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Tex-Mex, Cal-Mex, New Mex, or Whose Mex? Notes on the Historical Geography of Southwestern Cuisine.
by Jeffrey M. Pilcher
Residents of the United States often have a peculiar view of Mexican food,
drawn more from Mexican American restaurants or from fast food
simulations than from actual experience south of the border. While the
combination plates at local restaurants offer little of the rich
complexity of Mexico's regional cuisines, they do have a history of
their own, one that reflects the ongoing struggle of Mexican Americans
to gain acceptance and citizenship in the United States.
(1) The cooking of the Southwest, like
Mexican cooking in general, embodies a fusion of Native American and
Hispanic influences, the legacy of three centuries of first Spanish and
then Mexican rule. As examples of a common regional style, norteno
cooking, the dishes from different parts of the borderlands--resemble
each other more than they do the foods of other parts of Mexico. One
distinctive characteristic of northern Mexican cooking is the use of
wheat flour instead of corn in making tortillas. The great herds of
livestock raised along the frontier made nortenos more carnivorous, in
particular more fond of beef, than Mexicans farther south. On the other
hand, the grassy plains and arid deserts of the north, well suited to
cattle ranching and irrigated wheat farming, offered less variety in
vegetables, herbs, and chiles, limiting the potential for complex
sauces and soups. These common elements notwithstanding, considerable
variety also exists within Southwestern cooking. Cheryl Alters Jamison
and Bill Jamison, in their authoritative work The Border Cookbook,
define four broad regions straddling the U.S.-Mexican border: Texas and
northeastern Mexico, New Mexico, Sonora, and California. This essay
will describe these differing cooking styles from a historical and
geographical perspective.
(2) Native Americans and Hispanics in
the Southwest already had long-established culinary traditions in 1848,
when Mexico surrendered California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to
the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The predominantly
male fortune seekers who migrated to the region alternately looked down
on the racially mixed residents and married into the more
European-appearing elite, while grabbing land and wealth on an
equal-opportunity basis. A peculiar gender dynamic emerged in which
Anglo newcomers feminized the male inhabitants--think of stereotypes of
passive Mexican men in dress-like serapes and big, gaudy sombreros--and
sexualized the women as "hot tamales" and "chili queens." In this
contentious environment, the women's work of cooking and the
traditionally male task of grilling meat became sites of cultural
conflict and accommodation. Simultaneously attracted to and repelled by
the piquant stews of Hispanic women in San Antonio, Anglo males
ultimately appropriated chili by taming the hot peppers into a
mass-produced and easily regulated powder. Outsiders found some Mexican
American dishes simply repulsive, most notably menudo (tripe), thereby
making them powerful symbols of ethnic identity. Between these two
extremes, most Southwestern dishes gradually entered the mestizo stew
that makes up the cuisine of the United States, acquiring new tastes
and forms but maintaining clear links to their ethnic origins.
(3) CORN MOTHERS AND ANIMAL SPIRITS
For more than a thousand years, cooks
of the Southwest have taken inspiration from the civilizations of
Mesoamerica. The agricultural complex of maize, beans, and squash,
domesticated in central Mexico, gradually diffused through much of
North America in the first millennium of the Common Era. The staple
tortilla--made by simmering maize in mineral lime (CaO) grinding it
into masa (dough) on a metate (grinding stone), patting it into a flat
round shape, and cooking it briefly on a griddle--had also begun to
arrive in the Southwest before the Spaniards, as had the more elaborate
tamales, dumplings made of the same dough steamed in cornhusks.
Justifiably proud of their elaborate cuisine, the inhabitants of the
Valley of Mexico dismissed their northern neighbors contemptuously as
Chichimecas (dog-people) for their scavenging ways. Nevertheless, the
lack of large domesticated animals reduced even the haughty warriors of
the Aztec Empire to considerable hunting and gathering to supplement
their basically vegetarian diet, thus belying some of their claims to
superiority over cooks from the northern frontier. An assortment of wild plants and
animals formed the common basis for human subsistence in the Southwest.
With its large size and savory meat, the deer stood out as the favorite
game animal for much of North America, although Indians hunted smaller
game as well, including peccaries, rabbits, mice, rats, and snakes.
Edible desert plants such as the prickly pear, mesquite bean pods,
maguey, and a variety of roots, herbs, and quelites (greens)
supplemented the hunt. In some areas nature provided so abundantly that
the inhabitants had little incentive to undertake agriculture and
instead could wander freely. For example, in the coastal regions of
present-day California, acorns fell so profusely from the trees that
the Indians could gather them as a daily staple, along with the
plentiful fruits, berries, and game animals (see figure 1). The Seri
Indians, living in what is now the Mexican state of Sonora, caught
enough fish and sea turtles in the Gulf of California to feed
themselves without agriculture. The Gulf of Mexico, particularly around
the Rio Grande delta, yielded a similarly rich catch, although maize
agriculture had begun to make inroads in this region when the Spaniards
arrived. Even some inland areas, such as the confluence of the Rio
Grande and the Rio Conchos, offered plentiful freshwater mussels and
fish, but again not to the exclusion of floodplain agriculture.
(4)
The nomadic life of the California
and Seri Indians contrasted sharply with the lifestyle in the Pueblo
villages along the Rio Grande and the Little Colorado and Pecos Rivers.
Irrigated maize agriculture supported large communities, in some cases
numbering in the thousands and living in multistory mud-brick apartment
houses. The Pueblo Indians consumed the staple corn in a variety of
ways: toasted, boiled, and as gruel. In addition, the Spanish
conquistadors described the making of tortillas and tamales; indeed,
Coronado praised the Zuni tortillas as the best he had ever eaten.
