The Truth About Tex-Mex

Tex-Mex is now one of America's favorite foods, with restaurants in every state serving up dependable classics like margaritas, enchiladas, tacos, and queso. Since it's so ubiquitous now, it's shocking that the cuisine didn't start spreading across America until well into the 20th century. While many Tex-Mex dishes existed in some form hundreds or even thousands of years ago, most of the modern versions of these foods were invented less than a century ago. The history of Tex-Mex, and of all styles of Mexican food, involves centuries of cultural dialogue between European conquerors and indigenous people. Tex-Mex is a complex blend of Native American, Spanish, Anglo-American, and Mexican food. The innovations of a few Texas entrepreneurs took what had been a local, regional cuisine and turned it into a global sensation. That's not to say Tex-Mex had an easy road. The cuisine's backstory includes more than a little violence and prejudice. This is the truth about Tex-Mex.

Cumin is one of the signature spices in Tex-Mex's flavor profile, adding savory smokiness to chili, salsas, and fajitas. However, according to Thrillist, you won't find cumin in much Mexican food outside of America and far northern Mexico. The book "Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: a Spice Odyssey" claims that cumin probably originated in western Asia, but it spread so quickly around the ancient world that it's hard to tell for sure who first started using it in food. As an Old World crop, cumin didn't arrive in the Americas until Europeans arrived. Food historian Robb Walsh writes in his "Chili Cookbook" that the earliest references to cumin in Mexico come from the early 1700s when it was used by Spanish cooks in missions.

Walsh argues that these Spanish cooks probably used very small amounts of cumin, and that the spice didn't become an integral part of Texas' regional cuisine until settlers from the Canary Islands arrived. The Spanish government encouraged the Canarians to settle in what is now San Antonio because of the area's low population. The Canary Islands, though controlled by Spain, are located off the coast of Africa, and their cuisine is similar to Moroccan food in its heavy use of cumin and garlic. Canarian preferences for cumin-scented meat stews combines with New World crops like chile peppers to create the blueprint for chile con carne.

Although there is some validity to the common assertion that Tex-Mex is Mexican food adapted for American palates, the truth is much more complicated. Culture Trip asserts that Tex-Mex cuisine came about from a long process of cultural exchange between Spanish colonists and Mexican culinary traditions. The History Channel also notes that many food preparations in the region also have their roots in Native American recipes that existed for hundreds of years before Europeans set foot in the New World. When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, Texas was a Mexican province that already had its own distinct set of culinary practices. Texas didn't separate from Mexico until 1836, and only became part of America nine years after that. To call Tex-Mex "Americanized" Mexican food is to ignore the fact that Texas was part of Mexico for the entirety of its early history.

Modern Tex-Mex food is based on the home cooking of Tejanos, people of Mexican descent living in Texas. They adapted foreign ingredients like wheat flour, cheese, and beef into their traditional recipes to create a new style of cooking that spread all over the American Southwest and northern Mexico. Tex-Mex is properly understood as a specialized regional variation of Mexican food that is just as legitimate as the celebrated cuisine in Mexican states like Oaxaca and Puebla.

Eater writes that chile con queso is a dish with a long history and multiple inventors. Mexico has a wide variety of traditional melted cheese dishes, but they aren't anything like the mixture of processed American cheese and chiles that we know today. Some sources point to Otis Farnsworth as the inventor of modern queso, as chile con queso appears on menus from his Original Mexican Restaurant in the early 20th century. However, the exact composition of Farnsworth's queso is lost to time, so we can't be sure whether the dish served at the Original in San Antonio was more like Mexican queso fundido or the orange gloop most Tex-Mex restaurants serve today. The first recipes for processed cheese-based queso come from community cookbooks in San Antonio in the 1920s.

Although the historical record makes it pretty clear that queso began somewhere in the vicinity of San Antonio, the state of Arkansas decided to try to claim credit for the dish in 2016 (via The Wall Street Journal). Partisans of Arkansas' cheese dip say that it was created at a Mexican restaurant in Little Rock in the 1930s. While that may be true, that's still a decade after housewives in San Antonio began publishing queso recipes, so the Arkansas claim seems more like a PR stunt than a legitimate bid for recognition.

