Professor of History and Food Studies at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, Jeffrey M. Pilcher explores the taco and the overall history of Mexican cuisine, a much more complicated topic than casual readers might expect, with his Taco Planet: A Global History of Mexican Food.  Conquest, globalization, appropriation, and industrialization have all played roles over centuries until we’ve reached a point where what’s considered authentic Mexican food stems from promoters of cultural food tourism.  Chefs claim to serve dishes based on Aztecs or Maya, but Pilcher asserts Mexican cooking traditions as currently understood began the Spanish conquest, a form of globalization, because conquistadors and explorers also brought Mexican agriculture and ingredients back into the Old World, part of a process known as the Columbian Exchange, where plants, animals, diseases, and ideas were exchanged between these worlds.  Spanish colonialists, for example, introduced wheat into Mexico both for basic dietary purposes and for religious needs, since maize wouldn’t do when producing wafers for the Eucharist.  There’s much intermingling of cultures here, and what Pilcher finally delivers is quite a conversation among participants within the Mexican cooking realm.

This volume is a version of Pilcher’s Que Vivan Los Tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican National Identity (1998), aimed at general readers.  I know little about Mexican history beyond the basics we learned in California public schools during the 1970s, so preparatory investigations would have been helpful.  Nonetheless, I greatly appreciated what I understood and with work could bridge the gaps.  Especially interesting are the Chili Queens, street vendors who operated in late-nineteenth-century San Antonio, their chilis were wildly popular among both white and Latinx citizens, but the press labeled them as seductive sellers of spicy Tex-Mex which eventually led to civic moments that proved their downfall.  I’d love more studies into these entrepreneurs because that’s what they were, understandably taking advantage of economic opportunities.  Pilcher spends many pages outlining various vendor wars not only in San Antonio but in Los Angeles as well.  Civic battles over street vendors were happening across the U.S. Southwest.

Eventually, Glen Bell enters the picture, exploiting industrialized taco-shell manufacturing and opening his Taco Bell franchises.  This Americanized approach to Mexican food runs against the “insurgent taco” promoted by street vendors and within homes.  Pilcher says more about Bell during an interview with Katy June Friesen of The Smithsonian Magazine:

Glen Bell borrowed everything about the taco from his Mexican neighbors. He did not invent the taco. What he did was bring a U.S. business model called franchising. I mapped out where these taco shops were, and I found there were no shops—or very few—in East L.A., the biggest Mexican neighborhood in all of California. I was like, “How can this possibly be?” And I realized that Mexicans, when they were selling to other Mexicans, were not calling their restaurants taco shops. The word “taco” in a restaurant name was actually a way of selling Mexican food to non-Mexicans. What Glen Bell was doing was allowing Americans of other racial and ethnic groups to sample Mexican food without actually going into Mexican neighborhoods.

Honestly, no one can trace the origins of tacos, but Pilcher dips heavily into media, cookbooks especially, to support his ideas.  Oddly, critics have taken exception with this methodology, but isn’t analyzing source materials a historian’s job?  I’ll give Pilcher latitude, much more latitude than others spare for him.  You’ll never find a more in-depth study.  Pilcher’s traveled the world sampling tacos, which thanks to the interactive forces described throughout his book are not just Mexican but global fare.  I’m no gourmand, but I’d wager the same could be said for other cuisines as well.  Certainly, I’ll not disrespect current chefs in Mexico and the United States working to define “authentic” Mexican food through the use of supposed Aztec and Maya ingredients and techniques, regardless of Pilcher’s observations about phenomena beginning with the Spanish conquest.  These chefs aren’t just taking their identity back from colonizers, they’re forming new traditions based upon those efforts.  Pilcher supports this too, even if he strives for historical accuracy.  What an exciting journey.