Nevertheless, the Spaniards did not mention the use of chiles, the
principal flavoring of central Mexico. The Pueblo people also raised
domesticated turkeys, but their sedentary life and advanced agriculture
did not preclude hunting and gathering. Pinon nuts, gathered in the
fall, added greatly to the Pueblo diet, and the Pecos Indians even
ventured out onto the Great Plains to hunt bison. The people at Pecos
may also have caught large amounts of trout, while the Zuni considered
fish taboo.
(5) The majority of the Southwestern
Indians were semi-sedentary, growing maize while still depending
heavily on hunting and gathering. Called rancheria people by the
Spaniards, they generally lived in bands numbering two or three
hundred, spread out over considerable distances, and often migrating
during the course of the year. The rancheria people comprised the
Tarahumara and Conchos of the western Sierra Madre (Chihuahua); the
Yaqui and Mayo, inhabiting river valleys of the same names; as well as
their northern neighbors, the Lower Pima and Opata (Sonora), the Yuma
in the Colorado River valley, and the Upper Pima and Tohono O'odham
along various rivers in the Sonoran Desert (northwestern Sonora and
southern Arizona). In addition, the Athabaskan-speaking people later
known as Navajos and Apaches had recently migrated into the region from
the north and were beginning to cultivate maize when the Spaniards
arrived. While much of their harvest of corn, beans, and squash was
simply roasted along with any game they may have caught, the rancheria
people made pinole by adding toasted and ground maize seeds to water,
and baked loaves of corn and mesquite bread. Some also drank a mildly
alcoholic beverage of fermented cactus fruit.
(6) A common theme unified the lives of
these otherwise disparate peoples, that of constant movement. Even the
most settled Puebloans had to relocate regularly, rebuilding their
adobe homes in the process, in order to find more fertile land in the
arid climate. The agricultural Pueblo societies were matrilineal, and
some authors have suggested that women may have fared better there than
in the patriarchal hunter-gatherer societies of California. Moreover,
the Pueblo Indians worshipped Corn Mothers as fertility symbols at the
heart of their religious beliefs, while the rancheria peoples, who had
adopted agriculture more recently, attached less religious significance
to corn. But regardless whether the Native Americans believed in animal
spirits or corn goddesses, their encounter with Spanish priests changed
their diet as well as their religion.
(7) FRONTIER FOODS OF NEW SPAIN
The conquistadors' mission of
Europeanizing the Americas--literally founding a New Spain--required
the simultaneous introduction of Old World plants and animals and the
extirpation of native foods associated with heathen religious
practices. Father Bernardino de Sahagun instructed the Indians to eat
"that which the Castilian people eat, because it is good food, that
with which they are raised, they are strong and pure and wise.... You
will become the same way if you eat their food."
(8) Yet his
nutritional advice, like much of the Catholic doctrine, was accepted
only halfway. Native Americans embraced some new foods, particularly
livestock, while clinging stubbornly to their staple crops of maize,
beans, squash, and chiles. A mestizo cuisine eventually emerged,
combining foods from the Old World and the New, just as intermarriage
between Spaniards and Indians produced Mexico's mestizo nation. These
mixtures spread to the northern provinces as well, and on that distant
frontier, mestizo society and culture were often mistaken for Spanish
originals. Catholic priests, whose evangelical
mission to the Indians served to justify Spain's empire in the
Americas, demanded radical changes in the lives of the new initiates.
The European belief that civilization required permanent settlements
brought an end to the nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle of many
rancheria peoples, although the introduction of livestock compensated
in part for the decline in hunting. Prohibitions on polygamy, together
with the introduction of European diseases against which the natives
had little resistance, decimated the indigenous social organization.
Natives responded to these changes in different ways; the Yaquis
embraced the missions, adopting far more of the newly emerging Mexican
culture, including the cooking techniques, than did the neighboring
Mayo. Among the Athabaskan people, some settled down to become
sheepherders, blending their culture with that of the Pueblos and
taking the name Navajo. Others took only the Spanish horses, and by the
1660s, the Apaches, as they were called, had become a menace to both
Spanish and Pueblo settlements. Pacification policies encouraged
further acculturation through handouts of food and alcohol to make the
Apaches dependent on Spanish officials and the distribution of
defective firearms to limit the destruction when they did go on raids.
(9) If the spiritual conquest
legitimized the colonies, the prospect of making a quick fortune
attracted Spanish settlers. After looting the Aztec Empire, the
conquistadors set out for the north in search of the fabled Seven
Cities of Cibola, where legend had it that the streets were paved with
gold. The expedition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado reached the Zuni
Pueblos in 1540, discovering the reality to be a more prosaic adobe.
The silver bonanza at Zacatecas in 1548 attracted the first permanent
European settlement in the north and also led to the construction of
presidios to protect the treasure on the Royal Road back to Mexico
City. Juan de Onate, a silver miner made wealthy in Zacatecas,
established the colony of New Mexico in 1598, although the Pueblo
Revolt of 1680 temporarily forced the Spaniards to withdraw to El Paso
del Norte. The rest of the Southwest remained unsettled by Europeans
until the eighteenth century, when imperial defense requirements
promoted a more active Spanish presence. French incursions from
Louisiana into Texas led to the foundation of San Antonio in 1718,
while Apache raids in Sonora motivated the construction of a presidio
at Tucson in 1776. Finally, the appearance of Russian trappers on the
northern Pacific coast prompted the crown to transfer troops from
Sonora and Sinaloa to new presidios in California.