Nachos are a great example of the cultural interplay that birthed so many classic Tex-Mex dishes. They were invented by Ignacio "Nacho" Anaya in Piedras Negras, a city on the Mexican side of the Texas border (via The New York Times). He was the maitre d' at a restaurant called the Victory Club in 1940 when a group of American military wives from across the border in Eagle's Nest, Texas came to the restaurant looking for a drink and some light bites. With no cooks in the kitchen that afternoon, Nacho Anaya improvised a simple appetizer of fried tortilla wedges, Colby cheese, and jalapenos baked together on a sheet pan. The ladies loved Nacho's invention, and it quickly appeared on the Victory Club's menu.

Nachos grew in popularity over the next few decades, but they didn't take over the world until Texan entrepreneur Frank Liberto invented shelf-stable nacho cheese sauce and the pump that squeezed the cheese onto chips. This new type of nachos debuted in the Texas Rangers baseball stadium in 1976. They were quickly adopted by the NFL as well, showing up at Dallas Cowboys games one year later. From there, the trashy-tasty combo of processed cheese sauce and tortilla chips spread across the country.

Fajitas were born out of resourcefulness and necessity. Mexican cowboys working on cattle ranches along the Rio Grande in West Texas often received cuts of beef as part of their compensation. Of course, the more expensive bits of the cow were reserved for paying customers, so the ranch hands had to figure out recipes to use tougher cuts like skirt steak (via What's Cooking America). In fact, skirt steak looks kind of like a belt, and the word fajitas means "little belts" in Spanish.

Although the identity of the first fajita cook is lost to time, several people claim that they came up with the dish. Sonny Falcon alleges that he came up with the idea of serving little slices of skirt steak wrapped in flour tortillas sometime in the 1960s. He toured county fairs and other events selling fajitas. He trademarked his nickname "The Fajita King" and unsuccessfully tried to copyright the word fajitas. A woman named Ninfa Rodriguez Laurenzo also claims to have invented fajitas at her restaurant in 1948. However, both of these stories come from after cowboys in West Texas had been grilling skirt steak for years.

Austin is seen by many as the home of the breakfast taco, but it's a relative latecomer to the breakfast taco party (via Vice). Although Austin's breakfast tacos get more national attention due to the city's high profile media presence, the dish actually originated in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. There, home cooks served tacos at all times of day, including breakfast. No one thought to call them "breakfast tacos" because they were simply normal tacos that were eaten in the morning. Taco culture spread from the Rio Grande to San Antonio and the Hill Country outside of Austin. The breakfast taco began supplanting the breakfast burrito on restaurant menus in Texas in the 70s and 80s.

The competition over what city in Texas serves the best breakfast tacos is fierce. A petition called for the city of Austin to surrender to San Antonio and admit that city's taco superiority. Austin mayor Steve Adler responded with some smart remarks of his own, and the Great Breakfast Taco War commenced. Eventually, the mayors of the two cities held an official ceremony to bury the hatchet.

Corn tortillas are ancient, and have been eaten in the region we now call Mexico for thousands of years. Flour tortillas have a much more recent history. The Houston Chronicle notes that settlers invented flour tortillas after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Europeans initially disdained corn, viewing it as animal feed rather than food for humans. They used the wheat flour they brought from Europe to make tortillas instead of the traditional masa.

It's also possible that the flour tortilla has Jewish roots. Some of the colonists in Mexico were conversos, Spanish Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism by the Spanish government. Although they couldn't practice Judaism openly, they retained many of their traditional customs long after they became Christian. Spanish Jewish cuisine included flatbreads that are somewhat similar to the modern flour tortilla. Some sects of Judaism also couldn't eat corn because it wasn't considered kosher. Thus, Spanish conversos in Mexico may have been the first to substitute wheat for corn when making tortillas.