WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 77

They appear dazzled by camera flashes, and their barefoot troops, accepting service from tuxedoed
waiters, evince a mixture of pride and discomfort. Although Zapata and Villa's sojourn at the center of
Mexican government lasted less than a year, the image of them sprawled in the capital's most refined
palace of aristocratic dining has endured in national memory for almost one hundred years. More than
any other single image, it seemed to crystallize the revolution's challenge to class and racial hierarchies.
What usually gets forgotten about that famous breakfast, though, is the menu. The generals and their
troops didn't eat corn tortillas and beans that December morning in 1914; they ate sweet white rolls. 44
Although corn tortillas never risked displacement from the center of Mexico's diet, white bread has
been a fixture in the country since the earliest days of Spanish conquest. And for just as long, eating it
has been an act of social positioning. As historian Jeffrey Pilcher explained, in colonial Mexico “Creole
gentlemen … paraded their status within New Spain's racial hierarchy by wearing ruffled collars and
eating wheat bread. One 18th-century English visitor to the remote southern state of Chiapas even noted
that aspiring gentlemen would stand conspicuously in their doorways, 'to see and be seen … shaking
the crumbs of bread from their clothes.' ” 45
If anything, the status of white wheat bread increased after independence, particularly during the late
nineteenth-century dictatorship of Porfirio DÍaz. With the regime's governing ideology of white suprem-
acy and avid emulation of European fashions, bread baking boomed under DÍaz. The “French-style”
bolillo roll emerged as an edible incarnation of Mexico's progress. Reflecting on “the Future of the
Hispanic American Nations,” prominent Porfirian senator Francisco Bulnes gave the old preference for
bread a modern spin grounded in the emerging “science” of racial improvement. “The race of wheat is
the only truly progressive one … maize has been the eternal pacifier of America's indigenous races and
the foundation of their refusal to become civilized.” While U.S. food reformers inspired by Grahamism
tried to suppress enflamed passion with whole wheat diets, Pilcher notes, late nineteenth-century Mex-
ican elites “sought the opposite effect, to ignite vigor in the Indian masses through the consumption of
[white] wheat.” 46
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 toppled Porfirio DÍaz and challenged the privileges of the country's
light-skinned aristocracy, but the social dualism of modern wheat bread and backwards corn tortillas
proved more immutable. Intellectuals and artists of the post-revolutionary period like Octavio Paz and
Diego Rivera waxed eloquent about corn, casting it as the embodiment of Mexico's authentic, pre-His-
panic cultural essence. But for post-revolutionary rulers and their working-class cadres, wheat still sym-
bolized the country's urban, industrial future.
Robert Weis, a historian of Mexican baking, argues that by 1929, white bread—particularly bolil-
los —had become a key symbol of the revolution's promise to ordinary consumers. 47 Heavily subsidized
by the government, white bread baking boomed. Even President Lázaro Cárdenas—who revived the
revolutionary spirit of Zapata and Villa between 1934 and 1940 with sweeping land reforms, anti-im-
perialist rhetoric, and the expropriation of foreign oil companies—preached the superiority of wheat
bread. 48
There was only one problem. Even as World War II ended, Mexico was still very much a peasant
country without the capacity to supply a large urban industrial workforce with cheap bread. In the coun-
try's traditional wheat-growing regions, overtaxed soils produced meager crops and declining yields.
New farmland in the north, opened up for wheat cultivation by ambitious government irrigation projects,
offered better prospects, but endemic plant disease—a plague of black stem rust—continued to cripple
production. 49
Meanwhile, in the cities, technology for turning wheat into bread had not advanced much since
the eighteenth century. Even the capital city supported only one large industrial bakery—la PanaderÍa