Question: Mexican cuisine began about 9000 years ago, 7000 BCE, when agricultural communities such as the Maya formed, domesticating maize, creating the standard process of corn nixtamalization, and establishing their foodways, successive waves of other Mesoamerican groups, including which ancient Mesoamerican city located in a sub-valley of the Valley of Mexico, located in the State of Mexico 40 km northeast of modern-day Mexico City?

Context articles: Marilyn Masson
Target One
Mexican cuisine
Oaxacan cuisine
Mesoamerican pyramids
List of Mayan languages
Tazumal
Teotihuacan
List of Mexican dishes
New Mexico chile

Marilyn Masson (born 1958) is a Maya archaeologist whose research has focused on social transformation and political economy of ancient Mesoamerican cultures in Mexico and Belize.
 She is a professor of Mesoamerican archaeology at the University at Albany, SUNY.
 She is a co-director of the PEMY (Proyecto los Fundamentos Ecónomico de Mayapán/Economic Foundations of Mayapán Project ) project at the site of Mayapan in the Northern Yucutan Peninsula of Mexico.
Target One, also called T1, is an ancient Mesoamerican city described by author Douglas Preston as located in the mountains of the Mosquitia region in the easternmost part of the modern state of Honduras (this despite the fact that there are no mountains in this part of the country).
 T1 is of particular archaeological significance because unlike any other Mesoamerican city ever recorded, T1, once abandoned, was not rediscovered by either local inhabitants nor expeditionary European explorers/ conquistadors until 2013 when it was finally revealed using LIDAR technology under purely speculative premises.
Mexican cuisine began about 9000 years ago, 7000 BCE, when agricultural communities such as the Maya formed, domesticating maize, creating the standard process of corn nixtamalization, and establishing their foodways.
 Successive waves of other Mesoamerican groups, including the Olmec, Teotihuacanos, Toltec, Huastec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Otomi, and Purépecha, brought with them their own cooking methods, contributing to the infusion.
Oaxacan cuisine is a regional cuisine of Mexico, centered on the city of Oaxaca, the capital of the state of the same name located in southern Mexico.
 Like the rest of Mexican cuisine, Oaxacan food is based on staples such as corn, beans and chile peppers, but there is a great variety of other ingredients and food preparations due to the influence of the state’s varied geography and indigenous cultures.
 Well known features of the cuisine include ingredients such as chocolate (often drunk in a hot preparation with spices and other flavorings), Oaxaca cheese, mezcal and grasshoppers (chapulines) with dishes such as tlayudas, Oaxacan style tamales and seven notable varieties of mole sauce.
 The cuisine has been praised and promoted by food experts such as Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless and is part of the state’s appeal for tourists.
Mesoamerican pyramids or pyramid-shaped structures form a prominent part of ancient Mesoamerican architecture.
 Although similar in shape or form, these structures bear only a very weak architectural resemblance to Egyptian pyramids.
 The Mesoamerican examples are usually step pyramids with temples on top – more akin to the ziggurats of Mesopotamia than to the pyramids of Ancient Egypt.
 The Mesoamerican region's largest pyramid by volume – indeed, the largest in the world by volume – is the Great Pyramid of Cholula, in the Mexican state of Puebla.
 Some classic Mesoamerican pyramids are littered with stories about the Hero Twins, the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, Mesoamerican creation myths, ritualistic sacrifice, etc. written in the form of hieroglyphs on the rises of the steps of the pyramids, on the walls, and on the sculptures contained within.
The Mayan languages are a family of languages spoken by the Maya people.
 The Maya form a group of approximately 7 million people descendant from an ancient Mesoamerican civilization and spread across the modern-day countries of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
 They speak descendant languages from their original Proto-Mayan language, and some of their languages were recorded in the form of glyphs of a Mayan script.
Tazumal (/täsuːˈm äl/ ) is a pre-Columbian Maya archeological site in Chalchuapa, El Salvador.
 Tazumal is an architectural complex within the larger area of the ancient Mesoamerican city of Chalchuapa, in western El Salvador.
 The Tazumal group is located in the southern portion of the Chalchuapa archaeological zone.
 Archaeologist Stanley Boggs excavated and restored the Tazumal complex during the 1940s and 1950s.
Teotihuacan , also written Teotihuacán (] ,    ), is an ancient Mesoamerican city located in a sub-valley of the Valley of Mexico, located in the State of Mexico 40 km northeast of modern-day Mexico City, known today as the site of many of the most architecturally significant Mesoamerican pyramids built in the pre-Columbian Americas.
Mexican cuisine is primarily a fusion of indigenous Mesoamerican cooking with European, especially Spanish, elements added after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in the 16th century.
 The basic staples remain native foods such as corn, beans, squash and chili peppers, but the Europeans introduced a large number of other foods, the most important of which were meat from domesticated animals (beef, pork, chicken, goat and sheep), dairy products (especially cheese) and various herbs and spices, although key spices in Mexican cuisine are also native to Mesoamerica such as a large variety of chili peppers, cilantro and vanilla.
New Mexico chile (or New Mexican chile) is a group of cultivars of the chile pepper, initially developed by pioneer horticulturist, Dr. Fabián Garcia, at New Mexico State University in 1894, then known as Las Cruces College and the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts.
 Selective breeding began with 14 lineages of 'Pasilla', 'Colorado', and 'Negro' cultivars, from across New Mexico and Southern Colorado's old Hispano and Pueblo communities.
 These peppers were selected to have a "larger smoother, fleshier, more tapering and shoulderless pod for canning purposes."
 The first cultivar of this group was released in 1913, called 'New Mexico No. 9'.
 The New Mexico chile peppers are popular in the cuisine of the Southwestern United States and in the broader Mexican cuisine, and an integral staple of New Mexican cuisine.