For hundreds of years, Mexican women endured a harder toll than women in other parts of the world. The daily diet was based on tortillas and other food made from nixtamal (a mixture of maize, water, and calcium hydroxide). Its grinding bent over the stone metate was historically constructed as an exclusive female chore, and the process did not experience technological change until the late 19th century. Until then, the production of daily “bread” required about five hours of labor, every day, all year, in addition to all the other labor that women all over the world carried out to sustain and reproduce human life. This paper explores how Mexican women coped with this situation, why it remained unchanged for so long, and how it affected their lives.
It goes on to deal with the changes that new nixtamal-milling and tortilla-making technologies brought and diffused gradually through the 20th century: how they changed the lives of Mexican women, as well as with their active agency in shaping the liberation. It shows that the Mesoamerican solution to nourishment became an enduring legacy that molded Mexico’s history (and that of several Central American countries) in distinct, important, and long-enduring ways.
Incorporating tortilla making into the mainstream of Mexico’s history—it always was essential to Mexicans’ nourishment and survival—reveals the extraordinary importance of female labor to the existence, construction, and sustenance of the nation. It also evidences and strict limits most Mexican women faced in developing their potential beyond the metate and the hearth until recent times. Technological change in tortilla production is a key to understanding the transformations of women’s roles in Mexican society during the last century.