The El Paso-Ciudad Juárez borderlands and the Making of "Authentic" Mexican food
On the border, the meaning of "Mexican" and "American" food is constantly in flux.
“Shape-shifting burritos”
An El Paso burrito is a thing of beauty: long, slim and tautly rolled, filled with succulent guisados like chicharrón or barbacoa, or maybe huevos con winnie (scrambled eggs with sliced hot dog). The best come bundled in sturdy, ultra-fresh flour tortillas and wrapped in heat-preserving tinfoil, details that evoke the handiwork of a doting Mexican mother. In their elegance and economy—and their remarkable distillation of regional foodways encompassing Chihuahuan, New Mexican, and Anglo-Texan influences—burritos from the El Paso-Ciudad Juarez borderlands are unsurpassed.
Probably these are fighting words. For as much as we take them for granted or dismiss them as cheap comfort food, burritos elicit passionate opinion. In California, where I live, regional rivalries and nostalgia fuel the burrito discourse. San Franciscans weaned on Mission-style burritos champion the girthy plenitude of the burritos at La Cumbre and El Faro. Angelenos love the five-pounder “Manuel’s Special” at El Tepeyac and keep secret stashes of Burritos La Palma in their freezers for emergencies. San Diego natives are loyal and proud burrito connoisseurs, producing scholarship in the name of the California Burrito. (Sonorans—luxuriating in perfect char-grilled beef and ambrosial wheat-flour tortillas—absorb these controversies with polite bemusement).
In 1998, Washington Post journalist Peter Fox went in search of the burrito’s origin. A San Francisco native devoted to the Mission-style, Fox began his search in the Bay Area, whichs feels to me a little like going to Brooklyn to investigate the origins of pizza. His quest takes us to several notable and landmark Mexican food restaurants before concluding with a rather anticlimatic dinner at Hermosillo’s Restaurant Xochimilco (slogan: Si visita Hermosillo y no come en Xochimilco, haga de cuenta que no vino. Roughly translated: “If you came to Hermosillo and didn’t eat at Xochimilco, were you even in Hermosillo?”). There, Fox orders a quintessentially norteño beef machaca burrito, only to be disappointed by its size. “I had found the original burrito, but I had also found out something more basic,” he writes. “Things change. Tastes change. Foods evolve.”
There’s historical agreement that the burrito as we know it is the product of northern Mexico, where wheat-flour came into widespread use in the 19th and 20th centuries, and then diffused northward by Mexican immigrants. I can imagine my Bracero forefathers, working the southern California citrus belt, moving northward to pick hops, pears, prunes, and apples, finding pleasure and comfort in a burrito’s hot nourishment. (The most reasonable and succinct explanation I’ve encountered comes from writer and chef Minerva Orduño Rincón, writing in the Arizona Republic: “the invention of the burrito is much like the invention of fire in that it most likely sparked in multiple places at once and then spread”).
A trailer for “Harvests of Loneliness” (2010), produced and directed by filmmaker Vivian Price and Dr. Gilbert Gonzalez. The documentary includes historical accounts of migrant Mexican farm workers brought into the U.S. from 1942-1964 under the temporary worker program known as the Bracero Program.
People, of course, have been wrapping meats and vegetables with tortilla-like foods since time immemorial. More interesting to me is Fox’s quixotic quest to unearth the true and authentic “original burrito,” an impulse that speaks to our longing for concise, linear streams of information, but which underestimates or ignores the complicated backstories and cultural baggage attached to familiar foods.
The shape-shifting quality of the burrito is emblematic of the U.S-Mexico border, and the El Paso-Juarez border in particular, a cultural threshold where the line between what’s “Mexican” and what’s “American” is blurrier than lines drawn on maps. I’m tempted to repurpose the Chicano refrain, “Ni de aquí ni de allá”—“neither from here or there”—in the name of the burrito, the quintessential El Paso-Juarez border food.