(10) The new settlers, although
generally mestizos from central Mexico, attempted to construct a
Spanish society on the northern frontier. The Iberian Peninsula had a
medieval tradition of mounted cattle raising--the vaquero culture later
appropriated by Anglo cowboys--but the scrawny range cattle were often
butchered for their hides alone, leaving the meat behind to rot. The
settlers preferred sheep and goats, especially prizing cabrito asado
(roast kid) as a delicacy throughout the frontier region. Cooking
techniques often amounted to methods of preservation such as making
cheese or sausage. The colonists also produced large amounts of carne
seca, a form of jerky made by cutting beef into long strips and drying
it in the desert sun inside a cage to keep the flies out. To preserve
pork, they made a vinegar marinade called adovo, heavily spiced with
chiles to distinguish it from similar Spanish preparations. Whenever
irrigation permitted, the settlers cultivated the European grain wheat,
although the expense of mills and ovens often forced women to grind the
grain on metates and cook it in the form of tortillas rather than
bread. The pervasive use of chiles in stews and salsas likewise
demonstrated the Native American influence on Spanish cuisine. The rich
agricultural land of California allowed the production of those
Mediterranean staples, wine and olives, unavailable elsewhere in New
Spain, but even the wealthiest settlers ate a generally Spartan diet
with only an occasional luxury such as imported chocolate. Those sturdy
frontier foods later became the foundation for Southwestern cuisine and
a bulwark of Mexican American identity.
(11) DECONSTRUCTING CHILI/E
Chili or chile? Chili con carne or
carne con chile? Chile verde or carne verde? Southwestern cuisine often
seems as baffling as it is intimidating to newcomers who have not yet
developed a tolerance for spicy foods. The confusion derives from both
regional and temporal differences; for example, a person who asks, "Red
or green?" is now answering the question, "Where are you? New Mexico."
Prior to refrigeration, the color question was seasonal, had the fresh
green chiles ripened and turned red while drying on the ristra? But
however varied their cooking styles, Hispanics in the Southwest faced a
common question that struck to the heart of their identity: were they
Mexican or Spanish? For more than a century after the United States
annexed the region, former Mexican citizens, accustomed to fluid racial
boundaries, struggled to find a place in a society that saw only black
and white. They claimed Spanish descent in an attempt to gain equal
status as Europeans, but in doing so, often shunned their fellow
Mexicans who had migrated north more recently. The permutations of
chile reflect the diverse experiences of Hispanics as they encountered
Anglo society and established their citizenship in the United States.
(12) New Mexico, the oldest European
settlement in North America, also has the most firmly established
cuisine in the Southwest. Centered around the capital, Santa Fe, this
cooking style extends beyond the geographical confines of the state to
include the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, the mountains around
Flagstaff in northern Arizona, and parts of Chihuahua, Mexico (see
figure 2). The soul of Mexican cuisine has always been the chile
pepper, but while the cooks of Old Mexico experimented with blending
different chiles to make their renowned mole sauces, in New Mexico they
perfected the cultivation and cooking of a single chile. The state's
eponymous pepper forms the basic ingredient for both chile verde and
chile colorado, which can be served thick as a sauce or with broth and
vegetables as a stew, although in the latter case the green is more
common, sometimes with the name carne con chile verde or chile verde
caldo to distinguish it from the sauce. For those unable to choose
between the two sauces, restaurants in New Mexico offer a combination
of red and green known as Christmas. Unlike Mexican moles, which gain
their taste and texture from freshly ground peppers, chile colorado is
often simply a mixture of chile powder and water, perhaps thickened by
a roux, with garlic, oregano, and salt to taste. As Santa Fe cooking
authority Huntley Dent explains, red chile "savors of mystique, not so
much for its own taste, which is earthy and fairly musty, as for its
ability to combine with corn tortillas, meat, and cheese."
(13) The traditional cooking of New Mexico
comprises a variety of dishes, often made with distinctive local
twists. The celebrated blue corn and the little-known chicos (roasted
green ears) are both hallmarks of the state, which is also the only
place cooks serve the hominy dish posole as a vegetable side order
rather than a meaty stew. Pork rather than beef came to replace kid and
mutton as the most common meat, used both for chile stews and the
colonial dish carne adovada, which remains a favorite in New Mexico.
Meals end with such distinctive desserts as the fried-bread sopaipillas
and bunuelos or the enigmatic sprouted-wheat pudding panocha. Moreover,
different cooking styles appear within New Mexico, particularly in the
rivalry between north and south. The residents of Chimayo and Espanola
take pride in the intense flavor their diminutive chiles develop while
shivering in the shadows of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. "Down there
in the south," explained farmer Orlando Casados, Sr., "a lot of those
chiles are as big as a banana, but they taste like cardboard, no flavor
at all. This is the best place for growing chile in the whole world."
Nevertheless, people down south in the "Chile Capital" of Hatch, New
Mexico, feel equally proud of the rellenos (stuffed chiles) served at
their annual Chile Festival. Hispanics in Colorado meanwhile consider
their chile verde superior because of the quality of the local pork.
(14) The regional cooking of Sonora,
encompassing both the Mexican state and the southern half of Arizona,
gave much less emphasis to the heat of the chile pepper. The classic
New Mexico stew carne con chile verde changed so radically when made
with mild Anaheim peppers that some Arizona cooks dropped the word
"chile" entirely and referred to it simply as "carne verde." The dish
also featured beef instead of pork, a tribute to the herds of cattle
raised in the valleys of the Sonoran Desert. Even after the advent of
refrigeration, one of the most common methods of preparing beef
remained the colonial style of jerky, sometimes called machaca, for the
pounding needed to reconstitute it. Cookbook author Diana Kennedy noted
that cooks throughout the state of Sonora kept a large black pebble for
this purpose. Flour tortillas, while common throughout the Southwest,
also reached the peak of artistry in Sonora, where cooks often roll
them out to perfectly round, paper-thin disks a foot and a half in
diameter. When wrapped around beef or bean fillings to make burritos,
they became "possibly the single heaviest fastfood item in the world,"
which in turn took the name chimichanga (basically meaning
"thingamajig") when deep fried.
