Was the Taco Invented in Southern California?

investigations | jeffrey m. pilcher WWasas thethe TacoTaco InventedInvented iinn SSouthernouthern CCalifornia?alifornia? Taco bell provides a striking vision of the future trans- literally shape social reality, and this new phenomenon formation of ethnic and national cuisines into corporate that the taco signified was not the practice of wrapping fast food. This process, dubbed “McDonaldization” by a tortilla around morsels of food but rather the informal sociologist George Ritzer, entails technological rationaliza- restaurants, called taquerías, where they were consumed. tion to standardize food and make it more efficient.1 Or as In another essay I have described how the proletarian taco company founder Glen Bell explained, “If you wanted a shop emerged as a gathering place for migrant workers from dozen [tacos]…you were in for a wait. They stuffed them throughout Mexico, who shared their diverse regional spe- first, quickly fried them and stuck them together with a cialties, conveniently wrapped up in tortillas, and thereby toothpick. I thought they were delicious, but something helped to form a national cuisine.4 had to be done about the method of preparation.”2 That Here I wish to follow the taco’s travels to the United something was the creation of the “taco shell,” a pre-fried States, where Mexican migrants had already begun to create tortilla that could be quickly stuffed with fillings and served a distinctive ethnic snack long before Taco Bell entered the to waiting customers. Yet there are problems with this scene. I begin by briefly summarizing the history of this food interpretation of Yankee ingenuity transforming a Mexican in Mexico to emphasize that the taco was itself a product peasant tradition. As connoisseurs of global street cuisine of modernity rather than some folkloric dish transformed can readily attest, North American fast food is by no means by corporate formulators. After describing the reinvention fast. Street vendors in the least developed of countries can of the taco by migrants in early-twentieth-century Los prepare elaborate dumplings, noodles, sandwiches, or tacos Angeles, I examine how tacos gained a following among as quickly as any us chain restaurant can serve a nonde- mainstream audiences, with particular attention to the script hamburger, never mind the time spent waiting in line geographical distribution of restaurants. From this evidence at the drive-through window. I conclude that the first taco franchises succeeded not Moreover, this contrast between North American by selling fast food per se but rather by marketing a form modernity and non-western tradition assumes that the taco of exoticism that allowed nonethnics to sample Mexican has existed unchanged since time immemorial—a dubious cuisine without crossing lines of segregation in 1950s historical claim. In contemporary Mexico, the soft taco southern California. WINTER 2008 is simply a fresh maize tortilla wrapped around morsels of meat or beans. The tortilla has surely been used in this 26 Proto-Tacos fashion since it was invented thousands of years ago. By contrast, the hard taco, a soft taco fried in pork fat, must be Before examining the taco’s migration northward, we must a comparatively recent invention, because Spanish conquis- first locate its origins in Mexico, which is no easy task. tadors brought the pigs. Yet the puzzle remains of why an Linguistic evidence of the edible taco is most notable for its everyday food with deep pre-Hispanic roots is called by a absence. The Spanish word “taco,” like the English “tack,” GASTRONOMICA Spanish name, in contrast to other Mexican dishes clearly is common to most Romantic and Germanic languages, derived from indigenous words.3 An examination of diction- although its origins remain unclear. The first known refer- aries, cookbooks, archives, and literary sources reveals that ence, from 1607, appeared in French and signified a plug the word “taco” has a surprisingly recent provenance, enter- ing regular usage only at the end of the nineteenth century Right: Paperboys eating tacos for brunch, ca. 1920. col. sinafo-inah, inventory number 155025. courtesy of the instituto nacional de in Mexico City. As cultural historians have shown, words antropología e historia, méxico. gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, vol.8, no.1, pp.26–38, issn 1529-3262. © 2008 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press’s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2008.8.1.26. 