Sarah Bak-Geller Corona is a professor and researcher at the UNAM Anthropological Research Institute. PhD in history from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France). Former student of the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm-Paris) and Hong Kong University. Her lines of research focus on the political dimension of food practices and the forms of representation of food in the contexts of colonialism and nation-building in Mexico and Latin America. Her work on cooking, culture and power covers different topics, such as: food, body and race in Latin America; recipes and national identities; food languages and citizenship building; and the processes of patrimonialization of the indigenous kitchens in America. She is part of the Mexican Food Anthropology Group and is an associate member of the Patrimoines Locaux laboratory at the National Museum of Natural History in France.

 

Publication:

Books:

2022. (with A. Forero-Peña) (eds.). Connected Recipes and Stories for Tomorrow. Recetas e historias conectadas para el mañana, México/EUA, City University of New York-La Guardia Community College-Casa de las Américas-UNAM.

2022. Almanaque de la sustentabilidad alimentaria en la Ciudad de México (Almanac of Food Sustenaibility in Mexico City), UNAM/SECTEI/Gob. de la Cd de México.

2022. Libro de proyectos para la salud y el bienestar. Educación preescolar, primaria y secundaria. México, Conacyt-Centro Maria Sibylla Merian de Estudios Latinoamericanos Avanzados (CALAS)-IIPAC.

2020. Sabores desconocidos de la nación mexicana. The Unknown Flavors of Mexico, Guadalajara, Universidad de Guadalajara, University of Guadalajara Foundation in Los Angeles, Pyrrha Gladys Grodman Educational Trust. (bilingual)

2019 (with Charles-Édouard de Suremain, Raúl Matta) (eds), Patrimonios alimentarios: Consensos y tensiones (Alimentary Heritage: Consensus and Tension), Colegio de San Luis, Institut de la Recherche pour le Développement (IRD).

 

Journal articles and book chapters:

2020 (with A. Pasquier). “How Sustainable is Tradition? Cultural Heritage in the Context of the Food Crisis”, Food Justice and Sovereignty in the Americas, Fundación Heinrich Böll-Université de Lyon-CEMCA.

2021. “Patrimonio alimentario y ciudadanía indígena. El caso coca de Mezcala, Jalisco (México)”, en Rebaï N., Bilhaut A-G., de Suremain C-E., Katz E., Paredes M., (éds.), Patrimonios alimentarios en América Latina: recursos locales, actores y globalización, Lima, IFEA/IRD, 191-215.

2020 (with R. Matta). “Las cocinas mestizas en México y Perú. Claves para interpretar el multiculturalismo en América Latina”, Antípoda, Revista de Antropología y Arqueología

102(39):69-93.

2020. “Langage culinaire, imaginaire gastronomique et construction de l’Ètat moderne au Mexique”, en Julia Csergo y Olivier Etcheverria (eds), Les imaginaires de la gastronomie: productions, diffusions, valeurs et enjeux, Paris, Maison d’éditions Le Manuscrit, 209-220.

2019. “Gastronomy and the Origins of Republicanism in Mexico”, en Igor Ayora Díaz (ed), Taste, Politics and identities in Mexican Food, London-Oxford-NY, Bloomsbury, pp. 37-50.

2019. “The Cookbook in Mexico. A Founding Document of the Modern Nation”, en Atsuko Ichijo, Venetia Johannes and Ronald Ranta (eds), The Emergence of National Food: The Dyanmics of Food and Nationalism, London-Oxford-NY, Bloomsbury, pp.28-38.

2016. “Culinary myths of the Mexican nation”, en I. Banerjee (ed), Cooking Cultures. Convergent Histories of Food and Feeling, Cambridge University Press.

2015. “Wheat versus maize. Civilizing Dietary Strategies and Early Mexican Republicanism”, en Journal Of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas, vol. 4, no 8.

2014. “Food Shortage in Colonial Mexico: maize, food policies and the construction of a modern political culture (1785-1807)”, en Carol Helstosky (ed), The Routledge History of Food, London, Routledge, pp. 81-91.

 

Research project as CALAS fellow:

Title: Recipes to make nations. Cookbooks in Latin America, 1830-2023

Summary: Food is one of the most symbolically rich activities for the life of individuals and societies, so it should not surprise us those cookbooks, whose pages teach to prepare food, are imbued with the meanings that a society gives to eating, sharing food and digesting. Over the years, cookbooks have been one of the favorite tools and materials for expressing and reproducing the social, economic, cultural, symbolic and political principles and values that order and give meaning to human food.

My research has focused mainly on food and cookbooks to the extent that they affect the emergence of political modernity in Latin America, particularly how notions of nation and citizenship have been conceived and disseminated. As I have shown in previous works, the language of food played a pioneering role in the formation of national identities, and even anticipated the political and legislative language of modern definitions of the concept of nation. In this project, I aim to demonstrate that culinary language has been a key vehicle for thinking, defining, and challenging the dominant ideas of nation and citizenship in Latin America. The project is far-reaching, as it starts from contexts of construction of Latin American nations from its beginnings at the beginning of the 19th century, until recent times in which a new definition of nation-state is appearing in almost all countries of the region. The latter is because most countries have made a transition to multicultural and plurinational regimes. An interdisciplinary methodology between cultural history, political history, and social anthropology allows me to pose a series of questions that have to do with the ambiguous, controversial, selective, and exclusive character of a cookbook.