Cooking Classes in Oaxaca
If you want to take a cooking class in Oaxaca, I have a list of recommendations at the end of this page. I used to teach them myself, but decided to leave that business behind after reflecting on the knowledge I’ve learned throughout 5 years of teaching and working in tourism.
In this page, you’ll find experiences, anecdotes, reflections, and the chats and mutual learning from hundreds of people. As I mentioned above, you can still book a class with the community members I’ve been collaborating with over the years, and learn about the reality of Oaxaca from my perspective. You can skip to the recommendations if you prefer.
How Taking Cooking Classes Abroad Became a Thing?
According to this text I found from John Mulcahy and his sources, Gastronomic Tourism is as old as people started to travel. It only has been mutating according to the types of promotion of destinations and economic capabilities of travelers as mass consumption of it. There are also not a lot of studies around this, at least academic ones. But one thing is for sure; the explosion of social media as a tool to demonstrate people’s social and cultural capital, as Mulcahy mentions, is something that has made a boom in the tourism industry.
I prefer to take a non-academic approach to this topic. I consider that approach slow and obtuse. Reality and the dynamics of an industry that is quickly changing happen faster than a paper can be approved or published. Especially if we focus on the colonial aspect of traveling. Speaking of which, if you haven’t read or heard of Bani Amor, and you’re planning to travel from the global north to the global south, I recommend you to give them a good read and listen to their interviews.
Big players like tripadvisor, airbnb, lonelyplanet, zagat, and so on, have been profiting from traveling in a very subtle way; in a desirable way. This subtleness is possible because of the status quo and how people are perceived, and expected to play a role in certain positions: Of service, of facilitator, of consumer, and all of them are expected to be fulfilled in a system that we all accept. As Mulcahy mentions and, I repeat, our food-inspired travels are to increase our social and cultural capital, either through our social media, or our cooking repertoire. Knowledge we can capitalize on later in any possible way: Opening a restaurant, networking, starting a podcast, or writing a cookbook. You name it.
In this capitalistic system, everything can be converted into a product. Traveling too. I don’t need to cite here how much money has been spent by travelers in the last decade, we know it’s been increasing, especially after the lockdown measures of the ongoing pandemic.
What’s Behind Traveling like a Local?
After five years of running cooking classes here in Oaxaca, I’ve noticed dynamics that made me feel uncomfortable at times, and hopeful at others. I appreciate that I was able to find many nuances on the many topics that surround those activities and all the players that participate in this industry; myself included.
My point, and criticism, about tourism and how so-called experiences have shaped the life of local people to serve a population that has been told and encouraged by influencers (digital and analog,) and a system that the desirable thing to do is to travel abroad and consume a product. The product is our lives, our daily lives, our trips to the market where we enjoy not only choosing our produce and groceries for cooking our breakfast, lunch, and dinner; but also gossiping and talking to our regular vendors about the week. We open our kitchens, our dining rooms, our bathrooms, and our lives so all of them can taste what it feels like to participate and be part of it for a day. Think deeply about the story you’ve been told by joining those activities; think about the narrative behind the “exotic”, behind the “deep Oaxaca”, behind the “authentic”, behind the “live like a local”, behind the “traveler-not-tourist mentality”.
Don’t get me wrong, if you have been to my kitchen (which by the way I don’t have anymore) and have been welcomed by me, it was real honest and warm as 100% of my clients told me they felt. We shared and cooked together and I also learned a lot. I’m not complaining about you. I’m criticizing the system that put us there in the first place. It’s also true that, like me, many people that live in a place like Oaxaca, have limited options to make a decent living with dignity. This takes me to the next point: Class.
My experience of life is shaped by migration, like many of us. One chapter of my life took me to live in the United States. I’m a great language learner and speak four languages fluently. The cultural capital I obtained from coming from a big city and having a degree in graphic design and experience in programming, web design, marketing, photography, arts, and yes, also traveling. All of that allowed me to start a business like this by myself with a website, SEO techniques, photographs, and of course, my passion for cooking and hosting parties and friends at home.
This takes me to the next thing for you to consider. Who do you want to hire to learn from? What platform are you using to do so? As I mentioned before, some of us decided to start making a living out of this. Some of us would consider the ethical implications and decide to inhabit the contradictions that come along; some wouldn’t. Cultural appropriation, gentrification, colonialism, racism, and similar ones. I’ve tried not to share recipes that were shared with me in the confidence of a kitchen in Oaxaca. I just came up with my own recipes and family knowledge in the kitchen together with local ingredients.
But also, on the other hand, which industry is clean and not full of dirty contexts? As I wrote in the past about why I left my work in IT, certainly tourism is not exempt from people and practices that would make me leave as well. Again, the systems that run how we relate and how we consider mostly everything a commodity, make our capital (monetary, social, cultural, etc.) who we are in terms of capital value, instead of human value.
So, from Here, What’s Next?
I don’t have a universal solution to fix the issues that predatory industries like tourism have caused in destinations like Oaxaca or similar ones around the world. I believe that is more of a collective effort. Dropping my reflections and experience working on a daily basis on it is my way to add to the conversation.
