MEXICAN FOOD IN THE USA

As American as Fajita Pie
From Chicago to Disneyland, Mexican food has taken a surprising path to U.S. dominance


As the fast-food chain Taco Bell celebrates its 50th anniversary this week, you may have noticed ads for its latest offering: the Doritos Locos taco. (That would be a taco with a shell made of Doritos chip material.) You might even have eaten one. Could anything be more American—or more Mexican?
That's "Mexican" in the sense of the hugely varied Mexican food that has taken over much of America's food landscape over the past century. In its combination of the exotic and the familiar, Mexican food has always occupied a unique place in the culinary history of the U.S. (click below to read more)


Like millions of people of Mexican ancestry who live here, the story of Mexican food in America is deeply intertwined with the past, present and future of our relationship with our neighbor to the south. To wit, here are 10 things that you probably didn't know about the origins of some of your favorite Mexican foods:
1. The first Americans to praise Mexican food were military brass. As early as 1879, San Antonio canners won contracts with the War Department to feed soldiers with chile con carne.
2. America's first Mexican-food celebrity wasn't a cook—or even a Mexican—but rather Buffalo Bill Cody. In 1886, just outside the first Madison Square Garden, he set up a "genuine Mexican restaurant" to complement his traveling road show. On the menu: enchiladas, chile rellenos, chili, mezcal, tamales and other treats familiar to us today.
3. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago was the event that sent Mexican food on its way to conquering American palates. Tamale men from San Francisco roamed the city selling their wares from steam buckets. From there, tamaleros spread across the U.S. and became a familiar sight in small-town America for decades afterward. San Antonio appeared with its native chile con carne; Chicago's meat companies quickly started canning the product, Americanizing the name to just "chili."
4. Doritos were invented at Disneyland in the early 1960s, when Mexican workers at the theme park's Casa de Fritos restaurant fried discarded tortillas and put flavoring on their crispy creation. Frito-Lay executive Arch West discovered the chips on an impromptu trip and pitched his bosses on the idea. Doritos debuted nationally in 1966.
5. In 1971, Mariano Martinez rigged a used soft-serve ice-cream machine to make margaritas at his Dallas restaurant from a prefabricated mix packaged in a Spackle bucket. Today, that first-ever frozen-margarita machine is in the Smithsonian's collection.
6. Nachos were invented in 1943 by Ignacio Anaya, a chef in Piedras Negras, Mexico, who whipped up a quick snack for military housewives on a shopping holiday. The gooey dish didn't go truly national until 1976, when a San Antonio concessionaire named Frank Liberto (cousin of Johnny Cash's first wife, Vivian) created ballpark nachos to sell at Arlington Stadium, then the home of the Texas Rangers. Today, nachos outsell hot dogs at the concessions stands of pro baseball and football games.
7. Fajitas first became famous in Houston via Ninfa's, a restaurant run by Rio Grande Valley native Ninfa Rodriguez Laurenzo. She didn't capitalize on the idea, though. Instead, national chains like El Torito and Chi-Chi's sent spies to learn how to make the dish and spread it far and wide during the 1980s.
8. The earliest documented designated taco truck was operated by two New York housewives in the city's Riverdale neighborhood in 1966. Called Tic-Taco, the truck was available for catering but didn't have a full-fledged kitchen. The earliest acknowledged Los Angeles-area taco truck was King Taco, which didn't set up operations until 1974; today, it's a beloved chain visited by presidential candidates needing a spicy photo op.
9. Tortillas are now a multibillion-dollar industry in the U.S., but as recently as the 1980s, the only way that most Americans who lived in areas without Mexicans could find them was in canned form. This abomination was pioneered by George N. Ashley of El Paso, whose Ashley's company of El Paso started selling the product in 1938. Today, canned tortillas are largely extinct.
10. Tacos arrived in the U.S. with refugees from the Mexican Revolution, but they didn't become truly popular until Glen Bell opened Taco Bell in 1962, in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey. Mr. Bell admits in his biography that his taco recipe was lifted from Mitla Café in San Bernardino, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year.
The Doritos Locos taco recipe? That one is all Taco Bell's.
—Mr. Arellano is editor of the OC Weekly in California's Orange County and author of "Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America."