| Summary: | In 2010 the “Traditional Mexican cuisine” has been inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, in this way becoming the first national cuisine to obtain such recognition. Nevertheless, the process leading to the successful inscription on the list has not been an easy one, since an earlier Mexican candidacy had been previously rejected in 2005. A close reading of the official documents supporting the two candidacies reveals the contradictory nature of the discourses centred around a “national” cuisine, an ideological construct which has a long history – starting at least at the beginning of the 19th century – and which is often essentialized through processes of ancestralization based on a debatable use of colonial historical sources. The first candidacy was rejected mainly because of the lack of a clearly identifiable concrete manifestation of a too abstract Mexican cuisine. Therefore, the second request was centred on a specific regional example – the “Michoacán Paradigm” – presented, quite paradoxically, as a metonym of the national gastronomic tradition as a whole. The nationalistic discourse that undergoes this process has been further reinforced by the temporal coincidence of the 2010 inscription with the celebrations for the Bicentennial of the Mexican Independence and the Centennial of the Mexican Revolution.
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