(15) New Mexico and Arizona shared a
common isolation, which kept the territories from reaching full
statehood in the nineteenth century and also allowed the Mexican
communities to retain their cultural integrity. Of course, Anglos came
to dominate politics and most Hispanics remained strictly working
class; nevertheless, a substantial Mexican American middle class
preserved its economic position and cultural heritage by renaming it
Spanish. Eventually, the same rugged mountains and stark desert
landscapes that had repelled immigrants in the nineteenth century
attracted them when air conditioning and ski lifts arrived following
World War II, leading to a real estate boom that drove increasing
numbers of Hispanics from their land around Santa Fe, Taos, and Tucson.
By contrast, Mexicans in Texas and California did not have a century of
isolation to consolidate their social position, for the dispossession
of land followed immediately on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
(16) While the origins of Texas's chili
con carne remain shrouded in culinary legend, the subsequent
development of the dish reveals a process of both racial stereotyping
and cultural appropriation. The dish probably began as a stew, made of
goat or deer meat as often as beef, and spiced with red chiles, cumin,
and oregano, which remain the distinctive flavors of Tex-Mex cooking as
cooking expert Marilyn Tausend has observed. Subtleties of taste were
lost on Anglo visitors to nineteenth-century San Antonio, who rarely
made it past the initial shock of the chile peppers. In 1874, for
example, Edward King described "fat, swarthy Mexican mater-familias"
offering "various savory compounds, swimming in fiery pepper, which
biteth like a serpent." The imagined dangers, both culinary and sexual,
of the so-called chili queens on Military Plaza enticed countless
tourists, who remembered the city "because of the Chili Stands, the
Menger Hotel, and the Alamo." But the Hispanic cooks did not share in
the profits from mass-marketing their dish; in 1896, a German
immigrant, William Gebhardt, formulated the chili powder known as
Tampico Dust, which helped spread the taste for chili across the
country. Already tamed down for timid palates, chili underwent other
alterations, the side order of beans was unceremoniously dumped into
the pot, and it was added to hot dogs and, in Cincinnati, even to
spaghetti. Meanwhile, back in San Antonio, after a long struggle with
city inspectors, the original chili stands closed down as supposed
health hazards in the 1930s.
(17) Chili had been stripped of its
ethnicity to become the state dish of Texas, but Mexican Americans
retained a repertoire of other foods that affirmed their identity
precisely because of the scorn they attracted from the Anglo elite.
Although it had lost favor in New Mexico and California, cabrito asado
remained as popular in south Texas as in northeastern Mexico,
particularly Monterrey, where it attained legendary status. Anglos had
little use for goat, but the only beef that poor Mexican Americans
could afford was the viscera. One such castoff cut, the diaphragm
muscle (arrachera), lost its tough texture in a marinade of lime juice
and garlic and became quite delicious when grilled on an open fire and
served with salsa on hot, fresh tortillas. Perhaps the most beloved
dish of working-class Mexican Americans, and the most repulsive one to
outsiders, was the pit-barbecued bull head (barbacoa de cabeza). The
two-day process of preparing the pit, cooking the meat, and serving it
up messily as tacos invited communal celebrations, drinking, and
dancing among Hispanics.
(18) Legends of Texas chili
notwithstanding, the most mysterious branch of Southwestern cuisine is
the original art of California ranch cooking. Unlike the thriving
Hispanic cultures of New Mexico, Arizona, and south Texas, Californio
society now exists only as a memory, distorted by the assimilation of a
small elite into Anglo society and by more recent Mexican migrants, who
far outnumber the descendants of the original settlers. Nevertheless, a
few tastes of that pastoral era can be gleaned from the first
Spanish-language cookbook published in the state, El cocinero espanol
(1898) by Encarnacion Pinedo. An heiress to one of the most prominent
Californio families, the Berreyesa clan, she was born in the tragic
year of 1848, as a swarm of Anglo fortune hunters descended to swindle
away the family estates and to lynch eight of her uncles and cousins.
Determined to maintain the dignity of Hispanic culture, Pinedo gave a
stinging rebuke to the barbarous Yankee invaders, describing their food
as "the most insipid and tasteless that one can imagine." Her own
recipes, written in a lively literary style, derived from classical
Mexican dishes such as moles, tamales, chiles rellenos, and barbacoa de
cabeza, even though she disguised them with Spanish titles. As Victor
Valle has observed, "The Mexican roots of [modern] California cuisine
can also be detected in her liberal use of fruits and vegetables, fresh
edible flowers and herbs, her aggressive spicing, and grilling over
native wood fires."
(19) Pinedo's cookbook provided an
eloquent example of Hispanics' widespread use of food to affirm their
identity against the threat of Anglo encroachment. Jacqueline Higuera
McMahan has written a series of nostalgic cookbooks, laden with family
history, which describe the culinary encounters of old California. The
Yankee newcomers were apparently so astonished to see people eat chiles
for breakfast that they attributed to Californios the digestive system
of ostriches. The Higueras meanwhile repeated the fiction that they had
lost their Santa Clara ranch to finance the legendary 1865 wedding
festival of Don Valentin's favorite daughter, Maria. Although declining
in society, the family at least took comfort from the belief that they
had a more civilized lifestyle than the Anglo land grabbers around
them. Twentieth-century migrants brought their own regional dishes with
them from Mexico and often used these foods to defend themselves
against racial discrimination. Victor Villasenor, in his best-selling
family memoir, Rain of Gold, recalled his grandmother's words, "Don't
worry about the police. One day we'll feed them tacos with so much old
chile that they'll get diarrhea and their assholes will burn for
weeks!"
