To the left of Gustavo Arellano is the hamburger stand that Glen Bell, the founder of Taco Bell, once ran
By JULIA MOSKIN
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif.
ADMIT it, tortilla-chip fans: you are curious about Taco Bell Doritos Locos tacos, introduced in March. These salt bombs take the usual fast-food taco filling and stuff them inside a giant orange-dusted nacho-cheese chip. They have been so successful that the company has just introduced a Cool Ranch flavor.
But to truly grasp the significance of these creations, the taco must be eaten in the company of Gustavo Arellano, a journalist and Orange County, Calif., native who is perhaps the greatest (and only) living scholar of Mexican-American fast food. And preferably, you will eat it here, in the birthplace of American fast food, while he explains to you precisely how the Frito, America’s first corn chip, was copied from the Mexican tostado, then evolved into the Dorito and eventually the Tostito.
He has just published “Taco USA,” an absorbing account of how a few foods (salsa, tacos, chili, tequila) from the complicated and enormous cuisine of Mexico managed to slip into the mainstream of American taste.
“It’s not exactly a feel-good story, except maybe for the shareholders of Frito-Lay,” he said, gesturing out to the empty storefronts and cash-only gas stations that line the streets.
San Bernardino, an hour east of Los Angeles, is the fertile crescent for American fast food, but its west side has clearly seen better days. In 1940, the first McDonald’s drive-up hamburger stand opened a few blocks from this Taco Bell; throughout the ’40s and ’50s, entrepreneurs came through town to check out the McDonald brothers’ revolutionary technology hacks — like single-serving ketchup dispensers, burger-size spatulas and disposable milkshake cups. (In 1954, Ray Kroc, a salesman of milkshake mixing machines, came through town and was so impressed that he bought in, started his own franchise, and later bought the brothers out.)
The evolution of Mexican food in the United States is the current obsession of Mr. Arellano, the editor of The OC Weekly, a lively journal where he has also been the food critic for the last 10 years. He has spent much of that time exploring precisely how Mexican food became so popular and profitable in this country — where, until very recently, most things Mexican were generally both unpopular and unprofitable.
For the purposes of Mr. Arellano’s tale, the story of the fast-food taco begins here, on the corner of North Sixth and Mount Vernon Streets, where Route 66 used to run through town.
Mitla Cafe, a modest restaurant serving typical Mexican-American food, has been on this corner since 1937 and is still owned by the descendants of its founders, Vicente and Lucia Montaño. It’s the oldest Mexican restaurant in the Inland Empire, the vast tract of sage and scrub east of Los Angeles, now covered with housing developments and strip malls, and home to millions of Mexican-Americans. (San Bernardino County’s population is almost 50 percent Hispanic, according to 2010 Census figures.)
Mitla is not a destination for huitlacoche, epazote or a rigorously authentic mole negra. It is old-school Cal-Mex, with burgers and grilled cheese on the menu. Plenty of patrons eat fries with their enchiladas; Pepsi products, not aguas frescas, fill the drinks cooler. But Mitla does serve a signature Mexican-American dish: tacos dorados con carne molida, “golden” tortillas fried to order and folded around a spicy compressed wedge of ground beef, blanketed with iceberg lettuce, chopped tomatoes and shredded Cheddar. (The hard-shell taco is not unknown in Mexico, but it is usually deep-fried with the stuffing already sealed inside it. These proto-tacos can still be found at Cielito Lindo on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles, where the recipe hasn’t changed since 1934.)
At Mitla, the tortilla is hot and crisp, the meat is beefy and satisfying, but other than that, this specialty — which has been on the menu as long as any of the Montaños can remember — very closely resembles the taco served to more than 36 million customers every week at 5,600 Taco Bell locations in the United States.
Coincidence? Mr. Arellano thinks not.
In 1950, one Glen Bell, an entrepreneur possessed by envy of the McDonald brothers’ success, opened a burger stand across the street from Mitla. (The building is still there; today, it’s a taco stand.) According to Mr. Arellano’s research, Mr. Bell ate often at Mitla and watched long lines form at its walk-up window; later, having persuaded the Montaños to show him how the tacos were made, he experimented after hours with a tool that would streamline the process of frying the tortillas.
He started serving his own tacos in 1951 (this according to Mr. Bell’s 1999 biography “Taco Titan,” which Mr. Arellano has practically memorized), and the business went through several name changes (Taco Tia, El Taco) before starting as Taco Bell in 1962. Now, at Mitla, the lines are gone; only the brown vinyl booths and the lunch regulars remain; while on the Taco Bell Web site, Mr. Bell is cited as the creator of the “fast food crunchy taco.” The Montaño family members are philosophical about this outcome, but Mr. Arellano isn’t.
