I remember in one of Carolyn Haywood’s “Eddie” books, the eponymous character wondered a lot about what tamales were made from and how they tasted. IIRC, he finally got to try some when he went to stay at his uncle’s ranch for the summer, and was surprised when they turned out to be only a little spicy.
This must have been back in the '40s.
As the linked New Yorker article indicates, tamales were surprisingly popular in points far north of the Southwest. For example, in Spokane, one of the legendary local eateries was Bob’s Chili Parlor whose tamales were known throughout the PNW during the first half of the 20th century. My grandparents told me stories about the place including how cattle and pork blood were among the tamales’ secret seasonings.
Depends on the style. Santa Barbara tamales (where my parents were from) are big and fat, and by western standards, pretty mild. New Mexico tamales, OTOH are much smaller, a little flat, and will burn the top of your head off. I’m sure there are other types I am unfamiliar with.
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I think the fast food Mexican places were a little slow coming to San Antonio, and probably much of South Texas.
I personally know in the late 50s and early 60s that nice sit-down Mexican places were abundant in town. I remember a favorite of my family, even down to the black velvet paintings of bull-fighting and Mexican costuming.
I think that the demand might have been a bit slower here since Wednesday in most South Texan public schools was always Mexican food day. All through the early to mid-60s you could get a Mexican school lunch with cheese enchiladas, beans, Spanish rice, etc for about $0.30. An individual small glass bottle (with cardboard top with pull tab) was $0.02 for white milk, $0.03 for chocolate.
The school lunches were always good, probably because most of the kitchen staff was Mexican-American.
there are also northern tamales …which are like the canned ones …there used to be a guy that was called the tamale king that sold a tamale machine …it was based on a cigarette roller and it was more like a taquito than a real tamale and I asked about them and was told "that’s what the anglos up north(ie the midwest) think tamales are
Damn, I grew up in North Texas. I am totally jealous.
I suspect that, as several posters have noted, there’s no one answer for “the USA” – for any given region, it probably depends on when that area actually had a significant number of Mexican immigrants (or, maybe, one really entrepreneurial one). I know that, growing up in northern Wisconsin in the 1970s and 1980s, there were very few Mexican restaurants, and the ones that did exist were places like Chi-Chis (i.e., not founded by Mexican immigrants, and not particularly authentic). At that time, there were very few Hispanics, of any heritage, in the area.
Anecdote: I’m an advertising strategist, and 20 years ago, I had a major “casual dining” restaurant chain as a client. We would do focus groups among casual dining patrons all over the country; we once did focus groups in Boston.
During the focus groups, we’d talk with the respondents about their impressions of the various big chains (Red Lobster, Olive Garden, TGI Fridays, Applebee’s, etc.), and what circumstances would lead them to choose to go to one place over another. And, in Boston, a lot of the respondents said, “We go to Chili’s when we want Mexican food.” :eek: This wasn’t just one or two respondents – this was probably half of the people we talked to. And, to call Chili’s menu “Mexican food” is a serious stretch – for one thing, they position themselves as Tex-Mex, and even at that point, it’s a highly homogenized, middle-America-friendly version of Tex-Mex food.
I’d be surprised if there weren’t any actual, authentic Mexican restaurants in Boston 20 years ago, and yeah, maybe we just had a rash of terribly uninformed respondents in those groups. Even so, it suggests that, at that time, in at least some northern cities, the impression of what a Mexican restaurant is / what Mexican food is may still have been rather uninformed.
Come to think of it, Mexican restaurants are few and far between in my neck of the Bronx, which is now heavily Hispanic. I can’t think of any, not even a Taco Bell, in the my part of the northeast Bronx. There are tons of Latin restaurants, but they are all Puerto Rican/Dominican. To find a Mexican restaurant, it would be easiest to go into Manhattan. (Checking on Google there are a few Mexican restaurants in the Bronx, but not many.)
Agreed that it’s really dependent on where you are. New Mexican is not Mexican, and you have to go out of your way to find a place that does something close to what you’d find in various parts of Mexico.
