el crispito

At a social gathering a while ago, someone asked what it was about a tomato that actually made it a fruit and not a vegetable. I responded that it was something about the seeds being on the inside. That lead to the comment that the seeds are on the insides of of a zucchini too, but we don't call it a fruit. That is true, I thought, and I put it in the back of my mind to look up later: why is it then that a tomato is actually a fruit and not a vegetable?

Last night, while fixing Shawn's lunch for today (which interestingly enough did not involve a single tomato), I remembered this debate and decided to look it up in the Wikipedia, where these things were clarified. In short, the tomato is a fruit because the part we eat is the ovary, containing the seeds within it. It is true that a zucchini also has this going on, but technically, it's a fruit too. A lot of things are fruits that we think of as vegetables: eggplants, pumpkins, chiles, etc. As an interesting side note to this, because in 1887, a tariff was put on vegetables and not fruits, the U.S. Supreme Court decided (Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304) that for legal purposes, foods would be classified by their use not by their scientific classifications, and since a tomato was eaten with dinner and not with dessert, it was a vegetable and not a fruit, and therefore (surprise!) was subject to the payment of duties.

Yet another interesting side note is that tomatoes originated on the west coast of South America. It is part of the Nightshade family, and while eventually cultivated by the Spanish after their arrival in the New World, the tomato has now and again been regarded as being poisonous. American Indians did not cultivate it as a food before the arrival of the Spanish, but the Spanish brought it back to Europe. Before Italy fell in love with it, they avoided it as poisonous and used it only as a decorative plant. They loosened up a bit when they saw that the Spaniards were not dying from eating tomatoes, and look what they've done with it since. There's even a rumor that a British secret agent tried to kill George Washington by feeding him a dish laced with tomatoes. [source]

So the indigenous peoples of the Americas aren't why we eat the tomato; that distinction belongs to the Spanish. But they are the reason we call it what we call it, becuase the Náhuatl word for tomato is tomatl. Today in modern-day Mexico, they call it a jitomate. Oddly enough, they refer to a green tomato as a tomate; in other Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, like Colombia, the red kind is a tomate.

The truth of the matter is, it should not come as a surprise that Náhuatl words are used in the United States as well as Mexico. There are many foods that are indigenous to this hemisphere, and obviously their first names came from indigenous people. Perhaps the best known (and loved) of these is chocolate, but there are several others. As these foods gained popularity throughout the world, their Náhuatl names were carried with them, even if slightly altered from the original form.

Furthermore, Náhuatl, the second most-used language in Mexico, is part of the Uto-Aztecan group, a Native American linguistic family which is in turn one of the largest in the Americas. It's range goes from Oregon south through Mexico. The Uto-Aztecan languages are believed to have originated in what is now the American Southwest: Arizona or New Mexico. (Interestingly, Navajo is not one of the Uto-Aztecan languages; it belongs to the Na-Dené family.) There are 1.5 speakers of one Náhuatl dialect or another. Although no dialect matches Classical Náhuatl, it is believed that the Náhuatl spoken in the Valley of Mexico is the most similar to it.

To me, this Náhuatl influence on the Spanish of Mexico is tricky. There are names for places and things here that seem like long clusters of consonates with an occasional vowel thrown in, and they pop up like speed bumps in newspaper articles, news broadcasts and historical accounts. Teocuitlatlan , Acaxochitlan, Mihuiittilmoyoccuitlantonpicixochitl - try saying those ten times fast.

Náhuatl is part of the language of Mexico. There are at least 60 others, all of them recognized by the government as equally valid. This doesn't threaten Spanish speakers; they've been dominating the indigenous cultures here for nearly 500 years and that's not going to change any time soon. By allowing these minority languages and cultures legal recognition, the dominant culture is not diminuished. It simply recognizes the historical and present-day reality that it is one of many diverse cultures in Mexico, and instead of trying to fight it and force everybody into one heterogenous mass, they respect and groove on it.