Remembrance of tacos past

I may have grown up to be a foodie, but I still think fondly of Taco Bell and its mushy burritos and fast-food mission facades.

By Mark Dery

Read more: Mexico, Latinos, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

Sept. 5, 2007 | I'm having a señor moment. Dinner tonight is the unthinkable: a Taco Bell Original Taco and Burrito Supreme, abominations that haven't profaned this chowhound's palate since I was a kid in Southern California, birthplace of fast food. I'm committing this foodie felony partly because I'm à la recherche du whatever: the goldenrod-and-avocado-colored memories of my '60s-'70s youth, when dinner out, more often than not, meant Taco Bell.

Growing up white and middle-class in San Diego in those days meant that "cultural hybridity," as the postmodernists like to call it, was my birthright: Mexicans might have been "wetbacks" and "beaners," but our shared historical (sometimes literal) genes, reaffirmed on school trips to the region's Spanish missions, meant that Mexican food was "our" food.

Somehow, Taco Bell outlets felt like home, in an Alta California, Helen Hunt Jackson, wrought-iron-lantern kind of way. Their cute little mission-style facades, scaled down to Disneyland proportions and topped by a hole-in-the-wall-style belfry, complete with fiberglass bell, felt cozily familiar to Southern Californians like me. The Old California vibe was enhanced by trash cans shaped like saguaro cactuses and gas-jet fire pits (an inexhaustible source of entertainment for junior pyromaniacs, in that dark age before iPod and Gameboy). Sure, the theme-parked architecture put a friendly face on the mission system, built on the backs of enslaved Indians. And the original Taco Bell sign -- the proverbial lazy Mexican dozing against a cactus -- was to Mexicans what the golliwog was to American blacks. But we were clueless Anglos, and who knew?

The food, if not truly Mexican, was at least Mexican-ish. Not that my family scrupled at the difference: recently transplanted from Connecticut and resigned, in a Stockholm syndrome sort of way, to my mom's unhappy-homemaker cooking -- the vaguely resentful, let-them-eat-Hamburger Helper cuisine of '70s mothers politicized by Ms. and Maude -- we either didn't know what distinguished a real taco from a Taco Bell taco, or just didn't care.

But that was then. This is now. Which is the other reason I'm eating Taco Bell tonight: I want to sink my teeth into the culture clash between past and present -- the whiter, more monocultural society we were, versus the hyphenated nation we've become. Taco Bell harks back to the Wonder Bread America of 1962, when the chain was founded on the assumption that real Mexican food was too slow, too spicy, too unpronounceably foreign, even in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, where Glen Bell launched his chain. "Buh-ree-toh," I ordered, prompted by the painfully phonetic rendering on the early Taco Bell menu boards. "Toast-ah-duh." Ordering in Español when you can't even habla! How bitchin' is that?

Paradoxically, even as its architecture and barefoot, serape-clad mascot, the "Taco Bell Boy," insisted on the Mexican-ness of the brand, Taco Bell was taking the "Mexican" out of Mexican food -- destigmatizing it by deracinating it. Since the 19th century, the racial unconscious of white Southern California had projected its fear and loathing of brown-skinned people onto the food they ate. The racist commonplace that Mexican food is dirty -- a coded way of saying that our brown-skinned neighbors to the south are third-world cucarachas, peeing in the Great Race's gene pool -- is a durable myth. In 1895, the chronicler of frontier life John G. Bourke noted that the "abominations of Mexican cookery have been for years a favorite theme with travelers," then joined in the fun, deploring Mexicans' "indifference to the existence of dirt and grease" (not to mention their "appalling liberality in the matter of garlic" and their "recklessness in the use of chili colorado or chili verde").

Taco Bell made Mexican food safe for postwar white America by turning down the tongue-searing heat, translating alien ingredients into the gabacho idiom, and automating food prep: The queso fresco sprinkled onto Mexican tostadas became cheddar cheese; the fragrant, meltingly delicious tortillas made by hand in Tijuana taco stands became prefab taco shells, uniform as widgets.

Most important, Glen Bell recontextualized the experience of eating Mexican food. In the gothic fantasies of white America, taquerias indifferent to the existence of dirt and grease served meat of uncertain origin and colon-scarring spiciness, calculated to exact Montezuma's revenge from whimpering, backfiring whites. Bell moved Mexican food to the right side of the tracks: Brightly lit and spotless as operating rooms, early Taco Bells were staffed and patronized exclusively by Anglos, at least in my experience. (Times have changed, apparently: SoCal-based Mexican-Americans interviewed for this story claimed that the sight of Latinos working and eating at Taco Bell is not at all uncommon.)

"At the time, Mexican restaurants were considered dirty," said the culinary historian Andrew F. Smith, in an e-mail interview. Raised in L.A. in the '60s, he recalled that "in racist Southern California, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, then popularly known as greasers, were also considered dirty. Few suburban Anglo kids ate Mexican food until Taco Bell arrived. It sanitized 'Mexican' food (and in many ways, it also cleaned up the image of Mexican-Americans)."

But what's Taco Bell's reason for living in an America where public schools are adding mariachi to the music curriculum and huitlacoche is the new porcini? In the United States of 2007, Hispanics are now the nation's largest minority -- at 44.3 million, they make up 15 percent of the population -- and 64 percent of them are of Mexican origin. Who needs partial-birth cuisine like the Meximelt or the Crunchwrap Supreme when the real thing, in more and more American cities, is just a barrio away? Yet, defying all cultural logic, the chain "serves more than 2 billion [American] consumers each year in more than 5,800 restaurants," according to its Web site; in 2005, company-owned Taco Bells rang up $1.8 billion in sales, while franchisees tallied $4.4 billion. However, as the chain's corporate parent, Yum Brands Inc., concedes in its first quarterly statement of 2007, U.S. operating profits are down by 11 percent, thanks to "negative and unforeseen incidents at Taco Bell" (translation: Andromeda strain of E. coli! Rodent infestation from hell!). Taco Bell had been Yum's most profitable brand. To compound its woes, the chain is getting squeezed, on one hand, by local restaurants selling home-style Mexican cuisine, and on the other by "fast casual" competitors such as Chipotle Mexican Grill, Qdoba and El Pollo Loco (all of whose offerings are, in this writer's opinion, higher-quality and more authentic than Taco Bell's).

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