“There’s a lot of anger about appropriations from Mexico, but in my opinion it’s not enough,” he said.
The book tells many similar tales of white Americans (gabachos, he said, 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, the editor of The Village Voice, who grew up in Los Angeles and recalls making enchiladas with canned tortillas, refried beans and salsa in a Columbia dorm in 1982. “There wasn’t even a Taco Bell in New York City back then, and I was desperate.”
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. Without it, Mr. Arellano said, the mass success of restaurant chains like Chipotle, Chili’s, and El Torito would never have been possible. (Margaritas are often the most profitable menu item in Mexican restaurants; the food is expected to be inexpensive.)
Mr. 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 hybrid is, he said, “the dish that best personifies the Mexican-American experience, a monument to mestizaje.”
But he is wary of the many non-Mexicans who have anointed themselves as ambassadors for Mexican food in the United States, from Bertha Haffner-Ginger (who taught cooking classes at The Los Angeles Times in the early 20th century and wrote an influential and confusing cookbook called “California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book”) to more modern arbiters of taste like the British expatriate Diana Kennedy and the Chicago chef Rick Bayless.
For Mr. Arellano, non-Mexicans who glorify “authentic” Mexican cuisine, even with respectful intent, are engaging in a kind of xenophobia. “It’s a different way of keeping Mexican food separate, out of the American mainstream,” said Mr. Arellano, who calls Mexican-food purists “Baylessistas.” (Mr. Bayless declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Mr. Arellano, 33, has lived in Orange County his whole life, remaining inside what he calls the “Mexican bubble” through high school, eating mainly fast food and his mother’s cooking. His parents were born in Zacatecas, in the mountainous center of Mexico, where potatoes, beans, beef and cheese are plentiful; chiles rellenos, stuffed with aged cheese nicknamed queso de pata (foot cheese) are a family favorite.
“I never had Thai food or Korean food until I was 21,” he said, pointing out that while Orange County is huge, densely populated and home to many immigrant communities, people tend to remain separate for the first few generations. In towns like Irvine and Newport Beach, Orange County also has a high concentration of wealthy whites; over all, there is plenty of opportunity for culture clash in the region. In 2004, perpetually amazed by local ignorance about Mexican culture and history, he invited reader submissions to a provocative and now widely syndicated column, “¡Ask a Mexican!”
As “The Mexican,” a fat sombrero-wearing caricature with a gold tooth, the angular and bespectacled Mr. Arellano answers readers’ deepest questions about Mexico — questions that are sometimes sincere but frequently racy, racist or both. (Some of the more tame examples: “Why do Mexicans like Chinese food so much?” “Is it true that Mitt Romney is part Mexican? “What is the deal with Cinco de Mayo?” )
For the record: it’s tasty and familiar; Mitt Romney’s father, George, was born in Mexico, where many American Mormons moved after the church banned polygamy in 1890; Cinco de Mayo is the anniversary of the 1862 Battle of Puebla, when Mexican forces held off French invaders. It is celebrated there, but traditionally not in the rest of Mexico. And certainly not with frozen margaritas.
The big question of what constitutes Mexican-American food has never been more interesting. In Orange County these days, he said, young Chicanos (whom he defines as Mexican-Americans who speak English as a primary language) are crushing on teriyaki rice bowls, an inflammatory Japanese-Hawaiian-Cal-Mex mashup of short-grain rice, teriyaki meat, scallions and Tapatío hot sauce. It’s a quick, cheap lunch, with a side of horchata, the cooling, sweet Mexican drink that is like rice pudding in liquid form.
The Korean taco, stuffed with bulgogi and kimchi and popularized around Los Angeles by chef Roy Choi — who also grew up in Orange County — has become a hipster street-food standard; last week, the T.G.I. Friday chain started serving a version. Alex Stupak, a classically trained pastry chef, has turned his hand to making fresh corn tortillas and filling them with Wagyu beef steak tartare in the East Village.
Can Chinese-American carnitas bao and Swiss enchiladas be far behind? (That last one exists already; enchiladas suizas, named for the blanket of béchamel that covers them in the oven.)
“Here’s what I know,” Mr. Arellano said. “If it’s in a tortilla, it’s Mexican food. If it’s made by a Mexican, it’s Mexican food.”
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