The unpleasant truth about Tex-Mex

Brenner Report #5

People who know a bit about regional cooking from Mexico often have strong opinions about Tex-Mex — those combo plates of cheese-smothered enchiladas with rice and beans, assorted fajitas (chicken, shrimp and steak), mountainous platters of cheese-and-salsa-drenched nachos, tubs of gooey dip made from process cheese (that’s the actual industry term) and Ro-Tel canned tomatoes.  

Here in Texas, where I’ve lived for 11 years, those in the “love it” camp powerfully outnumber the “don’t care for it” camp. When as a restaurant critic in 2012, I derided the melted Velveeta dip that goes by the name of queso in a post on The Dallas Morning News Eats blog, I was lambasted by the competing press (and even, less loudly, by some of my scandalized colleagues). Four years later, Eater Dallas still wanted my head on a plate over it. 

Yep, people love their Tex-Mex — probably especially now, as pandemic anxiety has engendered a universal yearning for comfort food. I became concerned about those who must be missing it, and six weeks into quarantine I wrote a story for The News designed to help people cook it at home. (In case you hit the paywall, here’s the story reprised at Cooks Without Borders.) I swear my intentions were pure, but I’m sort of regretting having written it.

That’s because in the past week I’ve come to understand something disturbing about Tex-Mex: Its very existence is based upon an egregious instance of cultural appropriation.

In the course of researching a dish I grew up with called Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken (my mom clipped the recipe from the New York Times Magazine circa 1970), I learned of a very interesting writer, chef and filmmaker, Adán Medrano.

In 2014, Medrano, a San Antonio native who was the founder of the San Antonio CineFestival (the first and longest-running Latinx film festival in the U.S.) and now lives in Houston, published a book called Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes (Texas Tech University Press). In it, he laid out what he refers to as Texas Mexican cooking. 

[Adán Medrano on a diplomacy tour in Moscow last year / Courtesy of the Author]

“‘Texas Mexican’ is the cuisine that has evolved over centuries in the region immediately north and south of the lower Rio Grande,” he wrote in the introduction. “It is deeply rooted in the indigenous cultures of what are now northeastern Mexico and central and south Texas, the region where my extended family and all my Mexican American friends live.”

What it is not is Tex-Mex.

Although I’ve long been aware that much of what passes as Mexican cooking in the United States bears little relation to what you eat if you travel in Mexico, I suppose I’d always assumed that Tex-Mex was also the result of some kind of evolution — that early on it must have looked and tasted more like what Mexican-Americans might cook at home, what Medrano refers to as “comida casera.”

In fact, as Medrano wrote, the first Tex-Mex restaurant — named, in a remarkable display of hubris, The Original Mexican Restaurant — was created by an Anglo for Anglos. Specifically, the owner was Otis M. Farnsworth, an entrepreneur visiting San Antonio from Chicago. Furthermore, to make way for the rise of Anglo-driven Tex-Mex, the businesses of a “celebrated group of Mexican, Texas Indian businesswomen” were systematically destroyed, as Medrano tells it, and the women were harassed. Though today we know the name of the man who opened that first Tex-Mex dining room, the names of the women who fed the community before him, cooking out of open-air diners in the downtown market square, have been forgotten. We only know them as “The Chili Queens.” How easy to dismiss and even ridicule.

As Rachel Wharton pointed out in an excellent New York Times profile of Medrano last year:

Today, Farnsworth’s restaurant might be called out for cultural appropriation, or what Mr. Medrano calls “cultural poaching.” And Mr. Medrano does get angry at the lack of respect for his culture, the many ways in which Mexican-Americans have been wronged throughout history.

At the time Wharton interviewed Medrano, in advance of the publication of his second book, Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking, Medrano expressed the view that Tex-Mex is a cuisine that should be respected and celebrated. “It’s just that Tex-Mex standards like queso and combo fajitas piled high with chicken and shrimp don’t speak of home to those whose Texas roots go back some 12,000 years,” she paraphrased him as saying.

So much as happened in the last year that I couldn’t help but wonder whether Medrano still holds that same hospitable view of Tex-Mex.

Though he’s busy in post-production of a 90-minute documentary, “Truly Texas Mexican” — a film that follows up on his first book — he was happy to illuminate his views on the phone. The documentary’s log line: “Texas chefs, artists and activists dig up the 15,000-year-old indigenous roots of today’s Texas Mexican food. A delicious combination plate of archaeology, politics and feminism, it definitely ain’t tex-mex!” He’s hoping to have it finished by the end of this month.

While the 71-year-old chef told me straight off the bat that he still feels Tex-Mex should be respected, “Tex-Mex has overshadowed our comida casera,” he said. “This has been caused by food writers who in the past have not been aware of the indigenous food of Texas.”

From there we launched into an improvised Q & A. (Note: I have edited what follows for sense and flow.)

The Brenner Report: Do you ever eat Tex-Mex?