27 GASTRONOMICA WINTER 2008 used to hold the ball of an arquebus in place.5 Eighteenth- Perhaps the first unequivocal reference to the Mexican century Spanish dictionaries also defined “taco” as a taco appears in Manuel Payno’s 1891 novel, Los bandidos ramrod, a billiard cue, a carpenter’s hammer, and a gulp of de Río Frío (The Bandits of Rio Frio). During the festival of wine—a combination recalling the English colloquialism, a the Virgin of Guadalupe, the indigenous classes danced in “shot” of liquor. Only in the mid-nineteenth century did the honor of the national saint, while feasting on “chito (fried Spanish Royal Academy expand the meaning to encompass goat) with tortillas, drunken salsa, and very good pulque… a snack of food, and the specific Mexican version was not and the children skipping, with tacos of tortillas and avo- acknowledged until well into the twentieth century.6 Of cado in their hand.”12 Although this culinary meaning of course, European definitions must be used with caution in taco had no doubt been in common usage by the popular referring to a Mexican reality. Nevertheless, taco did not classes for some time, with Payno’s benediction, it quickly appear in early Mexican dictionaries either, most notably received official recognition in Feliz Ramos I. Duarte’s 1895 Melchor Ocampo’s vernacular volume, published in 1844 Diccionario de mejicanismos, which also attributed the geo- under the wry title “Idiotismos Hispano-Mexicanos.”7 graphical origin of the term to Mexico City.13 Nineteenth-century cookbooks provide no more help Unfortunately, these literary sources do not indicate than dictionaries, which may come as no surprise given how this Spanish word, newly used for a generic snack, the elite preference for Spanish and French cuisine over became associated in Mexico City with a particular form indigenous dishes.8 The first and most influential cookbook of rolled tortilla. Peasant women have long used such torti- published in the nineteenth century, El cocinero mexicano llas as a convenient package to send food to male relatives (The Mexican Chef, 1831), provided a long list of popular working in the field or elsewhere, even if they called it dishes including quesadillas, chalupas, enchiladas, chila- something other than a taco. Some speculation is necessary quiles, and envueltos. The envuelto (Spanish for “wrap,” to make the precise connection, but one possibility lies in appropriately) comes closest to what would now be called a peculiar eighteenth-century usage among the silver min- a taco, although it was something of a cross between a taco ers of Real del Monte, near Pachuca, Hidalgo, to refer to and an enchilada, with chile sauce poured over the fried explosive charges of gunpowder wrapped in paper. While tortilla. Most elaborate were the envueltos de Nana Rosa this particular variant does not seem to have been recorded (Granny Rosa’s wraps), stuffed with picadillo (chopped in any dictionary, it derives from both the specific usage of meat) and garnished with “onion rings, little chiles, olives, a powder charge for a firearm and from the more general almonds, raisins, pine nuts, and bits of candied fruit.”9 meaning of plug, since the silver miners prepared the blast Nineteenth-century costumbrista (local color) literature by carving a hole in the rock before inserting the explosive provides further detail about Mexico’s rich tradition of “taco.”14 And with a good hot sauce, it is easy to see the simi- street foods. The first national novel, José Joaquín larity between a chicken taquito and a stick of dynamite. Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento (The Mangy We cannot know exactly when the miners might have Parrot, 1816), mentioned a lunch cooked by Nana Rosa brought their tacos to Mexico City, but nineteenth-century “consisting of envueltos, chicken stew, adobo (marinated civil wars and economic turmoil struck the silver districts meat), and pulque (fermented agave sap) flavored with particularly hard, forcing many to migrate in search of work. prickly pears and pineapple.” In a footnote to the 1842 One of the first visual records of the taco, a photo from the WINTER 2008 edition, the editor lovingly evoked the scene. “On the banks early 1920s, shows a woman selling tacos sudados (“sweaty 28 of the irrigation canal on the Paseo de la Viga, there was a tacos”) to a group of paperboys (see photograph on p.27). little garden park where Nana Rosa, who lived to be nearly These treats were made by frying tortillas briefly, stuffing a hundred, attracted the people of Mexico…charging them them with a simple mixture, often just potatoes and salsa, stiffly for the good luncheon spreads she prepared; and even and wrapping them in a basket to stay warm, hence an today, the envueltos de Nana Rosa still figure in the cook- alternative name, tacos de canasta (“tacos from a basket”). books.”10 Another formidable gourmet and man of letters, Both chronicler Jesús Flores y Escalante and early archival GASTRONOMICA Guillermo Prieto, recalled plebeian restaurants at mid- sources confirm this connection with miners by pointing century serving enchiladas, gorditas, and frijoles refritos, out that tacos sudados originally carried the sobriquet while the renowned geographer Antonio García Cubas tacos de minero.15 compiled an exhaustive zoology of ambulant vendors.

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