(20) Encounters between ethnic foods and
mainstream consumers have remained sites of cultural contention
throughout the twentieth century, as Mexicans faced the contradictory
impulses to preserve their culture intact or to profit from adapting
the foods for a general audience. Enclave restaurants sprang up
wherever large numbers of Mexicans settled more or less permanently to
work. By the beginning of the century, such small-time establishments
existed all along the border as well as in more distant urban areas
such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City. Moreover, many restaurants
acquired a Mexican character when Anglo owners discovered the profits
they could make by allowing their Hispanic kitchen staff to cook their
own foods. One such successful restaurateur, who had started out with
just a shack selling hamburgers and barbecue in Tucson and was facing
ruin when his Mexican cook quit, begged her to write down the formulas.
"Oh no," Esperanza Montoya Padilla replied, "I'm dumb enough to work
for you, but I'm not dumb enough to give you my recipes!"
(21) The combination plate, rarely seen
in Mexico but one of the mainstays of Mexican American restaurants, may
have originated in Texas early in the twentieth century as an
adaptation to Anglo customers. Tacos, enchiladas, tostadas, and
burritos, known collectively as antojitos (little whimsies), had long
provided quick meals to working-class Mexicans, who often ate them
standing on a street corner. Mainstream diners required a more formal
meal, including a plate and silverware, so Hispanic cooks complied,
perhaps spreading quantities of red chili sauce on top because the
customers were using forks anyway. Anglo expectations for a quick plate
full of food, as opposed to the Mexican preference for separate,
smaller courses, encouraged cooks to combine the main dish with rice
(usually eaten prior to the main course) and beans (eaten after).
Numbering the combination plates relieved non-Spanish speakers of the
need to pronounce what they were eating, a strategy also adopted by
Chinese cooks seeking a crossover clientele. About 1940, the
combination plate even made its way back to Mexico when flamboyant
restaurateur Jose Ines Loredo created his signature dish, carne asada a
la tampiquena. This butterflied and grilled filet, served with poblano
chile strips, two green enchiladas, a bowl of frijoles, and a piece of
grilled cheese, introduced the regional foods of Loredo's hometown,
Tampico, to residents of Mexico City.
(22) Small restaurants have a high
mortality rate, and Mexican American establishments are no exception;
nevertheless a few have survived through the years to attain the status
of enduring monuments. The names of these restaurants have become local
legends: in Los Angeles, El Cholo, founded in 1923 as the Sonora Cafe;
Tucson's El Charro Cafe, dating back to 1922; La Posta, which opened in
Mesilla, New Mexico, in 1939; and Mi Tierra, located on San Antonio's
Market Square since 1951. Outstanding kitchens provided the common
foundation for these culinary monuments, but their fame spread far
beyond their ethnic enclave in part because of celebrity endorsements.
El Cholo became a watering hole for Hollywood stars from Clark Gable
and Bing Crosby to Jack Nicholson and Madonna. Western movies filmed on
location near Tucson in the 1940s gave El Charro an opportunity to bask
in Hollywood publicity. More recently, national attention focused on Mi
Tierra when a photojournalist caught President Bill Clinton wearing one
of their T-shirts while jogging on a beach.
(23) Countless restaurants have sought
to lure non-Mexican customers through identification with celebrities,
either by decorating their walls with autographed photos or by affixing
small plaques to the tables. Such endorsements offered a cheap
substitute for advertising in order to build up a brand name as well as
a surrogate form of authenticity in a multi-ethnic marketplace. This
familiarity may have been particularly valuable when mainstream eaters
lacked sufficient knowledge of an ethnic cuisine to distinguish quality
food from bowdlerized imitations. A similar purpose was served by
culinary legends, endlessly repeated, about which Southwestern
restaurateur named Ignacio invented nachos, or who created the original
margarita, or the first green enchiladas with chicken and sour cream.
These tales often reveal a desire for acceptance of ethnic foods by the
broader society; for example, the owners of El Charro Cafe recall a
visit, in 1946, by Thomas E. Dewey in which the presidential candidate
supposedly mistook one of the soft, thin flour tortillas for a napkin
and tucked it into his collar. The Dewey Napkin exhibited the same
characteristics as the legendary origins of Mexican mole, created by
colonial nuns out of a mixture of Old World spices and New World
chiles--just like the mestizo nation--and served up for the approval of
the Spanish viceroy. In the Southwest, these urban legends gently chide
Anglos for their unfamiliarity with Mexican food
and by extension their society. Perhaps the most famous tells of
President Gerald Ford eating a tamale without taking off the husk.
(24)
Another route to financial success
for Mexican American restaurants in the postwar era came from the
development of franchise chains. The largest of these, El Chico, began
in 1931 with Adelaida "Mama" Cuellar's tamale stand at the Kaufman
County Fair. After losing a number of small-town cafes in the
depression, the family moved to Dallas and opened the first El Chico in
1940. When the war ended, the Cuellar brothers began expanding, locally
at first and eventually throughout the South and Southwest, before
selling the restaurants in the 1990s. Another chain based in the
Dallas-Fort Worth area, Pulidos, began in the 1950s with an immigrant
family from Zacatecas. The Pulidos weathered economic downturns by
self-financing new locations, often taking over defunct restaurants,
and by expanding into small towns where they faced little competition.
Although the menu catered predominantly to Anglo customers, the tamales
retained an authentic Mexican taste because they were made by hand
every morning by Mrs. Pulido and her two comadres.
