Jeffrey M. Pilcher
As late as the 1960s, tacos were virtually unknown outside Mexico and the American Southwest. Within fifty years the United States had shipped taco shells everywhere from Alaska to Australia, Morocco to Mongolia. But how did this tasty hand-held food - and Mexican food more broadly - become so
ubiquitous?
In Planet Taco, Jeffrey Pilcher traces the historical origins and evolution of Mexico's national cuisine, explores its incarnation as a Mexican American fast-food, shows how surfers became global pioneers of Mexican food, and how Corona beer conquered the world. Pilcher is
particularly enlightening on what the history of Mexican food reveals about the uneasy relationship between globalization and authenticity. The burritos and taco shells that many people think of as Mexican were actually created in the United States. But Pilcher argues that the contemporary struggle
between globalization and national sovereignty to determine the authenticity of Mexican food goes back hundreds of years. During the nineteenth century, Mexicans searching for a national cuisine were torn between nostalgic "Creole" Hispanic dishes of the past and French haute cuisine, the global
food of the day. Indigenous foods were scorned as unfit for civilized tables. Only when Mexican American dishes were appropriated by the fast food industry and carried around the world did Mexican elites rediscover the foods of the ancient Maya and Aztecs and embrace the indigenous roots of their
national cuisine.
From a taco cart in Hermosillo, Mexico to the "Chili Queens" of San Antonio and tamale vendors in L.A., Jeffrey Pilcher follows this highly adaptable cuisine, paying special attention to the people too often overlooked in the battle to define authentic Mexican food:
Indigenous Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
Preface
Introduction A Tale of Two Tacos
Part I: Proto-Tacos
1. Maize and the Making of Mexico
2. Burritos in the Borderlands
Part II: National Tacos
3. From the Pastry War to Parisian Mole
4. The Rise and Fall of the
Chili Queens
5. Inventing the Mexican American Taco
Part III: Global Tacos
6. The First Wave of Global Mexican
7. The Blue Corn Bonanza
Conclusion The Battle of the Taco Trucks
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
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Jeffrey M. Pilcher is Professor of History at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is the author of Que vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity; The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City; and Food in World History. He also edited
the Oxford Handbook of Food History.
Writing History - William Kelleher Storey and Towser Jones
The Oxford Handbook of Food History - Jeffrey M. Pilcher
The Oxford Companion to Food - Alan Davidson
Edited by Tom Jaine, Jane Davidson and Helen Saberi
Chop Suey - Andrew Coe
Curry - Lizzie Collingham