Mexico’s fiery love affair with hot peppers

Published August 18, 2023

Step into a sizzling world where passion and pain entwine. As ancient as the Mexica pyramids and as thrilling as a roller coaster, the history of hot peppers unveils a secret: there’s a reason we love to turn up the heat!

In Mexica cosmology, hot peppers had their own goddess, Tlatlauhqui cihuatl ichilzintli, or “Respectable Lady of the Little Red Chili”, the sister of the more famous Tláloc, god of rain. In 1566, Spanish conquistador Bartolomé de las Casas famously wrote that “Without chili, Mexicans do not believe they are eating.”

Over millennia, our Mesoamerican ancestors learned to cultivate and eat chiles, native to South and Central America. Recognizing their different flavors and degrees of spiciness, they learned how to combine them with other ingredients. It is this accumulated wisdom that now makes chiles an icon of our beloved national cuisine.

Archaeological studies in southern Mexico have shown that the use of chiles in Mesoamerica may date all the way back to about 400 BCE. Peppers were an important part of the pre-Columbian diet, along with corn, beans, tomato and squash.

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