Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Gustavo
Arellano, who in the last decade has risen from food editor at the O.C.
Weekly in Orange County to investigative
reporter at the paper and author of the popular syndicated column “¡Ask a
Mexican!,” a witty send-up of anti-Mexican stereotypes published in at least 38
media outlets, came to San Diego to speak at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in
Balboa Park April 11. He was there to promote his latest book, Taco
U.S.A.: How Mexican Food Conquered America,
and his talk encompassed everything from the ways Anglo-Americans made big
bucks appropriating Mexican recipes to the way creative cooks and restaurateurs
keep inventing new variations on the old Mexican culinary themes.
“I’m going to
start with my anecdote on Mexican food in San Diego,” he announced. “Two years
ago, I spoke at the book fair at San Diego City College. Then we went across
the street to a small Mexican place to eat. I saw the burritos on the menu and
there was a listing for a ‘California Burrito,’ which I’d never seen before. I
asked what was a California burrito, and they said, ‘You’ve never heard of it?’
They looked at me like I was from the Minuteman Project. Then they told me it’s
a burrito with French fries in it, and I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ But
I ordered it, and when I got the mixing of the meat, rice and French fries in
it, it tasted great.”
What that did to
him, Arellano said, was cure him of any residual notions of auténtico in Mexican food. He’s come to appreciate the vast
regional variations of his ancestral homeland’s cuisine, not only in Mexico
itself (a subject so vast he decided early on not even to try to cover the different kinds of Mexican food in
Mexico) but throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world. In the book he
explodes some of the myths surrounding the origins of many popular “Mexican”
dishes — Doritos (corn chips with cheese), for example, were actually invented
in Disneyland as a way of using leftover scraps of tortillas — and tells a wide
variety of stories.
Arellano traced
the proliferation of San Diego taco shops named with the suffix “-berto’s” to
one Roberto Robledo, a bracero (Mexican
guest worker) who settled in San Ysidro in 1957, started a taco stand, built a
chain and then disaffiliated some of his relatives from his chain because he
didn’t think they were using fresh enough ingredients. Roberto Robledo died
well before Arellano started his research, but Arellano was able to interview
his son Reinaldo, who told him that the family launched not only Roberto’s and
the rival chain Alberto’s but also Lolita’s, where Reinaldo’s sisters sold
their own invention: a “2-in-1 burrito” with tortillas inside as well as
outside.
Taco U.S.A. is a fun book, livened up by Arellano’s sprightly
prose style, but it’s also full of stories of cultural imperialism, notably in
the early chapters on how Mexican (and, later, African-American) street vendors
who sold tamales were put out of business and replaced by white entrepreneurs
selling cleaned-up versions in sit-down restaurants at higher prices.
(African-American jazz and blues songs like Freddie Keppard’s “Here Comes the
Hot Tamale Man” and Robert Johnson’s “They’re Red Hot” immortalize the Black
tamale vendors of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta.)
Among his most
grimly ironic stories was how Christine Sterling, a socialite who had relocated
from Northern California to Los Angeles, learned that the L.A. city fathers
were planning to tear down the historic Mexican buildings around Olvera Street.
She intervened and saved them from destruction, then transformed them into her
own romanticized image of “Old Mexico,” with waiters dressed in costumes supposedly
resembling the clothes worn by the grandees
of Spanish Mexico. Among the innovations of Olvera Street — which Arellano
basically describes as a theme park long before theme parks were “in” — was the
taquito, a rolled-up tortilla
filled with meat and guacamole
invented there in 1934 and now a standard “Mexican” dish.
According to
Arellano, Mexican dishes have not only conquered El Norte but are marching across the world, seducing palates
in places as far removed from Norteamericano as Australia and Japan. “There’s no stopping
Mexicans and no stopping Mexican food,” he said at the end of his talk. “It’s
the manifest destiny of good taste.”