(25) Despite the success of culinary
monuments and Southwestern chains, Mexican American food did not attain
a national presence until it was taken over by non-Mexican corporations
such as Taco Bell. Sociologist George Ritzer has described the spread
of fast-food restaurants--"McDonaldization" he calls it--as the
continuation of Max Weber's rationalization process whereby technology
imposes greater efficiency, predictability, and control on society.
(26) This explanation certainly applies to the restaurant chain founded
in 1962 by Glen Bell in Downey, California. Rather than compete for the
hamburger market with Ray Kroc, in nearby San Bernardino, Bell devised
a way to speed up the production of tacos by pre-frying the corn
tortillas, thus creating the prototype for the hard taco shell.
Mexican-style food was thereby released from the need for fresh
tortillas, allowing the chain to expand throughout the country. The
corporation went public in 1969, was bought by Pepsi-Co. in 1978, and
then spun off in Tricon Global Restaurants with Pizza Hut and KFC in
1997. With more than 4,600 locations worldwide, and with look-alike
competitors such as Del Taco, Taco Time, and Taco Tico, Taco Bell
defined Mexican food for an entire generation in the United States. The mass-market appropriation of Mexican food,
which began with Tampico Dust and racial slurs about chili queens, thus
culminated in chants of "Viva Gorditas!" by the Taco Bell dog.
Nevertheless, as tourism and migration gave consumers a greater
awareness of genuine Mexican cuisine, a culinary renaissance became
possible. THE BLUE CORN BONANZA
Taco Bell had skimmed the surface, or
perhaps dredged the bottom, of Mexican American foods, but a wealth of
Southwestern dishes awaited discovery by consumers. Santa Fe finally
grabbed the nation's gastronomic imagination in the 1980s, after a
lengthy search for authentic regional cuisines from the United States
that could compete with those of France, Italy, and China. Once the
trend began, Southwestern food quickly became so common that, in 1987,
M. F. K. Fisher groaned, "If I hear any more about chic Tex-Mex or blue
cornmeal, I'll throw up." Nevertheless, her complaints went unheeded,
as corporate versions of Mexican food
filled supermarkets across the country. That this was not just a
temporary fad became clear in 1991, when salsa surpassed catsup as the
best-selling condiment in the United States. This rapid success did
nothing to diminish but rather heightened the tension between
authenticity and adaptation that had so long bedeviled Southwestern
cooking.
(27) The birth of a modern, upscale
restaurant version of traditional Southwestern cooking had a long
gestation period--most notably in the cookbooks, newspaper columns, and
ecological awareness of James Beard, Craig Claiborne, and Alice
Waters--so that when it finally emerged, it soon became ubiquitous.
John Rivera Sedlar, a native of New Mexico who pioneered this new style
in 1980, recalled, "When I first began serving tortillas, tamales, and
chiles in a fine-dining environment, people gasped." Shortly
thereafter, Robert Del Grande in Houston and Stephan Pyles in Dallas
did for Texas cooking what Sedlar had done for New Mexico. In 1987,
Mark Miller, a former anthropology student with a deep knowledge of the
foods and cultures of Latin America, opened the acclaimed Coyote Cafe
in Santa Fe. Where ethnic restaurants had earlier pursued celebrities
as advertisements, the chefs suddenly found themselves to be
celebrities--for example, television's "Too Hot Tamales," Mary Sue
Milliken and Susan Feniger. As the field grew increasingly crowded, Jay
McCarthy sought recognition by proclaiming himself the "Cactus King,"
followed by Lenard Rubin, the "Cilantro King." Of course, much of this
nouvelle Southwestern cuisine bore only a superficial resemblance to
either Mexican or Mexican American cooking; witness Pyles's signature
dish, a seared foie gras corn pudding tamale with pineapple mole and
canela dust. Nevertheless, similar concoctions began to appear in some
of the most expensive restaurants in Mexico City.
(28) Supermarket sales of tortillas, chips, salsas, and other Mexican foods
meanwhile grew into a three-billion-dollar market by the mid-1990s,
although only a small fraction of this revenue went to Hispanic-owned
businesses. Indeed, the industry has been dominated by Anglos since
Elmer Doolin purchased the formula for Fritos corn chips from a
nameless Mexican American in 1932 and Dave Pace began bottling salsa in
1948. Just three corporations controlled more than half the nation's
salsa market: Pace, owned by Campbell Soup Co., Tostitos, a brand of
Frito-Lay, and Old El Paso, a subsidiary of Pillsbury. Boutique
producers meanwhile contended for a more upscale niche with outlandish
claims of authenticity. Fire Roasted Zuni Zalsa attributed its origins
to a mythical Mexican past: "The old patron walked down the
mountainside overlooking the jalapeno field. He paused, turned to young
Joselito [sic] and said, `Make me a salsa, make me a salsa I can't
refuse.'" Local Mexican American manufacturers did better with corn
tortillas because of their brief shelf life, but the bulk of sales in
the United States went for flour tortillas, often stripped of their
original ethnic character by cinnamon or pesto flavoring and marketed
as "wraps."
(29) Yet the search for authenticity, or
at least for product differentiation, led back again and again to
Mexico. The quintessential dish of modern Tex-Mex, fajitas, started out
as the vaquero's humble arrachera, served up on a fancy grill but eaten
in the style of all Mexican tacos, with salsa on hot and, one hopes,
fresh tortillas. In the 1980s, the fad drove the price of skirt steak
out of the reach of the working-class Hispanics who invented the dish
and also led to that oxymoron "chicken fajitas." One of the hottest
items of the 1990s, the fish taco, was discovered by surfers such as
Ralph Rubio while vacationing in Baja California and became part of the
new Cal-Mex cuisine, especially around San Diego. At the same time,
growing numbers of Tex-Mex restaurants in New York City have begun to
replace burritos and fajitas with regional Mexican dishes from Oaxaca
and Veracruz, dumping the serapes and mariachi music in the process.