“Chuco Town”
The El Paso-Juarez borderlands, where the Rio Grande and the Franklin Mountains intersect, represent one of north America’s great cultural crossroads. Humans have lived here for at least 10,000 years, sheltering the Manso peoples, the semi-nomadic Suma, and bands of the Mescalero Apache. El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the Royal Road of the Interior, the earliest Euro-American trade route in the United States, ran through here for about 300 years, connecting Mexico City to the Spanish territorial capitol of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Following the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico, “the only successful Native uprising against a colonizing power in North America,” the Tigua people settled and built the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo just east of El Paso, establishing the acequia (canal) system that made the valley bloom; Piro, Tano and Jèmez people also settled in the region after being displaced by Spanish colonizers. Buffalo Soldiers, African American Army men serving on the western frontier in the years following the Civil War, were stationed at El Paso’s Fort Bliss in the 1860s. Mexicans and Chinese immigrants made the region an important north American foothold in the late 19th century; a “Chinese underground railroad” sprang up here in the 1880s to aid immigrants denied entry into the country due to racist immigration polices. One of the most vibrant Black communities in the American West came to life here in the early 20th century. (The first Texan chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People opened in El Paso around 1914).
The Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, in which Mexico lost about 55 percent of its territory, permanently staunched the fluidity of the region. Before the war, present-day El Paso was a string of hamlets and farms on the northern banks of the Rio Grande, on the outer edges of El Paso del Norte—the pass to the north, the original name of Ciudad Juarez. The Rio Grande was transformed into an international borderline almost overnight, and present-day El Paso was cut away from its historic center. The railroad came to El Paso in the 1880s, bringing increased Anglo migration and industry to the border, including the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), whose twin smokestacks would for decades wreak damage on the land and its people. For all the “progress” and change wrought by the new border, the line could never fully excise El Paso from its Mexican heart. To certain Texans, El Paso remains a far-west oddity, a place “out there,” almost six-hundred miles from the capitol statehouse, suspiciously close to Mexico. It’s telling that in the summer of 2019, when a 21-year-old white supermacist from Allen, Texas, named Patrick Wood Crusius moved forward with his plan to exterminate as many Mexicans as possible, he chose El Paso to carry out his terrible vision.
In the first half of the 20th century, El Paso became “Chuco Town,” a nickname evoking the flowering of pachuco youth culture in the border city. It was an era of Mexican American hepcats whose sensibilities were shaped by big-band music out of Mexico City and jazz culture out of Harlem. Their music and wardrobes were brash and flamboyant, their slang florid and complex. Pachucos were the living embodiment of “Ni de aquí ni de allá”—neither from here nor there—a creative and rebellious manifestation of borderland identity and life. Chuco Town became a major cultural node on a circuit that included Mexico City, Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua City, San Antonio, and Los Ángeles, among other cities and towns—an artery flowing with migration and travel, and the new ideas, trends and material goods that these engendered.
It seems somewhat fated that Mexican food would take on hybrid forms at the border—that here it would undergo a dramatic commercial transformation that would permanently shape the way people around the world came to eat and understand Mexican food.
“Authentically American-made”
Before Ciudad Juarez became “Murder City,” before the transnational corporations set up duty-free maquiladoras along the southern border following NAFTA, before the killing fields of working-class Juarez women became “la vergüenza nacional” (Mexico’s national shame), there was romance in the borderlands. Albeit, it was the romance of bordertown stereotypes—of desperate fugitives and wanderers, racy señoritas and lovelorn cowboys, a convergence of broken humanity caught between opposing worlds.
It’s the dicey romance of Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” the classic country-western story-song about a black-eyed “Mexican maiden” who is “wicked and evil” yet also irresistible. It’s the complicated romance of the Mexican Revolution, whose spiritual home was the El Paso-Juarez borderlands, a place that in the early 20th century became a passionate welter of political insurrectionists, radical journalists, soldiers-of-fortune, saint-healers, and Pancho Villa himself, drinking strawberry sodapop at the bar of downtown El Paso’s Roma Hotel.
This romance would be instrumental in selling Mexican food to apprehensive white consumers. Mexican food, along with other “ethnic” cuisines, was for most of the 20th century a hard sell. A majority of white Americans viewed the cuisine as suspicious in hygiene, cleanliness and healthfulness. Memorably, a New York Times writer in 1908 described it as “greasy food” that was “not conducive to American Energy.” (That’s among the kinder opinions of the day.)
