Mestizaje

The book tells many similar tales of white Americans (gabachos, he says, is the term Mexican-Americans use; gringo is now used only by gabachos) who have managed to capitalize on Mexican food, going back to the 19th century, when entrepreneurs in Texas raced to produce the first canned chili con carne. There is Duane Roberts, the son of a California butcher, who engineered the first frozen burrito; Henry Steinbarth, a German-American butcher, who first brought packaged chorizo to the national market; and George N. Ashley, who managed (briefly) to produce canned corn tortillas that seem to have been eaten mainly as a last resort by expatriate Southwesterners. “It tasted pretty much like you would imagine a tortilla in a can would taste,” said Tony Ortega, now the editor of The Village Voice.

There are a few happy endings for Mexican cooks in “Taco USA:” one is Mariano Martinez, the Dallas restaurant owner who invented the frozen-margarita machine. His original contraption, adapted from a used soft-serve ice cream machine, is now among the holdings of the Smithsonian Museum of American History … [“Taco USA” author] Gustavo Arellano is far from a Mexican-food purist. (“You would have to go back to before the Spanish conquest: no carnitas, no cheese, no beef, no thank you.”) Some of his favorite Mexican-American foods are the Sonora dogs found in Arizona, bacon-wrapped hot dogs stuffed into soft bolillo rolls with salsa, pinto beans and mustard; the breakfast burritos stuffed with Tater Tots served at a chain called Taco John’s that he tried in Brookings, S.D.; and the Mexican hamburger at Chubby’s in Denver, a hamburger patty pressed into a burrito with beans and crisp pork rinds, then drowned with green chile sauce, which he anoints the single greatest Mexican dish in the United States. That burger/burrito mashup is, he says, “the dish that best personifies the Mexican-American experience, a monument to mestizaje.”