People of the rest of Mexico look down upon the states of the south of Mexico, and in general, everything that is south of the capital. This is a colonial idea caused by the racist ideas and narratives that native people are lazy and prefer rather to be maintained by the government. Whereas, if you’ve ever been to a place like here, the people of Oaxaca, but I’m not talking about the rich settlers of Oaxaca that are mostly descendants of colonizers. I’m talking about the people who live in the rural areas and are connected to the land; they are the most hard-working people you’ll find here. Those are the people the knowledge is being taken from; how many people brag about corn as a staple food of Mexico and even organize experiences and workshops while not having a single clue or connection of how corn is harvested or even knowledge of how preserving the native seeds is at stake by the push of the US government to introduce GMO corn in Mexico. Even worse, the stigma and racism that the actual indigenous farmers face when they have to go to the big cities of Mexico.
That being said, my recommendation is to try to find a cooking class that is run by people like them. Avoid the restaurants and big quintas. Also, those usually try to get as many people as they can in a single group to stretch their profits but you will end up in a restaurant station in a less personalized setup.
I’ve heard a lot of people saying, I want to support local businesses by buying directly from them. While this statement is very conscious and thoughtful, it’s also a tricky one. It’s great that you’re selective of how you spend your money and who you drive business to; in dynamics like this, is something good for you, and also if there’s a tendency of more and more people doing this, the big players and monopolies get less business. Until here, everything seems fine. However, there’s something we need to detach from it. We are consumers, and to whom we bring business to is a great way of conscious decision-making and small-scale support of dismantling and boycotting corporations; we’re not doing any favor or saving anyone by doing so. By feeling or believing this, we are following white-savior behaviors by putting ourselves in a certain position of superiority and acknowledging our actions are saving people from something.
So, on a greater scale, it’s amazing we spend our money selectively and consciously, but my advice would be: Let’s not utilize it as a mechanism of how we are some sort of hero that is saving the other we consider, by default, is in a lower position, and rather challenge and question what have historically driven people to make a living out of their traditions and culture and having to direct it to a certain target who, also systematically, holds more power in their currency, nationality, or class.
For now, it’s all I have to add, but I’ll be working on a single text about corn and native seeds. If you want to support this content creation, I invite you to join my Patreon account where I reflect on these topics and the brainchilds are generated, as well as drafts for early access to the written content of this website.
References
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340183656_Historical_Evolution_of_Gastronomic_Tourism
- https://geezmagazine.org/magazine/article/decolonizing-travel-an-interview-with-bani-amor/
- Bani Amor on Tourism and the Colonial Project https://forthewild.world/listen/bani-amor-on-tourism-and-the-colonial-project-234
Recommendations
It’s been two years since I personally stopped teaching cooking classes in Oaxaca. I moved to the coast and left behind a space where I received hundreds of you. Things have changed, and I started a new endeavor.
I’m going to resume teaching the cooking classes next year. In the meantime, I’ve been working on building community and a network of projects that exist and resist in the middle of a predatory expansion of big money and foreign big projects in Oaxaca. We support each other through care and knowledge. Personally, with my knowledge and experience in web design and programming, I created their websites or helped them improve their existing ones. We’ve been working together for some years now through mutual aid and collaboration. Allow me to introduce and recommend them.
Cocina Prehispánica en Fogón
If you want to learn from a traditional cook from Oaxaca, you should book a class with Vicky Hernández. She’s a native Oaxacan cook who created an immersive experience to share with you a cooking session at her home that begins with a visit to the market to source the fresh ingredients. Her signature class is the Corn Class, where you will learn about the process of nixtamalization and tortilla making. This is an experience that you can’t miss once in Oaxaca.
Rosita de Borracho
Samuel has worked in different regions of Oaxaca and also in different fields, which helped him to connect on a deeper level with many food producers. He has created a project to distribute mezcal and other goods like corn, becoming a community connector between different producers and customers. He offers mezcal tastings at his spot in Oaxaca City. This is a great way of tasting selected mezcales from a wide variety of producers across Oaxaca and Mexico, as well as other distilled drinks.
Nurturing Tour
This is the endeavor I mentioned at the beginning of the page. Eme and I used to work together for a company that showed us how tourism can and will crush you when money is the only boss. Luckily, we realized this pattern and decided to start our own food tour project. We cover food tours in Oaxaca City and Puerto Escondido. This is a great way to do an initial approach to local food before diving into other restaurants and street food from a respectful and responsible perspective. And yes! I’ll be teaching cooking classes again in the future, just not yet.
La Calenda
Bany is a Oaxacan chef who migrated to the US and started working in the food industry. Always carrying her heritage to the Oaxacan diaspora in Santa Barbara, California. She offers chocolate workshops, cooking classes, and travel planning in Oaxaca. We’ve partnered up in the past to collaborate on a few cooking classes. You’ll have a lot of fun and learn a lot about Oaxacan traditions.
Taller Ometeotl
Ana Martínez is a clay artist from Santa María Atzompa. She will teach you how to work the clay in a patient and careful way. She also offers accommodation so you can work on your pieces and follow the whole process, all the way to the kiln. If you are short on time, you can also visit her workshop to buy a few clay pieces, either decorative or utilitarian. One of the most magical workshops you will visit in Oaxaca. Trust me!
She doesn’t have a website, but this is her Instagram account.
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