Adán Medrano: I don’t. I don’t like Tex-Mex food. I think many people do, and I have been out, especially in high school and college, in places that were Tex-Mex, and had lots of fun with my friends, with the margaritas and queso.  It’s a very powerful and highly successful business format. But I don’t particularly care for it.

I wrote a series of six stories about Texas Mexican food here in Houston. I did that as a way to show how you can explore the other side. They’re all on a street called Navigation. I like that way of knowing that today it’s possible that the home cooking of Texas Mexican American families will be enjoyed by more people.

TBR: Oh, wow — who did you write that for?

AM: The Houston Press; it was published last year. I think it’s very interesting how we have Houston’s first food of Texas’ first restaurants. 

TBR: How bothered are you by the cultural appropriation that happened when Tex-Mex was created?

AM: Cultural appropriation is a dangerous and ugly thing. We’ve got to get to the point where food becomes a bridge that brings us together so we can build a table where all are welcome. Food writers have yet to begin to talk about how food can do that. The divisiveness happens because there’s a lack of understanding.

Two important values are the ingenuity and inventiveness of cooks all over the world. We always want to change things and explore all avenues. That’s a given. But when [this kind of change] begins to function in a public marketplace, market forces can either harm or help a cultural community.

TBR: When does the kind of normal and progressive evolution you’re talking about become cultural appropriation — how does that line get crossed?

AM: I use three criteria: voice, agency and money. The question is whose voice are  you augmenting or diminishing? In the case of Texas Mexican food, it became famous when the original chef-owners opened their diners in San Antonio — the Chili Queens; they’re chef-owners. Everyone wanted to go there, but when the center of the city became more high-toned, the ladies were looked down upon because they were Mexican and they weren’t sophisticated in their demeanor. The city wanted closed [not open-air] restaurants, so they were driven out. In that case, that’s appropriation because you have erased the voice of the original cooks. It’s even more horrible to me because they are women. Women’ s voices have been erased. Not only their voices, but the fact that they’re not remembered as chefs, they’re just chili queens.

They were able to open those [Anglo] restaurants because they had access to banks and capital, which we did not. Our land was taken away, we were ostracized in social and political circles. We have no capital. That is appropriation because you’re inflicting harm by your actions. 

We cook chiles for flavor, texture and color, and if you survey Tex-Mex restaurants, they will to a great extent describe chile or chiles as “fire alarm #1,” “fire alarm #2,” so their heat is the determining factor. But that’s not that way chiles work in Texas Mexican cuisine. In fact we remove the seeds to improve the flavor.

Now there are more who are recognizing this. This all began two years before the New York Times [profiled me]. In 2014 when my book came out, it was very difficult for writers to write about it. They have no concept that we are of this land. We didn’t come from across the border. It puts into crisis what their world view is.

It’s a very complicated situation, and it’s good to look at it very clearly. You can act differently to help. Maybe there are partnerships that are possible, ways that recipes can be offered and the women can be given credit.

In my new film the ending is building a new encounter. We didn’t encounter the other by invading the way the Spaniards and others did. How do you build something new and evolve in a way that’s not destructive? That’s what food is calling us to do now. The film is clear because I’m interviewing chefs who are from the comida casera tradition, and they speak about all these things. My mother is in these spices. My grandmother is in these pots I have. It’s the ritual of cooking — I’m never far from home.

Cooking is about family. I’m not talking about my blood relatives; I’m talking about community.

🐞

Where do we go from here?

I often feel that the accusation of cultural appropriation is misapplied. Just because a white person may choose to cook or celebrate Vietnamese food or Mexican food or Indian food — or make a living cooking it or writing about it, or earn a reputation cooking it — doesn’t necessarily mean a crime has been committed. It’s much more complicated and nuanced than that, or it should be. Appropriation, as Medrano very clearly articulates, involves inflicting harm. To appropriate is to take away — which is what very literally befell the female chef-owners in San Antonio whose names have been forgotten. Of course sometimes that appropriation takes a subtler form, that of disrespect, which can also be a theft.

In any case it should, I think, be of concern to the proponents of Tex-Mex that the genre was born of a cultural sin.

How to atone? We can start by paying attention to comida casera. Often it’s what indigenous Mexican people are, as the name describes, cooking at home. But sometimes it’s also on the menu at your local mom and pop’s, if you skip down past the queso and combo plates and explore the guisados and the caldos.

And find a way to see Medrano’s documentary when it’s released; I’ll be sure to herald it here.

Last night I cooked a delicious dish, Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita — Shrimp and Squash Noodles, from Medrano’s newest book.

The basic ingredients, as the chef writes in the headnote, "are all native to the Texas Mexican region: tomato, tatuma squash, onion, chie, salt and Texas Gulf Shrimp.” (My substitution of zucchini, which is very similar to tatuma, is sanctioned in his recipe.) I’ll be writing about it this week at Cooks Without Borders, where you’ll be able to find the recipe.

OK, gotta run. I apologize that I didn’t put together a news roundup this week. I’m thinking of friends and relations of friends in Beirut, and a cherished friend closer to home who is in hospital. Hoping for wellness and safety.