As far as I know, there are two basic styles of food being called “Mexican”, One is “authentic” Mexican, usually meaning food prepared in the style of interior Mexico. Stuff like mole poblano, cochinita pibil, huitlacoche, birria, etc…
The second style is the fusion style, usually seen on the borders. Tex-Mex is the classic one, and has traditionally been Mexican-style dishes produced with US ingredients(Tex-Mex cheese enchiladas are a good example), or American dishes made in a Mexican style (i.e. chili). There are also styles from other border states- Cal-Mex, for example.
The issue is that there is both overlap between say… Tex Mex and border Mexican, and that you don’t always know what you’ll get- you may be expecting mole poblano and the like, and end up at a place with fajitas, margaritas and chimichangas. Or vice-versa.
In general, most “Mexican” places I’ve been are really Tex-Mex or something along those lines, and a place serving actual interior Mexican dishes will call that out specifically with a region of Mexico or the words “interior” or something like that.
Example of more or less interior Mexican restaurant menu:
I grew up in Texas. I never knew that Mexican food wasn’t the norm. I never ate at a Taco Bell until the late 80’s, and likened it to cheap plastic version of what someone from California thought Mexican food was supposed to taste like. Horrid.
Born and raised in Chicago, but California is an odd locale to pick for your comparison, as it’s particularly known for its Mexican food (southern California, specifically.)
Here (Texas), “Mexican” food means Tex-Mex, not Cal-Mex or Mexican food from the interior of Mexico.
So something like California-style Mexican is going to be weird by comparison.
Think of it like pizza, or barbecue, or anything else with multiple styles described by one term. One place’s barbecue is messed up by the standards of another- for example, that bland pork mush that they serve in the East on sandwiches isn’t really barbecue to us Texans, even though they use the same term.
Touché. Southern Californian Mexican food is pretty awesome, though. I don’t get there quite enough. (Though I am pretty partisan about the Mexican we get here in Chicago. I think it’s a matter of what Mexican food you grew up with, although a lot of the stuff I like around here is food I discovered in the last 20 years. But each area of the US with a large Hispanic population seems to have their own regional bits and pieces of Mexican cuisine, along with local Mexican-American twists or inventions, so I love eating Mexican all across the US.)
Except as mentioned upthread, in parts of the Northeast, for example, the “large Hispanic population” was from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic or elsewhere and not Mexico, so some of the cuisine wasn’t Mexican.
I so want to go there if I find myself in Austin again some day. I’m actually pretty lucky in that I’m reasonably close to a community known as “Mexicantown.” There’s plenty of suburbanite-aimed Tex-Mex food, but there are a few jewels once you get back into the neighborhoods.
There’s one place that I’d been going to for years, but it got popular with the non-Mexican folk, and its menu has been changing little by little over the years such that it’s no longer my favorite.