In 1931, an El Pasoan named George Ashley borrowed money from his mother, Ida Ashley, to open a milk bar. In an effort to boost business, Ashley sold takeaway Mexican dishes made with “a rich tasty sauce prepared from a secret recipe belonging to his mother-in-law, Sarah Tyra,” according to the El Paso Times and the El Paso County Historical Society. The details and ingredients of Ms. Tyra’s sauce may be lost to time, but it’s reasonable to assume the sauce was mild in flavor and spice level, as it was engineered for largely Anglo consumers. In any case, Ashley’s side hustle would morph into Ashley Inc., the first company in the U.S. to sell canned Mexican foods. It would become among the most influential food manufacturers of the 20th century.
Ashley’s marketing efforts appealed to white consumer’s sense of adventure and romance. “Wouldn’t you like occasionally to serve something totally different, romantically foreign, and still wonderfully appealing even to the palates of world traveled gourmets? You, too, can find it, as many others have, in Mexican foods,” reads an undated advertisement brochure, most likely published in the 1950s. They also stressed the hygienic and orderly nature of the company’s operations facilities. The El Paso-Ciudad Juarez borderlands played a central part in these marketing efforts: Ashley Inc. touted its products as “made on the border.” Yet the products were also clearly labeled as “Made in the U.S.A.” These dueling messages characterized the burgeoning commercial food genre pioneered by companies like Ashley, Inc., which I’ll call American-made Mexican food.
Possibly a watershed moment in Mexican American food history happened in 1938, when Ashley, Inc. won a contract to feed the servicemen at Fort Bliss. The foods became wildly popular on base. The servicemen’s endorsement was an All-American stamp of approval, legitimizing Mexican foods like mashed beans and “Spanish” rice while simultaneously helping diffuse them around the country. (A major Ashley innovation was canned tortillas, which made the food travel-friendly and shippable). Ashley would eventually supply about half of the tortillas to El Paso’s retail market, according to the El Paso Times. By the 1950s, it was canning 20 Mexican food products, including canned enchiladas, several sauces, green chiles, and various bean preparations, and exporting products to Hong Kong, China, Venezuela, the Phillippines, and South America.
The ascendance of Ashley, Inc. represents a pattern that would repeat itself over time: Anglo American businesspeople appropriating Mexican foods, transforming them into industrialized, efficient, shelf-stable foods for Anglo consumers. Ashley’s main competitors were the Mountain Pass Canning, founded in 1916 in southern New Mexico, and Valley Canning Company, which was based just outside El Paso in Canutillo. Mountain Pass would eventually absorb Valley Canning and move its production facilities to suburban El Paso. In 1938, following the example set by Ashley, Inc., Mountain Pass trademarked the “Old El Paso” label.
From the beginning, “Old El Paso” was created for non-El Pasoans; according to the El Paso Times, the label and food line was sold only outside West Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The “Old El Paso” brand name was an obvious signifier of authenticity—of food produced close to its roots. Its expansive line of products—including enchilada sauces (mild, medium or hot), canned chiles, seasoning mixes, taco shells and dinner kits—were designed to make Mexican cooking easy and approachable for Anglo home cooks. To this day, Old El Paso is marketed as a quick-fix solution to dinnertime—the Mexican-inspired meal that even your Aunt Gladys in Bismarck can pull off.
In 1998, Old El Paso produced a TV ad introducing the burrito to Australia.
In 2001, shortly after the Minneapolis-based food conglomerate General Mills took over the Old El Paso company, it shut down the long-running production facilities in Anthony, Texas, just outside El Paso, where for a half-century its products were made. Old El Paso’s largely Latino workforce, numbering in the hundreds, was out of work; the contracts with southern New Mexico chile farms, a regional supply chain for decades, became null and void. Whatever meaningful ties the product had with its namesake region were permanently cut.
