Taco USA Quotes

“It was a mission of celebration: never had two Mexican-Americans flown up in space on the same mission, and never did burritos shine so brightly.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“Tellingly, the Latinos who frequented his stand eschewed the tacos in favor of hot dogs and hamburgers. He racked up sales that opening day, but no one wanted the tacos. Finally, a white man ordered one, mispronouncing it as “take-oh.” The shell was already cold, waiting for its fillings; Bell prepared it and handed it to the gentleman. Juice from the ground beef inside dribbled on his pinstriped suit, but the man ordered another. Bell was ecstatic.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“meat didn’t come from the actual meat around the diaphragm of hens. As long as guests had the opportunity to see a waiter bring a sizzling platter of something to their table and warn them that the platter was hot, that was a fajita.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“Farnsworth’s innovation of offering multiple items on one plate, but added even more combinations. Someone at the restaurant numbered the different options, making it easier for non-Mexicans to order a plate instead of pronouncing each item on the menu, and the—pick your favorite: #1? #5? #15?—numbered combo plate became de rigueur.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“brought [Mexican food] down to their lowest common denominator,” wrote Diana Kennedy, with “an overly large platter of mixed messes, smothered with a shrill tomato sauce, sour cream, and grated yellow cheese preceded by a dish of mouth-searing sauce and greasy deep-fried chips.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“To identify as Mexican in California during the first part of the twentieth century was a dangerous proposition. Segregation was enforced in schools, housing, even in swimming pools. By passing as “Spanish,” Mexicans plugged into the memory of the Californios, of Ramona, and of everything that Americans such as Sterling and Chandler idealized. In Southern California, an acceptable ethnic alternative was Sonoran, since it was a group of immigrants from that northern Mexico state who had originally settled Los Angeles and who provided most of Los Angeles’s Mexican immigrants until the Mexican Revolution. The earliest Mexican restaurants in Southern California therefore called themselves Spanish or Sonoran—anything but Mexican.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“Even after California became part of Mexico upon the country’s independence from Spain, the region’s inhabitants thought of themselves differently from their fellow Mexican citizens—they were gente de razón (people of reason), a term that distinguished them from the Indians or those of mixed blood, frequently called cholos.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“La América Tropical stayed hidden from public view and history until the 1960s, by which time the elements washed enough white away so that ghostly outlines emerged. The mural is currently undergoing a restoration effort sponsored by a new generation of city fathers, its promise intimidating: you can hide the Mexican, but the Mexican will emerge.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“We changed the eating habits of an entire nation,” Bell states near the end of Taco Titan, and for once he isn’t merely self-mythologizing. Bell showed other Americans that their countrymen hungered for Mexican grub sold to them fast, cheap, and with only a smattering of ethnicity. Tacos the way Mexicans ate them were out of the question: tortilla factories were still concentrated in the Southwest, and tortillas didn’t last long.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“Taco Bell, which he launched in 1962 in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“On days off, Bell patronized the Mexican restaurants on San Bernardino’s West Side, the city’s historic barrio. He noticed how more and more non-Mexicans were eating Mexican food—this in a city that had just desegregated its swimming pools and was about to desegregate housing and schools. Feeling that tacos were the way to beat the McDonald’s, Bell passed the idea by his wife, who dismissed it as foolish: whites wouldn’t buy the food because it was too spicy, she argued. When Glen suggested toning down the heat, his soon-to-be-ex retorted, “Then even Mexicans won’t buy it.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“The American taco can boast of two birthplaces: Los Angeles and San Bernardino, California. But its baptismal font is the pan angrily bubbling with oil at Cielito Lindo, a tiny stand in downtown Los Angeles named after a classic ranchera song meaning “Beautiful Little Heaven.” From here come taquitos filled with shredded beef, grabbed fresh from that roiling pan, then anointed in a creamy salsa, more pureed avocado than chile.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“Tacos originally migrated to California and Texas in the 1920s, and only made it into scattered Mexican cookbooks written by Americans in about the 1930s. They”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“The United States in the 1890s was in the midst of a tamale man invasion that strolled hand in hand with the chili con carne craze.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“While the tamale dates to the foundation of civilizations in Meso-America, food historians will forever debate the origins of chili. Only”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“legend has it that Mexican food made its national debut at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, better remembered as the Chicago World’s Fair.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“Vanilla arrived in Europe shortly after the Conquest, specifically as a flavoring agent for the chocolate that the Spaniards were already imbibing, as a drink, in large quantities. Through the royal courts, the vine took hold in France, where the House of Bourbon prized vanilla for its scent. The demand increased enough that small vanilla plantations existed by the eighteenth century from Veracruz to northern Guatemala—but how to pollinate the plants and thus make a profitable industry out of harvesting vanilla remained with the Totonacs, who worked the fields. Scientists, investors, traders, and others vainly attempted to decipher the pollination puzzle, going as far as to bribe the Totonacs and even spy on their methods. But still, the secret remained intact, and the Veracruz area continued as the center for the vanilla trade, Papantla its main port of commerce.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“Food became one of the primary tests the Spaniards and the Aztecs used on each other to determine if the other side was amigo or foe. Moctezuma”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“tomatoes, corn, and chile peppers, found lives outside the Mexican diet and came to define other cuisines. And then there’s the two filched foods: vanilla and chocolate, indisputably Mexican, beloved by almost all, creators of fortunes for nearly everyone but their motherland.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“We must consider the infinite varieties of Mexican food in the United States as part of the Mexican family—not a fraud, not a lesser sibling, but an equal.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“These weren’t the tamales of my youth—they were smaller, but that was okay.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“But I can divine one thing: in Mexican food's rumble through this country, in the trail behind and the road ahead, I see us -- always evolving, never stagnant, continually striving for something better, constantly delicious. The American spirit manifested as a combo plate, heavy on the salsa.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“Ho didn't know how prescient those words were, as they fundamentally changed the course of Mexican food in the United States for like the thirtieth time ever.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“gasps a little, blinks his eyes three or four times and indulges in a convulsive shiver”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“And if your neighborhood still suffers under the tyranny of Taco Bell and combo plates? Fear not -- Mexican food is coming to wow you, to save you from a bland life, as it did for your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. Again. Like last time -- and the time before that.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“It's like a taco aspired to become a sope mixed with a quesadilla but got scared by the grease bath and quit halfway.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“I've eaten it since I was wee high to a snail's butt, and ah, it has not only counteracted the destructive elements that I have imposed upon my beautiful God-given brain, but given me a genius that I cannot account for except for the chile seed." says Jimmy Santiago Baca, New Mexico's most famous Chicano poet.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“The wide and strange land shaped and reshaped human institutions to its own purposes, and one either learned to live with the blazing sun, the scarcity of water, the dust and interminable distances, and the whispering quiet of empty canyons and mesas, or he admitted failure and moved elsewhere.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“El Torito rescued the meals from the mythologizing amnesia of Southern California and introduced them to areas where customers didn't know how to pronounce the meals they waited for in hour-long lines.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America

“Across the street, Mitla Cafe's mascot stares directly at the former Bell's Burgers, stares with a smile, just next to the slogan "Real Mexican Food." Mitla might not have the riches, might never have capitalized on its tacos, but it gets the last laugh.

The Taco Bell taco is dead. Long live the taco.”
― Gustavo Arellano, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America