Even in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, restaurateur Chris Aparicio
reported optimistically, "You used to have to have Tex-Mex food to
survive. We serve authentic Mexican and our clientele used to be 80
percent Hispanic. Now it's 60 percent Anglo and 40 percent Hispanic.
People are catching on to the true flavor of Mexican food."
(30)
The real question about the blue corn
bonanza remains, who will benefit from it? Mexicans dreamed of finding
the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola for three centuries, only to lose
their northern provinces in 1848, a year before gold was finally
discovered in California. As Victor Valle has explained, too few of the
Anglo owners of Mexican restaurants and food-processing companies are
willing to give anything back to the communities that made their
fortunes, even by paying decent wages and offering equal employment
opportunities. But Valle also strikes a more positive note, pointing to
the Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans who have begun to reclaim
their foods in upscale restaurants around the country as well as in
factories turning out authentic foodstuffs. Joe Sanchez of the New El
Rey Chorizo Company did not feel threatened by large corporate
competitors: "So we are not going to disappear. We'll progress. And the
big chain stores will have to stock two sections of Mexican food; the tourist food for the Anglos and the real Mexican food for the Mexicans. And then, since many Anglos like real Mexican food, they'll go over to the Mexican section and buy real ingredients, too."
(31)
CONCLUSION: WHOSE MEX?
Douglas Monroy titled his study of
early California society, "Thrown among Strangers," evoking the similar
experiences of Native Americans forced to work on Spanish missions and
Hispanic ranchers displaced by Anglo capitalists. For much the same
reason, an account of the foods of the Southwest could easily be
called, "Fed to Foreigners." Native American women of the pueblos
cooked tortillas for the Spanish conquistadors, only to have their corn
mother deities denounced by Catholic priests in return. Hispanic women
in San Antonio served up chili stews to Anglo tourists three hundred
years later, losing their businesses to industrial mass producers and
city health inspectors in the process. Even their erstwhile compatriots
abandoned the Mexican Americans, denouncing chili con carne as a
"detestable food with false Mexican title that is sold in the United
States of the North," in the words of linguist Francisco J. Santamaria.
(32) Despite calumny from all sides,
Tejanas continue to treasure their "bowls of red" as a hearty,
restorative food, made by hand according to old family recipes and
served with pride to friends and relatives. Carne con chile verde holds
an equally revered status in the kitchens of New Mexico, as do burritos
de carne seca in Arizona and tacos de carnitas in California. Even if
only once a year at a holiday tamalada, Mexican Americans reaffirm
their connections to family and community, the past and the future,
through the ritual preparation and consumption of traditional foods.
Neither commercialization, mass production, McDonaldization,
Yuppification, nor any other menace of modern life has alienated these
foods from cooks, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic, who invest the time
to prepare them. The "Mex" thus belongs to anyone willing to embrace
it.
NOTES
(1.) For a history of Mexican
cuisine, see Jeffrey M. Pilcher, iQue Vivan Los Tamales! Food and the
Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1998).
(2.) The Border Cookbook: Authentic
Home Cooking of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico (Boston: The
Harvard Common Press, 1995).
(3.) Victor Valle argues
persuasively for the culinary metaphor of the mixed-race mestizo in his
scholarly and mouthwatering cookbook, Recipes of Memory: Five
Generations of Mexican Cuisine in Los Angeles (New York: The New Press,
1995), 175-77. Another insightful treatment is Amy Bently, "From
Culinary Other to Mainstream American: Meanings and Uses of
Southwestern Cuisine," Southern Folklore 55, no. 3 (1998): 238-252. On
the gendered nature of the frontier, see Fredrick Pike, The United
States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and
Nature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); and more generally
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979).
(4.) Douglas Monroy, Thrown among
Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 3-18; Edward H.
Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United
States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960 (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 1962), 14-15; Martin Salinas, Indians of the Rio
Grande Delta: Their Role in the History of Southern Texas and
Northeastern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 115-20;
Carroll L. Riley, The Frontier People: The Greater Southwest in the
Protohistoric Period (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1987), 298-300.
(5.) Riley, Frontier People, 184-87, 232-34, 260-63.
(6.) Ibid., 114-16, 142; Spicer, Cycles of Conquest, 12-14, 541.
(7.) Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus
Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1991), 14-16; Monroy, Thrown among Strangers, 8-9; Spicer, Cycles of
Conquest, 541.
(8.) Louise M. Burkhart, The
Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century
Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 166.
(9.) David J. Weber, The Spanish
Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992),
92-121, 227-30; Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic
Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700-1850
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 48-60; Spicer, Cycles of
Conquest, 542-46, 552; Albert H. Schroeder, "Shifting for Survival in
the Spanish Southwest," in New Spain's Far Northern Frontier: Essays on
Spain in the American West, 1540-1821, ed. David J. Weber (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1979), 243-44.
(10.) Oakah L. Jones, Jr., Los
Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979); Jesus F. de la Teja, San
Antonio de Bexar: A Community on New Spain's Northern Frontier
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); John L. Kessell,
Kiva, Cross and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540-1840
(Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1979); Max L. Moorhead, The
Presidio: Bastion of the Spanish Borderlands (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1975).
(11.) Arthur L. Campa, Hispanic
Culture in the Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979),
277-81; Patricia Preciado Martin, Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral
History of Mexican American Women (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1992), 11, 16, 28; Jones, Los Paisanos, 187, 194, 221.
