Central America’s Two Coasts — a note

Comparison

⚠ THE MOST IMPORTANT WARNING IN THIS FILE. Six of the seven Central American states front both the PACIFIC and the CARIBBEAN, and the two sides are different food worlds. THE PACIFIC AND HIGHLAND SIDE — where most people live — is Mesoamerican: nixtamalised MAIZE, the tortilla and the comal, beans, squash, chile, cacao, pork, cattle and dairy, Spanish colonial settlement and a Mestizo-Indigenous population. THE CARIBBEAN SIDE — thinly populated, long outside effective Spanish control, and in places under British influence instead — is COCONUT, cassava, plantain, rice and beans cooked in coconut milk, seafood, and Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities speaking creole English, Miskitu, Garifuna and Rama. ⚠ THE TWO SIDES OF NICARAGUA, HONDURAS, COSTA RICA AND PANAMA HAVE LESS IN COMMON WITH EACH OTHER THAN EACH HAS WITH ITS COUNTERPART ACROSS THE BORDER.

What is recorded

Central American foodways are recorded across a Pacific/highland Mesoamerican system and a Caribbean coastal system that are documented as materially different in staples, technique, population and language. Six of the seven states front both coasts. The two sides of individual countries are recorded as having less in common with each other than each has with its counterpart across national borders. documented

Spanish conquest of the isthmus; the Captaincy General of Guatemala is established, while the Caribbean coasts remain largely outside effective Spanish control. documented

Related foodways

This foodway relates to