Under The
Volcano
By Anthony
Bourdain
Americans
love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas,
tamales and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities. We love Mexican
beverages, happily knocking back huge amounts of tequila, mezcal and Mexican
beer every year. We love Mexican people—as we sure employ a lot of them.
Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand
that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients
we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes,
look after our children. As any chef will tell you, our entire service
economy—the restaurant business as we know it—in most American cities, would
collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that
Mexicans are “stealing American jobs”. But in two decades as a chef and
employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a
dishwashing job, a porter’s position—or even a job as prep cook. Mexicans do
much of the work in this country that Americans, provably, simply won’t
do.
We
love Mexican drugs. Maybe not you personally, but “we”, as a nation, certainly
consume titanic amounts of them—and go to extraordinary lengths and expense to
acquire them. We love Mexican music, Mexican beaches, Mexican architecture,
interior design, Mexican films.
So,
why don’t we love Mexico?
We
throw up our hands and shrug at what happens and what is happening just across
the border. Maybe we are embarrassed. Mexico, after all, has always been there
for us, to service our darkest needs and desires. Whether it’s dress up like
fools and get pass-out drunk and sun burned on Spring break in Cancun, throw
pesos at strippers in Tijuana, or get toasted on Mexican drugs, we are seldom
on our best behavior in Mexico. They have seen many of us at our worst. They
know our darkest desires.
In
the service of our appetites, we spend billions and billions of dollars each
year on Mexican drugs—while at the same time spending billions and billions
more trying to prevent those drugs from reaching us. The effect on our society
is everywhere to be seen. Whether it’s kids nodding off and overdosing in small
town Vermont, gang violence in LA, burned out neighborhoods in Detroit— it’s
there to see. What we don’t see, however, haven’t really noticed, and
don’t seem to much care about, is the 80,000 dead—mostly innocent victims in
Mexico, just in the past few years. 80,000 dead. 80,000 families who’ve been
touched directly by the so-called “War On Drugs”.
Mexico.
Our brother from another mother. A country, with whom, like it or not, we are
inexorably, deeply involved, in a close but often uncomfortable embrace. Look
at it. It’s beautiful. It has some of the most ravishingly beautiful beaches on
earth. Mountains, desert, jungle. Beautiful colonial architecture, a tragic,
elegant, violent, ludicrous, heroic, lamentable, heartbreaking history. Mexican
wine country rivals Tuscany for gorgeousness. Its archeological sites—the
remnants of great empires, unrivaled anywhere. And as much as we think we know
and love it, we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food
really is. It is NOT melted cheese over a tortilla chip. It is not simple, or
easy. It is not simply ‘bro food’ halftime. It is in fact, old— older even than
the great cuisines of Europe and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and
sophisticated. A true mole sauce, for instance, can take DAYS to make, a
balance of freshly (always fresh) ingredients, painstakingly prepared by hand.
It could be, should be, one of the most exciting cuisines on the planet. If we
paid attention. The old school cooks of Oaxaca make some of the more difficult
to make and nuanced sauces in gastronomy. And some of the new generation, many
of whom have trained in the kitchens of America and Europe have returned home
to take Mexican food to new and thrilling new heights.
It’s
a country I feel particularly attached to and grateful for. In nearly 30
years of cooking professionally, just about every time I walked into a new
kitchen, it was a Mexican guy who looked after me, had my back, showed me what
was what, was there—and on the case—when the cooks more like me, with
backgrounds like mine—ran away to go skiing or surfing—or simply “flaked.” I
have been fortunate to track where some of those cooks come from, to go back
home with them. To small towns populated mostly by women—where in the evening,
families gather at the town’s phone kiosk, waiting for calls from their
husbands, sons and brothers who have left to work in our kitchens in the cities
of the North. I have been fortunate enough to see where that affinity for
cooking comes from, to experience moms and grandmothers preparing many
delicious things, with pride and real love, passing that food made by hand,
passed from their hands to mine.
In
years of making television in Mexico, it’s one of the places we, as a crew, are
happiest when the day’s work is over. We’ll gather round a street stall and
order soft tacos with fresh, bright, delicious tasting salsas—drink cold
Mexican beer, sip smoky mezcals, listen with moist eyes to sentimental songs
from street musicians. We will look around and remark, for the hundredth time,
what an extraordinary place this is.
The received wisdom is that Mexico will never change.
That is hopelessly corrupt, from top to bottom. That it is useless to resist—to
care, to hope for a happier future. But there are heroes out there who refuse
to go along. On the episode of PARTS UNKNOWN, of Anthony Bourdains' Show. We meet a few
of them. People who are standing up against overwhelming odds, demanding
accountability, demanding change—at great, even horrifying personal cost.
This show is for
them.
Anthony Bourdain.
