History of the taco

The history of the taco runs from pre-Hispanic tortillas wrapped around fish and insects, through colonial introductions of pork, beef and wheat, to the named street food that appears in written sources in the late nineteenth century and spread through Mexico City, the northern borderlands and the United States in the twentieth.

Before the word

The corn tortilla is far older than the taco as a named dish. México Desconocido describes a group of Indigenous tacos still eaten in central Mexico, filled with charales and acociles from the lakes of the Valley of Mexico, maguey worms and escamoles from the pulque country, chapulines from Oaxaca and jumiles from Guerrero. Anthropologist Jeffrey H. Cohen notes that grasshoppers have been eaten in Oaxaca for millennia and are described in Bernardino de Sahagún's sixteenth-century history of New Spain. Historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher, however, argues that the taco as a recognized dish is not ancient, and that its origins remain unknown.

Colonial ingredients

The Spanish brought pigs, cattle, sheep, goats and wheat. In Yucatán, Diario de Yucatán notes, pigs arrived with the conquistadors in the first half of the sixteenth century, which makes cochinita pibil a colonial dish built on the Maya pit oven. Wheat reached Sonora in the sixteenth century, and México Desconocido credits settlers there with adapting the corn tortilla to wheat flour; by 1769 flour tortillas were a staple of expeditions to the Californias. Pilcher observes that colonial elites disdained Native foods and favored European ones, an attitude that persisted into the nineteenth century.

The word appears

According to Pilcher, the earliest archival and dictionary references to the taco as food date to the end of the nineteenth century, and one of the first types described is the taco de minero, or miner's taco. He links the word to the paper-wrapped gunpowder charges called tacos in eighteenth-century silver mines. The burrito appears in the same period: Félix Ramos y Duarte's 1895 Diccionario de mejicanismos defines it as a rolled tortilla with meat. In Hermosillo, a local chronicle records fried tacos sold beside the railway in 1882.

The city and the taquería

In the twentieth century, industrialization drew migrants to Mexico City, including many women working in light industry, and Pilcher argues that the regional dishes they brought formed the popular cuisine later defined as Mexican. Taquerías first appeared in working-class neighborhoods. Lebanese immigrants who settled in Puebla and Mexico City adapted shawarma into tacos árabes in the 1930s, and around 1960 pork on the vertical spit produced tacos al pastor; El Huequito (1959) and El Tizoncito (1966) both claim the invention. Monterrey's trompo arrived in 1962, Ensenada's battered fish taco emerged around 1960, and Tijuana's carne asada stands grew from the late 1950s.

North of the border

The earliest mention of the taco in a United States newspaper that Pilcher found dates from 1905. San Antonio's chili queens and Los Angeles tamale carts had already made Mexican food a street food for tourists. After World War II, Glen Bell borrowed the taco from Mexican neighbors in Southern California; MEL Magazine reports that he studied the tacos of the Mitla Cafe in San Bernardino, opened in 1937, before founding Taco Tia and later Taco Bell. Pilcher notes that patents for frying taco shells were granted to Mexican restaurateurs in the 1940s, and that the storable shell made it possible to sell tacos far from Mexican communities.

In the twenty-first century regional Mexican tacos, from al pastor to barbacoa and birria, gained popularity in the United States, and in 2024 the first Michelin Guide to Mexico awarded a star to a Mexico City taquería, El Califa de León.

Reviews

See also

• Taco
• Taquería
• Tacos al pastor
• Tacos árabes
• Tacos de pescado
• Taco Tuesday
• Tacos in Mexico City

References

1. "Where Did the Taco Come From?". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
2. "¡Para tacos, sólo México!". México Desconocido. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
3. "Would You Eat a Grasshopper? In Oaxaca, It's Been a Tasty Tradition for Thousands of Years". Food Manufacturing. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
4. "Cochinita pibil: cinco precisiones sobre el supuesto origen prehispánico". Diario de Yucatán. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
5. "Historia de las tortillas de harina, producto mexicano que va por 500 años de existencia". México Desconocido. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
6. "Los burritos: un platillo que sí es mexicano". México Desconocido. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
7. "Tacos dorados, los primeros que se vendieron en Hermosillo". El Imparcial. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
8. "State by Plate: Mexico City & Tacos al Pastor". Mexico News Daily. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
9. "Trompo Tacos Are So Much More Than Tacos al Pastor". Texas Monthly. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
10. "The mystery behind the invention of the Baja fish taco". Mexico News Daily. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
11. "Tacos El Poblano: How A Band of Taqueros From Izucar de Matamoros, Puebla Changed Baja California". OC Weekly. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
12. "An Oral History of Hard-Shell Tacos". MEL Magazine. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
13. "Tracing the History of Tex-Mex". History.com. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
14. "Mexico's MICHELIN One Star Taqueria: Taquería El Califa de León". MICHELIN Guide. Retrieved 2026-10-10.