There’s a place called Casa Taco that started in Elephant Butte and eventually expanded to Albuquerque. I read a Yelp review once that complained that a place calling itself Casa Taco was serving American tacos. The amusing part was that there is a good argument that the taco as we think of it in America was first published in a cookbook in Santa Fe. It made the reviewer sound like an uneducated hipster.
actually from what I’ve heard tacos themselves were imported to Mexico by middle eastern expats to Mexico who tried to make the gyro type of dish and then it adapted from there into Mexican tacos …
Is this characterization local? Chile’s (for me) is some place I’ve never characterized as Tex-Mex. It’s the “baby back rib” place, and they like to use cumin, so, maaaybe, “southwest,” but I’m honestly surprised at the “Tex-Mex” positioning.
Maybe I’m an oddball, because most of the Mexican places I go to are really Tex-Mex, characterized as Mexican.
The first GOOD Mexican restaurants in 1980s New York were in Manhattan…Cinco de Mayo in SoHo; Cocina in the West Village, that place on the Upper East Side that did handmade guacamole at your table, etc.
But when Mexican immigrants finally started moving in in the early 21st century, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park was the prime destination. If you want great authentic and cheap eats, that’s the place to go.
Trying to figure out when Mexican food became mainstream in the U.S. is like trying to figure out when pizza became mainstream in the U.S. O.K., so now some of you are going to say, “What do you mean? Pizza has always been mainstream for anyone in the U.S. alive today.” Well, no. Someone who was born in the early 1940’s in New York City and who remembers the 1950’s in that city as a teenager told me that even there you had to go to certain neighborhoods to find places serving pizza. The first chain pizzerias in the U.S. opened in the 1960’s. Growing up on a farm in Ohio in the late 1960’s, it was only then that I first tasted pizza from ones that my mother bought frozen in a supermarket. (When I grew up, spaghetti was still a little exotic.) It was only in 1970 that I first went to a pizzeria (and ordered some by telephone to be delivered). It was only in the 1970’s that pizza slowly became mainstream. It’s hard to say when Mexican food, pizza, or anything else became mainstream.
On The Honeymooners (1955-1956) they refer to pizza or pizzarias several times in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Although there was an Italian family in the building, I don’t think Bushwick was particularly Italian at the time.
No, it’s not just a local characterization, but it’s also not something that they flat-out proclaim, either (at least not lately).
Baby back ribs are now their signature dish (thanks, in part, to that earworm of a jingle), but when you look at their menu, you also find tacos, fajitas, and quesadillas, along with various dishes that use chipotle, anchos, and pico de gallo. Also, their drink menu is heavy on the margaritas.
Ditto here in suburban Arizona but it was Appian Way pizza kits, complete with the parmesan sawdust from a green can. I don’t remember seeing any frozen ones in the store but that might be because we didn’t deal with frozen foods much. The tiny freezer section in our Hotpoint refrigerator* had enough room for two ice trays, a couple bags of frozen vegetables, and not much else.
I do remember Bambino Pizza ads during intermission at the drive-in theater but we never got one. Probably just as well.
*I puzzled over that brand name as a kid since our gas stove was a Tappan.
You’re thinking specifically of Tacos al Pastor. They’re a style of taco from Mexico City where the meat is grilled on a “trompo”, which is the Mexican term for the vertical spit and stacked meat style of cooking that’s nearly identical to Middle Eastern shawarma.
The main difference is the meat (typically pork), seasoning/marinade used and the toppings- for al pastor tacos, it’s typically grilled pineapple, onions and cilantro.
And I think we can put to bed the idea that Chili’s is a Tex-Mex place. It’s not. It’s a burger place that originated in Dallas, and originally had a handful of Tex-Mex items on the menu- IIRC, they were chili, chips and salsa, and chicken tacos at first, and they added fajitas by the mid-1980s.
I’ve visited Albuquerque a couple of times. I think they just call Mexican Restaurants “Restaurants”.
That’s actually a good point. What is a “Mexican restaurant”? To me, they’re restaurants that have food I would get in Mexico, at a non-international restaurant, even if they vary from region to region. These restaurants are very few and far between in the parts of the USA I’ve been to.
