Tacos in Mexican-American history

Tacos entered the United States through Mexican-American cooks and vendors, from the street food culture of San Antonio's chili queens and Los Angeles tamale carts to family restaurants such as the Mitla Cafe in San Bernardino, before the fried hard shell and Glen Bell's Taco Bell carried a Mexican-American version of the taco to the national mainstream.

Street food before the taco

Mexican food was sold on American streets before the word taco was common there. History.com describes the chili queens, women who sold inexpensive food in San Antonio's plazas in the 1880s, where a bowl of chili con carne with bread and water cost a dime. First We Feast dates their rise to the 1870s and reports that they served from dusk to dawn, selling chili con carne, tamales, enchiladas and chili verde; it quotes Gustavo Arellano calling them the original pop-up restaurants. The historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher told Smithsonian Magazine that once the railroad brought tourists in the 1880s their stands became a nightly attraction, that visitors came for the Alamo and the chili queens, and that the food was sold as a safe taste of an exotic Mexico while the vendors themselves were sexualized. A San Antonio Chili Stand at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago introduced the dish to many Americans. In Los Angeles, Pilcher notes, tamale pushcarts played a similar role, and Mexican food in the United States was long treated as lower-class street fare. None of the sources consulted here says that the chili queens sold tacos.

First tacos in print

Pilcher told Smithsonian Magazine that the earliest mention of tacos he found in a United States newspaper dates from 1905, a period when Mexican migrants were working in American mines and on the railroads. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the English word to 1901. MEL Magazine credits Bertha Haffner-Ginger, brought to Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Times in 1912 to run its cooking school, with the earliest known English-language taco recipe and photograph, published in her California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book of 1914. In Los Angeles, Cielito Lindo on Olvera Street has sold rolled, fried taquitos with avocado sauce since the 1930s, according to NPR.

Mexican-American cooks and the hard shell

Pilcher argues that the children of migrants who arrived in the 1910s and 1920s, many of whom served in World War II, adapted tacos to American groceries: ground beef, cheddar, iceberg lettuce and tomato. He traces the fried shell to Mexico's tacos dorados and has noted that Mexican cookbooks of the 1940s already described hard shells. Arellano told MEL Magazine that no single person invented the hard-shell taco, and that George Ashley's company, Ashley Mexican Food, sold canned tortillas and metal taco molds for home cooks in the late 1930s. Juvencio Maldonado, an Oaxacan immigrant who ran a restaurant in Manhattan, received a patent in 1950 for a machine that fried several taco shells at once; Pilcher says patent applications for such devices were filed by Mexican restaurateurs in the 1940s. As Pilcher points out, a shell that could be fried ahead and stored made it possible to sell tacos far from Mexican neighborhoods.

The Mitla Cafe and Glen Bell

The Mitla Cafe opened in 1937 on Mount Vernon Avenue in San Bernardino, on Route 66. Atlas Obscura and The Takeout credit its founding to Lucia Rodriguez and her husband, whom The Takeout names as Salvador; MEL Magazine notes that Lucia Rodriguez began with a roadside taco stand. Its crisp tacos dorados, sold for ten cents and filled with ground or shredded beef, cheese and lettuce, became its signature. The cafe was also a community center: Atlas Obscura reports that local civic and church leaders met there in the 1940s to plan a lawsuit over access to a public pool, a case that served as precedent for the 1946 ruling that desegregated California schools.

Glen Bell, a Marine veteran, ran a hamburger stand across the street. Accounts in The Takeout, MEL Magazine and Atlas Obscura agree that he watched Mitla's lines, befriended the family and learned how they fried their tortillas. He opened Taco Tia around 1954, and later Taco Bell, whose first restaurant opened in Downey in 1962. Bell claimed in an authorized biography to have invented the taco shell; Pilcher calls his real contribution franchising and marketing tacos to non-Mexican customers across the segregated lines of postwar Southern California. Arellano, speaking to NPR in 2012, described the Mitla taco as the one that launched countless others.

Later developments

Texas developed its own Mexican-American taco styles. Texas Monthly describes the crispy taco and the puffy taco, a corn tortilla fried until it balloons, as staples of Tex-Mex restaurants from World War II to the Vietnam War, and the 1973 introduction of tacos al carbón at Ninfa's in Houston as the moment fajitas caught on. CNN Travel reports that breakfast tacos were common in South Texas and San Antonio long before Austin claimed them. Old El Paso's pre-fried shell kit of 1969, mentioned on the podcast Gastropod, carried the hard-shell taco into home kitchens. Pilcher notes that Taco Bell's attempts to open in Mexico failed, while regional Mexican tacos such as al pastor and barbacoa have since found large audiences in the United States.

Reviews

See also

• Mitla Cafe
• Taco Bell
• Hard-shell taco
• Puffy taco
• Breakfast taco
• Tex-Mex tacos
• Cielito Lindo
• History of the taco
• Women in taco history
• Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America
• Taco shell

References

1. "Where Did the Taco Come From?". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
2. "Tracing the History of Tex-Mex". History.com. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
3. "An Illustrated History of Tex-Mex". First We Feast. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
4. "Origin and history of taco". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
5. "An Oral History of Hard Shell Tacos". MEL Magazine. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
6. "The California Taco Trail: How Mexican Food Conquered America". NPR (republished by KAXE). Retrieved 2026-10-10.
7. "Mitla Cafe". Atlas Obscura. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
8. "How Taco Bell Was Founded On A Stolen Idea". The Takeout. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
9. "Tex-Mex 101". Texas Monthly. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
10. "A short history of the long fight over breakfast tacos". CNN Travel. Retrieved 2026-10-10.
11. "Talking Taco (transcript)". Gastropod. Retrieved 2026-10-10.