(12.) Victor Valle, "A Curse of Tea
and Potatoes: Reading a 19th Century Cookbook as a Social Text," Latino
Studies Journal 8, no. 3 (fall 1997), 3-18. For a historical discussion
that locates Hispanics within U.S. race relations, see Neil Foley, The
White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton
Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
(13.) Dent, The Feast of Santa Fe:
Cooking of the American Southwest (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985),
73. See also Cleofas M. Jaramillo, The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes
(Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, [1942] 1981), 4; Regina Romero, Flora's
Kitchen: Recipes from a New Mexico Family (Tucson: Treasure Chest
Books, 1998), 37-46.
(14.) Quote from Carmella Padilla,
The Chile Chronicles: Tales of a New Mexico Harvest (Santa Fe: Museum
of New Mexico Press, 1997), 48. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert, The
Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Food (Santa Fe: Museum of New
Mexico Press, [1949] 1982); personal communication from Marco Antonio
Abarca, January 25, 2000.
(15.) Quote from Merrill Shindler,
El Cholo Cookbook: Recipes and Lore from California's Best-Loved
Mexican Kitchen (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 1998), 85. See also,
Diana Kennedy, The Cuisines of Mexico (New York: Harper & Row,
1986), 244; Martin, Songs My Mother Sang to Me, 17, 59, 155; Jay Ann
Cox, "Eating the Other" (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 1993).
(16.) For just a few examples of
this voluminous literature, see Richard Griswold del Castillo, La
Familia: The Mexican American Family in the Urban Southwest (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); idem, The Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1990); Armando C. Alonzo, Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers
in South Texas, 1734-1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1998); Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California,
1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Oscar J.
Martinez, Troublesome Border (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1988); Thomas E. Sheridan, Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in
Tucson, 1854-1941 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986).
(17.) The best account of the
appropriation of ethnic foods is Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat:
Ethnic Foods and the Making of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1998), quotations are from 108-9; See also Marilyn Tausend,
Cocina de la familia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 66; Mary
Ann Noonan Guerra, The History of San Antonio's Market Square (San
Antonio: The Alamo Press, 1988), 14, 48.
(18.) Mario Montano, "The History
of Mexican Folk Foodways of South Texas: Street Vendors, Offal Foods,
and Barbacoa de Cabeza," (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania,
1992); Jose E. Limon, Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural
Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1994).
(19.) Valle, "A Curse of Tea and
Potatoes," quotes from 9, 12. The Pinedo volume has been edited and
translated by Dan Strehl as The Spanish Cook: A Selection of Recipes
from Encarnacion Pinedo's El cocinero espanol (Pasadena: The Weather
Bird Press, 1992).
(20.) Villasenor, Rain of Gold (New
York: Delta, 1991), 350. See also Jacqueline Higuera McMahan, The
Mexican Breakfast Cookbook (Lake Hughes, CA: The Olive Press, 1992),
116; California Rancho Cooking (Lake Hughes, CA: The Olive Press,
1988), 130-34.
(21.) Quoted in Martin, Songs My Mother Sang to Me, 116.
(22.) Jamison and Jamison, The Border Cookbook, 10-11.
(23.) Shindler, El Cholo Cookbook, 15; Flores, El Charro Cafe, (Tucson: Fisher Books, 1998), 3.
(24.) This discussion was inspired by
Tracy Poe, "Food Culture and Entrepreneurship among African Americans,
Italians, and Swedes in Chicago" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University,
1999). See also Flores, El Charro Cafe, 24.
(25.) Jeffrey Steele, "Mexican Goes
Mainstream," Restaurante Mexicano 1, no. 1 (January/February 1997):
6-15; interview with Edward Gamez, chairman of the board of Pulido's
Restaurants, Fort Worth, Texas, March 26, 1992.
(26.) George Ritzer, The
McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993).
See also Warren J. Belasco, "Ethnic Fast Foods: The Corporate Melting
Pot," Food and Foodways 2 (1987): 1-30.
(27.) Quote from Sylvia Lovegren, Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 378.
(28.) Quote from Barbara Pool Fenzl,
Savor the Southwest (San Francisco: Bay Books, 1999), 14. See also Mark
Miller, Coyote Cafe (San Francisco: Ten Speed Press, 1989); Mark
Miller, Stephan Pyles, and John Sedlar, Tamales (New York: Macmillan,
1997); Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, Mesa Mexicana (New York:
William Morrow, 1994).
(29.) Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat,
165, 219; "Another Round," Snack World 53, no. 6 (June 1996): 32;
Margaret Littman, "Wrap Up Profits with Tortillas," Bakery Production
and Marketing 31, no. 16 (November 15, 1996): 40
(30.) Mario Montano, "Appropriation
and Counterhegemony in South Texas: Food Slurs, Offal Meats, and
Blood," in Usable Pasts: Traditions and Group Expressions in North
America, ed. Tad Tuleja (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997),
50-67. Quoted in Julia M. Gallo-Torres, "Salud," El Restaurante
Mexicano 3, no. 3 (May-June 1999): 14. See also Jane and Michael Stern,
"Grill of His Dreams," Gourmet, January 2000, p. 40; Eric Asimov,
"Beyond Tacos: Mexican Food Gets Real," New York Times, January 26, 2000, p. B14.
(31.) Valle made this point
eloquently in a presentation at the Culinary Institute of America's
Flavors of Mexico Conference, St. Helena, Calif., November 11, 1999,
and in his book, Recipes of Memory, quotation on 175.
(32.) Diccionario de Mejicanismos, 5th ed. (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1992), 385.
JEFFREY M. PILCHER is assistant professor of history at The Citadel, South Carolina.
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