonizers have passed down to the colonies as their two cultures met, we hardly hear about exchanges between two colonized cultures bridged by a common colonizer. Lasco furthers this idea: narratives like these show “how it complicates narratives that depict colonialism as solely a one-way street, with powerful European actors successfully forcing their languages, traditions, and ways of life on local people.”
My other brush with Mexico today was courtesy of Pancake House, a local restaurant chain in the Philippines advertises it has “The best taco in town.” But the taco they sell is actually from Tex-Mex cuisine, and not a Mexican taco per se. That’s a story for another day.
