The Evolution of Puerto Vallarta Cuisine

Puerto Vallarta is a port-city located in western Mexico, in the Bahía de las Banderas, one of the largest bays in the world. From the point of view of its economy, we could say that it is the third most important tourist destination in the country. Only half a century ago, Puerto Vallarta was a modest shipping port and a tourist paradise for a handful of pioneering travelers. The transformation that Puerto Vallarta has undergone in recent decades is impressive. Thanks to the growth of tourism, it has gone from being a minor port, inhabited by commercial businessmen and fishermen, to one of the most visited spots in Mexico. This dramatic metamorphosis into a center of tourism has brought changes to its inhabitants’ food habits. Although they continue to follow food patterns that might be labelled ‘traditional’, there have also been major modifications to these habits.

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Eating in Puerto Vallarta

Barely four or five decades ago, Puerto Vallarta inhabitants lived a quiet life and had a diet free of industrialized and imported products. Those natural foods were produced locally and in the surrounding vicinity, although they also came from the countryside, from nearby mountain ranges, traditional and conservative areas, which the majority of inhabitants or their predecessors had left decades before. Their diet was composed of maize, beans and chilli -the ancient Mexican trinity- some locally grown vegetables and milk products, as well as domesticated cattle, fish and seafood was also consumed, since it was found in abundance.

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The availability of natural products consumed in those days was limited by the seasons, an aspect that few people remember today. The only exotic addition to this ancient diet was colored, sweetened and carbonated soft drinks, especially Coca Cola, which entered commercial establishments and popular taste, though still in an isolated fashion. The former inhabitants of Puerto Vallarta used to eat at home. However, following a time-honoured Mexican custom, they also ate in the street, by evening attending the cenadurías (night-time eating establishments), where the classic dish, pozolli (meat and maize stew), was served, as well as others derived from pre-Hispanic ingredients, enriched and transformed by the Spanish-indigenous merging of cultures. Memories of this way of eating are still nostalgic among older inhabitants.

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In the 1960’s, as part of the unstoppable growth of U.S. trade, Puerto Vallarta began to take on the guise of a tourist destination. With the burgeoning of foreign arrivals, as well as Mexican tourists, this small port of local businessmen and fishermen underwent a radical transformation. Its population rose from 5,000 inhabitants in 1950 to more than 180,000 in 2000, according to official statistics. This means a dramatic increase equivalent to 3,600 % in just five decades. Still, reliable sources, including municipal authorities, estimate that the real population of the port and the surrounding town easily surpasses 300,000, not including the floating population that arrives during the tourist season. During those years of increasing population, started the construction of enormous hotels to accommodate growing numbers of tourists, especially international ones, and a large number of restaurants and food establishments began to appear, offering numerous styles of food to satisfy every kind of consumer and newer social patterns of behavior. However, not to be outdone by these innovations, there was also an increase in traditional eating places, cenadurías, taco stands and seafood joints. Today, in Puerto Vallarta, it is said, one can find food for ‘every taste and every purse’.

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Puerto Vallarta currently has 219 districts. Their food supply comes from different sources. Certain perishable goods come from local suppliers, but most of them – over 70% – come from the wholesale market in the huge city of Guadalajara, 340 kilometers away. Meat and fish products are generally from local sources. Small scale producers and some distributors provide a wide variety of goods to specialist suppliers or directly to restaurants and food establishments. Large scale operators supply goods directly to warehouses where municipal markets and retailers obtain them: fruit, vegetables and groceries.

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People who attend municipal markets daily do so not only to obtain the freshest of perishable goods, but, while such visits form a daily ritual within their pattern of social interaction, they also provide the means to manage their scant budgets – which is the general rule. One advantage of making use of local markets, by far the most traditional form of shopping, is that the price of perishable goods tends to fall, since they lose their quality and freshness over time. Supermarkets, on the other hand, mainly held by transnational corporations, do not lower prices. The commercial principle here is standardization and selling large volumes of produce.

