Photographs by Kurt Hollander.

There is a real possibility that the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will be scrapped and that commercial trade between the United States and Mexico will be sharply curtailed, directly affecting the importation to Mexico from the USA of, among other things, food. This, however, might not be all bad for Mexico. Mexican culture has survived for thousands of years in large part due to the food the people living here have produced and consumed, but today Mexican food in Mexico is no longer so Mexican.

I arrived in Mexico City in 1989 (four and a half years before NAFTA went into effect). The endless variety of cheap, tasty foodstuffs available on the street, in markets and in simple restaurants was amazing. At that time, food in Mexico City was relatively inexpensive and you could still find food everywhere that represented an uninterrupted continuation of millennial traditions. Today, the food eaten in Mexico City, especially in the “trendy” neighborhood of Condesa where I’ve lived since 1989, has changed radically, and these changes affect more than just food preparation and reflect more than just culinary trends.

The Condesa wasn’t yet a neighborhood when the Jockey Club’s dog track and polo field were built there at the end of the 19th century. After the Revolution, when the playgrounds of the rich were being dismantled across the country, the racetrack was converted into a park. A community soon grew up around the park, populated in large part by European Jewish immigrants and characterized by the Art Deco architectural style brought over from the Old World. For most of the 20th century, Condesa was a mixed neighborhood, both in terms of class, nationality, in its residential and commercial mix, as well as its variety of food options.

The European immigrants, in an effort to conserve their own culture, started up several neighborhood restaurants that served the emigrant community. Besides these traditional European restaurants, there were also several fondas, the term for family-run, home-style restaurants that serve comida corridas (a succession of small portions of soup, rice, main course, fruit drink, dessert), and several taco restaurants that offer all kinds of meat wrapped in tortillas.

A rich variety of indigenous cooking, developed long before any European set foot in the city, has long been found on the streets of Condesa, as well. Throughout the week, women hunch over large metal comales, fanning the coal burning underneath, tending to quesadillas stuffed with beans, nopales, huitlacoche (corn mold) and pumpkin flowers. Pushcarts with glass display cases roam the neighborhood offering plastic cups chock full of sliced mango, papaya and other native...