For the General Mills executives, the products produced in Anthony, Texas, were too authentic, too faithful to Mexican home-cooking: “General Mills spokesman Tom Forsythe pointed to changing consumer tastes and market trends behind his company's decision to close the food factory,” reported Albuquerque Business First. “The Anthony division of Old El Paso, explained Forsythe, specialized in making products suited for what he termed ‘scratch cooking’—beans, sauces and chiles. ‘That is not a growing segment," insisted Forsythe. ‘There is a trend away from scratch cooking, and that is a factor.’ ”
Today it’s unclear at which U.S. General Mills facility the Old El Paso products are made (there are no facilities in Texas; one podcaster has postulated New Jersey). What we know is that in 2013 alone, the Old El Paso brand raked in nearly 300 million dollars in U.S. annual revenue; brand revenues reportedly jumped during the pandemic, according to several sources. Today, Old El Paso products are a global juggernaut; in France, the products reportedly have more than 70 percent share of the Mexican food market. Old El Paso products made for the European market are produced in a factory in San Adrian, Spain. What many view as a bowlderized version of Mexican cooking has become the face of the cuisine in parts of the world.
In his fascinating study of El Paso Mexican food and identity from the 1880s to the 1960s, historian Juan Manuel Mendoza Guerrero notes that the industrialization of Mexican foods flattened and subsumed the cuisine’s complicated and regionally-diverse foodways.
Moreover, Mendoza Guerrero describes the various ways that Mexicans and Mexican Americans living in El Paso sought to reappropriate the cuisine from the forces that would industrialize and commodify it. Early in the 20th century, small Mexican-owned businesses in the city touted the virtues of fresh ingredients over canned; Mexican restaurants increasingly advertised themselves as “authentically Mexican.” Middle- and upper-class Mexican immigrant families in El Paso were known to cross into Juarez on Sundays to eat at “authentic” Mexican restaurants like La Nueva Poblana and Café El Tecolote.
In 1937, an anonymous editorial in the El Paso Spanish-language El Continental newspaper railed against the growing industrialization of Mexican food, decrying the “pozole pills” and “refried bean capsules” that it had wrought. As Mendoza Guerrero argues, for El Paso’s Mexican and Mexican American residents living through the canned food revolution, the ways of eating Mexican food—slow-cooked versus stove-heated, for one—became increasingly a marker of Mexican identity and status.
Of course, the popularity of stream-lined, industrialized Mexican foods would continue apace throughout the 20th century, and these continue to hold sway over millions of dinner tables every night. “Inauthentic” canned foods are consumed by Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike. (As Mendoza Guerrero notes, Mexican immigrants have increasingly relied on canned foods to help recreate traditional meals and dishes.)
Yet El Paso’s central role as a commercial proving ground for Mexican food—and the waves of backlash it inspired—remind us that questions of authenticity have always followed Mexican food. These questions will never cease. For as long as we’re human, we’ll seek to define ourselves by the ways we eat, and the shape of our burritos.
Recommended Listening
Recommended Reading
Ramon Aguilera Rangel, Noro, October 22, 2022, “Los burritos son magia pura y este manjar tuvo su origen en Chihuahua”
Bill Esparza, Street Gourmet LA, January 23, 2011. “Villa Ahumada,Chihuahua:A Quesadilla and Burrito Oasis on the Cd.Juarez-Chihuahua Highway”
Nicole Lopez, El Paso Matters, February 26, 2021. “The rich history of El Paso’s African American community”
Katherine Magruder, The Historical Cooking Project, August 17, 2018. “The Almost-Forgotten Local Roots of the Old El Paso Food Brand”
Jorge Meza, El Heraldo de Juárez, June 4, 2023. “Burritos de Villa Ahumada, una tradición para los viajeros desde hace más de 70 años.”
Minerva Orduño Rincón, The Arizona Republic/USA Today, November 19, 2021. “Burrito myths, legends and how to make classic Sonoran burros de machaca.”
Jaime Portillo and Joanna Atilanoc, El Paso Community College Library, “Borderlands: Chinese Immigrants Helped Build Railroad in El Paso.”
José R. Ralat, Texas Monthly, August 2, 2021. “The Socorro and San Elizario Taco Trail.”
Charles D. Thompson Jr. Southern Cultures. Faces of Time: The Braceros of Ciudad Juarez.
Adriana Velez, Serious Eats, July 22, 2022, “13 Burrito Styles Everyone Should Know.”
Books
Daniel Dorado Romo, Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, 1893-1923
Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community