The other day I twittered a smartass remark: Authentic Mexican is to Tex-Mex as the Ballet Folklorico is to Freddy Fender. My fellow food writer Colman Andrews asked if I meant by that Tex-Mex was more fun and closer to the truth. His question caused me to reflect for awhile.
I have often faulted Diana Kennedy for assuming that the only way to champion authentic Mexican cooking was to trash Tex-Mex. I don’t want to make the same mistake in reverse. I love Mexico and most of its food. I eat antojitos in Houston taquerias and taco trucks all the time.
Its the “authentic Mexican” restaurants for gabachos in the U.S. and their ritualized recreations of relics like mole Poblano and chiles en nogada that remind me of Ballet Folklorico performances. People rave about the sophistication of this stuff, but both the food and the music strike me as stilted imitations of an outdated tradition.
Nobody is calling Tex-Mex sophisticated. It is a raw and primal half-breed border culture. I first heard this Freddy Fender Tex-Mex love song when I was in college and it still hits me hard.
Tex-Mex outlaw Freddy Fender, born Baldemar Huerta in San Benito Texas in 1937, started singing Elvis Presley songs in Spanish for the Mexican market after he got kicked out of the Marines. He recorded “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” in 1959, then spent three years in Angola for possession of marijuana. His number one hit “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” was recorded in 1974. He went on to win three Grammys before he died in 2006.
Did you take digging-yourself-out-of-a-hole lessons from Eric Massa, Robb? It is possible to appreciate Tex-Mex while also recognizing that–by all standards by which cuisines are judged–Mexican is superior.
The common perception of Tex-Mex food outside of Texas is represented by Old El Paso and hard-shell tacos filled with bland ground beef. It wasn’t until moving to Texas from NYC that I, with the help of my native Texan wife, learned otherwise.
This is a pretty cringe-inducing statement.
I could understand if you were complaining about the gringo-ized remakes of Mexican classics that you find in a place like Topolobampo, where upscale ingredients, such as foie gras or lobster or kobe beef, are added to dishes to make them more “sophisticated” in order to justify their high prices, but in reality, those items just create something incoherent. That I would get.
I would also understand if you were complaining that too many Mex-Mex restaurants in the United States (not that there are a lot of them) just give a “best of” menu of well-known Mexican dishes: mole poblano, ceviche, chiles en nogada, cochinita pibil, and the like, whether they’re good renditions, or (all-too-often) not.
But instead, you just trash tradition. Somehow a mole poblano, something you can find made every day in Puebla, is tired but a carnitas taco isn’t? Chiles en nogada, a September festival dish, seasonally appropriate both because that’s when pomegranates are ripe and because that’s when Mexican independence day is, is tired, but nachos aren’t? Really?
As if to emphasize my point rather than to make your own…. To show how tired a ballet folklorico is, you don’t counter with Mana or Los Lonely Boys, but Freddy Fender? Huey, I have a couple of Freddy Fender albums, Texas Tornados, and Los Super Seven, but I’d never try to convince myself that Fender is “current”. You just come across provincial — as someone who likes his era’s “stuff” but is unaware of what came after and thinks what came before is old-fashioned.
You have my sympathies when you defend Tex-Mex or call on people to stop thinking of Tex-Mex as a “lesser” cuisine (and call on people to cook with better ingredients where appropriate), but you’re not even making that point well here.
Hey, I just brought the whole thing up in the first place because, as someone who grew up on Cal-Mex (and, no, I don’t want to get into a compare-and-contrast thing or have to defend that genre’s virtues) and who subsequently has had the good fortune to spend a lot of time in Texas eating Tex-Mex (some of it in what I reckon is probably the capital of Tex-Mex, San Antonio), I just get tired of hearing people put it down and announce that they only like the “real thing”. Italian-American food gets the same bad rap. Sure, there’s lots of bastardized, lousy Tex-Mex—and Italian-American—food out there, but both are genuine cuisines in their own right and both can be damn good. There’s no need to put down cheese enchiladas or spaghetti with meatballs just because you’d rather eat (or tell people you’d rather eat) pato relleno en pipian verde or animelle alla finanziera.
I like Tex-Mex, eat a lot of it, but you have to admit it is mildly spiced. Tex-Mex is Mexican food without the challenge. But that’s OK, if you’re in Houston and you want spicy food you don’t go for Tex-Mex, you go for Thai or Indian.
Scott and ExtraMSG-
I have tried hard to stay on the wagon–but every now and then I backslide and take a drink of that good old Tex-Mex apologist Kool-Aid!
Thanks as always for keeping me honest.
Watch for a tribute to Velveeta coming soon to this blog!!
When I first fell in love with “Old Mexico” (as my in-laws call it) and as authentic Mexican food became commonly available here I went through a period of looking down on our traditional Tex-Mex style as some sort of bastardization swimming in melted cheese a meat sauce. And then I realized: in every region of Mexico, if you order enchiladas (which, by the way, is just short-hand for “tortillas enchiladas”, chilied tortillas) you get a wild variety of dishes; from the short-stack looking Oaxacan style to the Potosinos in North-Central Mexico. And as I came into contact with other Latinos who immediately identified my Spanish as Mexican I was forced to the realization that, linguistically, culturally and culinarily speaking, Texas is just one of the northernmost regions of Mexico. If Mexicans in Texas developed a style of cooking it was because of their environment and the available foodstuffs. It’s not “bastardized”, it’s just another Mexican style (Taco Bell aside). I always have fun introducing my Mexican friends to TexMex and watching their surprise…it can be way different. But, the whole region’s different. It’s where the United States of America and the United Mexican States overlap…that’s all. Again, Taco Bell aside.
By the way, if you want really “authentic” Mexican food in Austin, while La Fonda San Miguel has the classics, to eat like you’re really in Mexico you go to the taquerias (usually with names from the states of Jalisco and Michoacan), and especially (if you want an experience where you almost need a passport and a tourist permit) go to the supermarkets: La Moreliana, La Hacienda, and, best of all, La Michoacana. That’s where the GOOD stuff is…it’s like being in the market in Jacona, Michoacan…guisos, huaraches, chiles rellenos…todo sabrosisimo, güey!