The Mexican Restaurant in America, A Journey across Time and Place
The Mexican restaurant is a form of ethnic food dining found across the United States in cities and towns. It is an expression of popular cultural consumption but also a business enterprise historically engaged by families of Mexican ancestry. This presentation explores how Mexican restaurants came to be part of the American dining experience. The presentation examines the restaurant as a form of material culture, a venue of cross-cultural contact, an ethnic enterprise, and a culinary business of surprising regional variation. The story of the Mexican restaurant is revealed through conventional sources, including field investigations, and an archive of historic ephemera that includes postcards, matchbook covers, and menus. The Mexican restaurant can be traced to late nineteenth-century outdoor dining in San Antonio, TX. The popularity of Mexican food was driven by a nationwide early twentieth century “tamale craze.” In the post-World War II era, Mexican ancestry families opened dinner houses in selected regions. The family restaurant transformed in late twentieth century to a corporate enterprise, which exploded the appeal and geographic extent of Mexican restaurants. Mexican restaurant food evolved from recognized American regional varieties of the cuisine—Tex-Mex, Cal-Mex, Arizona-Mex, and New Mexico-Mex—to embrace regional varieties from Mexico such as foodways of Oaxaca and Jalisco. Today, selected restaurants highlight celebrity chefs who assemble menus that feature the native roots of the cuisine. In all these time and place transformations, the restaurant, originally constructed for non-Mexicans to experience Mexican food, persists as an institution of American dining enjoyed by many and located in every part of the country.
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Daniel Arreola is a cultural and historical geographer who specializes in the study of the Mexican American borderland and Hispanic cultures in America.
He is the recipient of the Paul P. Vouras Medal from The American Geographical Society for his studies in regional geography, and the Carl O. Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award and the Preston E. James Eminent Latin Americanist Career Award from the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers for his Mexican borderland studies. His Tejano South Texas (2002) book won the prestigious Jackson Prize from the Association of American Geographers
Arreola is the author of seven scholarly books including The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality (with James R. Curtis), Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province, and Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places: Community and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary America.
His recent works concern the visual historical geography of Mexican border towns, a research project in four volumes. The initial book in this project was Postcards from the Río Bravo Border: Picturing the Place, Placing the Picture, 1900s-1950s. Three subsequent volumes include Postcards from the Sonora Border: Visualizing Place through a Popular Lens, 1900s-1950s, Postcards from the Chihuahua Border: Revisiting a Pictorial Past, 1900s-1950s, and Postcards from the Baja California Border: Portraying Townscape and Place, 1900s-1950s.
Arreola’s is presently writing a book titled “The Mexican Restaurant in America, a Journey across Time and Place.” He is an Arizona State University, Professor Emeritus, and currently resides in Placitas, New Mexico.