The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands

In “Can Foreigners Handle the Heat? Mexico City Debates Milder Salsas?,” published in The New York Times on July 6, 2024, James Wagner notes how some taquerías around the capital of Mexico have modified their use of heat, provided by chiles, in their salsas to cater to the palate of tourists and other foreigners who have moved to the city on a significant scale since the COVID-19 pandemic. The article caused great commotion around the Mexican community in part because Mexicans have been denouncing the active practices of gentrification in the city and also, in great part, because, as Wagner explains, “chiles are fundamental to Mexican cuisine and, in turn, to the country's identity.” The recentness of this article brings forward an important issue: More attention needs to be paid to the aesthetic capacities of heat, specifically relative to chile eating.In his book The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands, Victor M. Valle takes on the task of delineating the historical and aesthetic place of chiles in Mesoamerican cultures. Valle does so by contrasting “Native and colonizing metaphors of chile eating in the critical space this distinction opens to identify indigenizing logics and practices we may improvise to survive catastrophic climate change” (p. 7). Valle's centering of the sensorial, articulated through the field of eco-aesthetics, inserts itself in a scholarly tradition, opened by Indigenous studies, folklore studies, and food studies, that proposes to look at the senses and aesthetics regimes as colonial projects.By employing “post-disciplinary strategies” (p. 11), Poetics of Fire juxtaposes the centrality of the metaphor of chile eating in Western and Indigenous cultures to the Americas in order to imagine other worlds through language. Metaphors of chile eating, which serve as the weaving threads and organizing logic of the book, invite readers to consider the bodily experience in the production of knowledge.Throughout the seven chapters of this book, the author visits key metaphor-forming moments and mediums to illustrate the role of the body, the senses, and language in world-making in Mesoamerican aesthetic regimes. For instance, in chapter 1, Valle looks at the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex, an encyclopedia of Nahua culture and language, and the Nahuatl di-phrase, “in chili, in iztal” (the chile, the salt), and invites readers to consider the dual role of chiles in the production of language and taste. Similarly, chapter 3 considers Mesoamerican relational aesthetics, focusing on the place of metaphors in mythmaking and representation. In doing so, it provides the tools for understanding how everyday culinary practices such as milpa agriculture or piquant tamales with pulque reproduce Mesoamerican cosmovision. Colonial understandings of taste certainly play an important role in the book, particularly in chapters 2 and 5. These chapters look at the vast yet similar representations of food cultures in communities that are Indigenous to the Americas. Chapter 2 explores the colonial categorization of comida de indios (food of the Indigenous people) and its place within the imagination of Mexican cuisine today in the borderlands. Understanding taste as part of a colonial system, Valle creates an opening to consider the relations between taste, food, and the land, and their part in colonial projects. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the role of chile as a plant, crop, and food. Particularly, these chapters aid in understanding the role of chile in the development of economic systems, a significant intervention that expands dialogues between ecocriticism and environmental and food studies.Given the wide range of topics that Valle touches on while guiding readers through different political, economic, environmental, and aesthetic places that chile occupies, this book makes a significant contribution to the fields of folklore studies, food studies, environmental studies, Indigenous studies, Latin American studies, and Latinx studies. While the target audience of this book is primarily academic, the casual reader of food history and foodways may also benefit. Chapter 2 is particularly captivating for scholars and readers beyond academia who are interested in learning about the genealogy of the Western aesthetic regimes and shifts in paradigms of taste in Western culture as well as in Indigenous cultures. Although this chapter aids in understanding how first colonial encounters with aji—an indigenous Taino piquant pepper—in today's Caribbean relate to later representations of chile in Mesoamerican food cultures, Valle makes clear that comparative work needs to be done, specifically looking at changes in taste regimes and the place of heat in Caribbean food cultures that include the Yucatán Peninsula. The Poetics of Fire is an indispensable book for considering the place of heat, specifically through chile eating, in Mesoamerican aesthetics.