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Besides, the monopolistic nature of supermarkets enables them to handle roughly 80% of perishable goods that previously were handled by municipal markets. It is also the case that the pressures of modern life force many people – especially those who work during normal business hours, from eight in the morning till seven in the afternoon – to do their food shopping at regular intervals, usually once a week. By stocking in their refrigerators, they reduce daily visits to the market. As a last resort, they might visit the shop around the corner to obtain something they lack: some fruit or vegetables or pricey items from international monopolies of dubious nutritional value, or indeed local ones, as is the case of ‘Milpa Real’ tortillas (a packaged commercial brand), instead of the regular ones.

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Another tendency is to consume, especially at night and during holiday periods, food that is prefabricated (pizzas, fried or roast chicken, hamburgers or even tacos usually sold in the street) perhaps adapted to local tastes by the addition of spicy sauce or some other ingredients. However, the change of food items and their quality constitute a change in the food model.

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Rhythms of eating and health

Current patterns of work in large urban conglomerations force people to spend a great deal of time away from home. This is more than obvious in a place like Puerto Vallarta, where a large share of the employment is in the area of services. Work rhythms in this tourist destination make the majority of working people eat at least one of their two principal meals, around midday or in the afternoon, away from home. The third daily meal tends to be frugal and is eaten rapidly at home, either in the morning or in the evening. On the other hand, it must be said that Mexicans have a deeply rooted tradition of eating food in the street, which is not only regarded as a habit caused by work patterns, but is also due to ingrained habits.

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The majority of establishments which cater are the classic taco stands and seafood places. There are also a number of loncherías (a name derived from the English word ‘lunch’) and these are based on an eclectic variety of styles of food. In these, which generally open during the morning, a large number of dishes and drinks are offered. They offer items ranging from soft drinks to grilled meat, crisp fried tacos, hot cakes, ‘Cuban’ sandwiches, fruit milkshakes, hamburgers, orange juice and a plethora of dishes and drinks that belong to different cultural traditions now incorporated into Mexican taste. Apart from these establishments and restaurants registered as such, there are others such as the cenadurías, sellers of cheap take-away home cooking, lunch-time establishments, roast meat stalls and pizza vendors, as well as those of Mexican style fast food.

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A fair number of these establishments stick to regional culinary tradition; the rest have succumbed to external influence. Mixtures of various culinary traditions to be found: there are largely substitutes for what is known as ‘international food’, tex-mex, fast food and, more recently, those of Asiatic origin, entirely adapted to suit customers with limited resources. These are places where inhabitants of Puerto Vallarta eat, but also many visitors who venture beyond their hotel restaurants or those considered to be gastronomic ones.

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Changes in eating habits of Puerto Vallarta inhabitants affect not only where they eat (public or private), but also what they eat: breaded or grilled chicken, pizzas, hamburgers, hot dogs or raw fish, Japanese style. All these foods are adjusted to the local palate, i.e. with an added touch of chilli. On the other hand, some typical Mexican dishes receive new spices or are accompanied by imported products such as soy sauce, fish sauce or fruits and vegetables that were previously unknown. Outside influences are not only from other countries, but also from other regions of Mexico. For example, seafood tacos in the style of Baja California, which, apart from introducing new flavours, contribute to reducing the cost for vendors and consumers, as well as providing food for those who have lived in those regions or had contact with them.

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In Puerto Vallarta you find both in the public and private domains the juxtaposition of culinary traditions which are the result of the town’s dramatic transformation. This juxtaposition is not conservative nowadays, since it is possible to taste mixtures that are perhaps, for traditionalists, too daring. On the other hand, whether Puerto Vallarta inhabitants have greater or lesser access to this juxtaposition – mixing depends naturally on their buying power, their social status and their resistance to change. This explains why time-honoured taco stands and cenadurías remain the same, preserving their version of local-regional Mexican culinary tradition – that of the west of Mexico- which reflects their taste and promotes consumption, in addition to keeping the food readily affordable.

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In its ambition to promote tourism, Puerto Vallarta has become a place where there is a juxtaposition of culinary tendencies that are mixed or mediated by certain traditions, although Mexican tradition continues to be the dominant one. Since this juxtaposition resists conservatism, food patterns encourage the appearance of mixed culinary products, adapted to Mexican taste and spiced with chilli, of dubious nutritional quality.

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