Authentically Yours

5 de Mayo, burritos, and cultural appropriation

Dear Friends,

Mexico City is absolutely swarming with Americans and local residents are fed up. In the coffee shop where I am writing this, 80% of the customers are fellow Americans. I feel the temptation to tell them that Mexico City was more interesting 13 years ago when I lived here, but that simply isn’t true. Mexico City is a way better city today than it was a decade ago. The restaurants, cafes, museums, transit, gyms, bookstores, libraries, public safety, cycling, markets — everything has improved enormously.

On the other hand, everything looks the same. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but it sure feels like every block in Mexico City now has the same ultra-cool coffee shop with perfectly poured macchiatos, cortados, flat whites, and cappuccinos (just don’t ask the barista to explain the difference). In a fun essay about the global convergence of taste, Alex Murrell writes:

Isn’t it obvious that a global group of hosts all trying to present their properties to a global group of travelers would converge on a single, optimal, appealing yet inoffensive style? “AirSpace,” however, isn’t just limited to residential interiors. The same tired tropes have spread beyond the spaces where we live, and taken over the spaces where we work, eat, drink, and relax.

Compared to 2010, when I moved to Mexico City, there are far more (and better) restaurants, cafes, hotels, and bookstores. And yes, despite the abundance of choice, it eerily feels like they are all the same place with the same menu and the same perfectly Instagrammable drinks and dishes. In reaction to so much perfect coffee, my friend Luis and I are bonding over our newfound love for shitty coffee and I’m increasingly drawn to dirty, dingy cafes.

Authentically Indigenous (or not Pretendian?)

I confess, I laughed out loud when Trump first called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” (🙈) Warren infamously reacted to Trump’s taunting by asking Stanford geneticist Carlos Bustamente to analyze and publish a DNA test showing she is between .1% to .3% Native American. (Which is to say that she is at a minimum 99.7% not Native American.) I was fascinated by the reaction to Warren’s decision to release her DNA test results. A consensus viewpoint quickly emerged that just because you have a genetic overlap with a Native American population doesn’t mean that you are culturally Native American, and therefore you shouldn’t identify as Native American.

On the other hand, UC Berkeley professor Elizabeth Hoover spent her entire life engaging in Native American culture (and identifying as Native American). Then, last week she issued a public apology when she couldn’t find any genetic or genealogical evidence of Native American ancestry.

And so which is it? Is it our cultural upbringing or DNA that determines our ethnic identity?¹

Last week, my friend Pablo told me about the incredible case of Brigído Lara, an indigenous artisan from Veracruz who sculpted pieces inspired by his Totonac ancestors. He sold his artwork to brokers, who passed them off as pre-Columbian artifacts that were sold to museums and exclusive international collections.² In 1974, Lara and the brokers were put in jail for looting pre-Columbian artifacts from archeological sites. He was released from prison only after he requested clay from prison to sculpt original pieces and prove that the “looted artifacts” were actually unintentionally convincing replicas.

Are Lara’s pieces authentic? What are they worth? Who decides? The brokers? The museums? The experts who mistakenly certified them as pre-Columbian?

Cinco de Mayo, burritos and pizza

While I was in a work meeting on Friday morning, I received a text message from a friend asking if I traveled to Mexico to celebrate Cinco de Mayo and drink beer. LOL. The day is not even a public holiday in Mexico and I bet that fewer than half of Mexicans know that it commemorates the Battle of Puebla.

So why is 5 de Mayo a bigger deal in the United States than in Mexico?

In 1986, Heinekin’s marketing firm started a rumor that Corona beer was contaminated with urine. Corona sued the marketing firm and won the case, but the damage was already done and sales of Corona were cut in half. Corona’s CEO Carlos Alvarez needed a quick comeback, and so in 1989 he practically invented a holiday. Somehow, even George W. Bush celebrated 5 de Mayo in the Rose Garden with pretty terrible Spanish (unlike his brother, Jeb, who speaks Spanish almost flawlessly.)

Is 5 de Mayo an authentic holiday or a marketing campaign? Is there even a difference anymore?

My friend Guillermo Osorno is working on a book about food, immigration, and identity in the United States.³ Guillermo argues that Americans accept and assimilate food before people. You won’t find a California Roll in Tokyo, but Americans developed a love for sushi and Top Ramen even while imprisoning Japanese Americans in internment camps. Before “Italians became White,” they suffered brutally racist discrimination while WASPy Americans devoured pizza and pasta. Chipotle is now worth $56 billion and made $8.6B in revenue in 2022 while Mexicans experience much of the same discrimination today as Italians did 100 years ago.

Authentically bilingual

On Saturday morning, I joined a group of at least 50 other cyclists at Ruta Cycling Cafe a block from where Iris and I lived between 2010-2014. We departed the city riding side by side and it felt like everyone else was talking with a friend except for me. I looked eagerly toward the person to my right a couple of times, but whoever it was, they showed no interest in talking. I thought about starting a conversation regardless, but then I pictured myself from their perspective and I saw a middle-aged man trying too hard to strike up a conversation with someone nearly half my age. At a rest stop without anyone to talk to, I pulled out my phone for a lonely distraction and the first thing I saw was a headline in the Wall Street Journal: “Millennials are starting to feel old.”

There are two ways to speak Mexican Spanish: like a 20-something scenester or a 50-something lawyer. When I lived here 13 years ago, I spoke more like a 20-something scenester. I suppose that it is now time for me to speak like a 50-something lawyer? What is an authentic version of me in Mexico?

Eventually, I fell into a conversation with another cyclist just a few years younger than me. My self-consciousness about how I ought to speak or act melted away. I was once again just me.

🧰 A useful tool: Fine-tune your Spotify recommendations

I’m still enjoying those Spotify Blend playlists that I mentioned last week. A couple of friends noted that their “taste profiles” were contaminated by a few playlists that get extra rotation to entertain their kids or to help fall asleep. If you want to exclude a certain playlist from Spotify’s recommendations, just click the three dots and select “exclude from your taste profile.”

👏 Kudos

Huge kudos to the cylists who completed last week’s Le Tour de Frankie — Mexico’s first unassisted ultra-endurance gravel cycling race from Mexico City to Oaxaca. They rode 500 miles and climbed 40,000 feet in just four days. I followed them on the tracking map and on social media throughout the week and can’t wait to join in the suffering next year! I’m also hoping to join this year’s Siete Almas gravel race in Oaxaca — let me know if you’re interested!

May you have a most wonderful and authentic week,

David

1. This may sound theoretical, but it will soon be a policy issue in California. Yesterday, the state legislature’s Reparation Task Force issued its recommendation to compensate Black residents for past injustices. The New York Times article observes that “a lifelong state resident who is 71 years old could be eligible for roughly $1.2 million in total compensation for housing discrimination, mass incarceration, and additional harms.” There are still debates about eligibility, but as currently drafted reparation recipients would have to prove that they are direct descendants of enslaved people. I can’t imagine how the government would begin to implement verification.

2. Even today, you can find one of Lara’s pieces in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

3. Paramount+ is now producing a series based on Guillermo’s book about gay culture in 1980s Mexico City.