A Mexican in the South: Notes, Quotes, and Observations from the Southern Foodways Alliance's Annual Symposium

Imagine my surprise earlier this year when I received an email from John T. Edge, one of the best food writers in America and head of the Southern Foodways Alliance, this awesome-ass effort by the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture to preserve, document, and celebrate the food culture of the South. He wanted to know if I'd be interested in doing a presentation on the barbecue traditions of Mexico for the SFA's annual symposium, and how they were panning out in the South, if at all.

I couldn't believe it. I have few writing heroes, but John T. is definitely one of them–and now, he was asking me to present at the SFA's baby? Hell ya!

That was in April; the symposium happened this past weekend in Oxford, Mississippi, and my advice to those of us Southern Californians who claim to know 'cue and love it: you don't know shit until you go to the foodie equivalent of Woodstock, a TED conference (sans the snobbery), a high school field trip, and a family reunion mixed into one whiskey-soaked, food-laden weekend.
]



So, with apologies to the much-missed Orange County Register sports columnist Randy Youngman, notes, quotes, and observations from the Symposium:

*Since I'm like an editor of an alt-weekly and shit, I wasn't able to escape to Oxford until Friday morning by taking a red-eye from LAX to Memphis, then taking a rental car for the one-and-a-half-hour trip from the Music City to Oxford through gorgeous forests and traffic-free roads. I unfortunately missed the lecture “The Politics of Protein and Tomatoes” in which my good pal, Greg Asbed of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, held court on his group's many righteous fights against corporate giants to pay more for tomatoes picked. I actually hadn't seen Greg in about eight years, so it was wonderful to catch up with him. Asbed was awarded the Eggerton Award for “food-world work on social and environmental justice”, which just shows the SFA knows their stuff.

*For breakfast that Friday: Texas-style beef brisket breakfast tacos. The taco rules ALL.

*The symposium itself is a grand mishmash of love: actual love letters, academic histories on how barbecue stands were the original fast food, studies on the differences of barbecue traditions in Kentucky's many counties, poems, a presentation by Alton Brown on the science of slow-roasting a pig, and even actors dressed as Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debating the merits of competitive BBQ (you had to be there to appreciate the surreal hilarity of that). My humble contribution to this was “Mexican America: Carne Knowledge,” in which I argued that the American South and Mexican South were merely brothers from another madre. I did this by reading out loud this ¡Ask a Mexican! column examining the similarities between hillbillies and wabs, by noting Mexican government statistics showed that the majority of Mexican migration from the country's southern states were going to the American South, especially focusing on the traditions of La Huasteca–barbacoa estilo Hidalgo for the food, and son huasteco for the music. I think folks enjoyed it, and you can listen to it below:

*There were next-to-no Californians there, but I was glad to run into the only other Orange Countian there: Jay Cohen, of Laguna Beach. He was one of the few people not in the food industry present, and we spent more than a few minutes talking about our love of Mos 2, the legendary Mexican teriyaki chain of Anaheim and SanTana. Small world!

Gustavo Arellano