Taco Tour with Nacho: A Binational Odyssey Through Ignacio Sánchez Prado's Tacos
- Frederick Aldama
- 1d
- 7 min read
Picture this: two chilangos—well, one chilango and one halfie (Guatemalan and Irish-American, if you're keeping score)—rolling low and slow through the Mexican Americas. Not in some tricked-out Parts Unknown production van with a camera crew and per diem, but in a beat-up sedan with sticky vinyl seats, a cooler of Jarritos, and Ignacio Sánchez Prado, aka Nacho, riding shotgun, gesturing wildly about the taco de nada. That's the zero-degree taco, he tells me—tortilla, salsa, salt. Everything else builds from there. He learned the term from Pati Jinich. I'm learning everything else from him.
This is how I read Nacho's Taco, the latest entry in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series: as an invitation to ride along, to taste and think and remember. Nacho doesn't give us a cookbook or a food history in any conventional sense. He gives us a crónica—that venerable Latin American form where first-person narrative trains its gaze on an object rather than the author's ego. Salvador Novo, Mexico City's official chronicler since 1965, would recognize the moves. So would any of us who've stood outside a taquería at 2 AM, drunk on mezcal and nostalgia, trying to figure out why this particular taco matters so much.
First Stop: The Tortillería of Memory
Nacho opens with his abuelita, Zoila, at the tortillería in 1986, post-earthquake Mexico City. He's a kid, overwhelmed by "the smell of limestone and corn that came from the tortillas cooking, and the squeaks and screeches of the huge tortilladora machine that spewed thousands of tortillas at this hour." It's a primal scene, this encounter with the industrial production of something ancient.
And it sets up the book's central provocation: the taco is not tradition. The taco is modernity.
That's going to ruffle some feathers. We've all been trained to fetishize authenticity, to imagine some pre-Columbian ur-taco unsullied by colonialism and capitalism. But Nacho demolishes this fantasy with scholarly precision and chilango wit. The taco was "barely central to the gastronomy before the 1920s but recognized as a significant Mexican food by the 1960s." Its rise tracks industrialization, urbanization, women's liberation from the metate (that stone grinding tool requiring six-plus hours of daily labor), and transcultural exchange with everyone from Levantine migrants to Japanese chefs to some guy named Glenn Bell in San Bernardino.
Even corn—maíz, that sacred botanical entity—is, as Arturo Warman called it, a "botanical bastard." No natural corn exists; it's always been the product of deliberate pre-Columbian biological manipulation from teosinte. Philosopher Gabriela Méndez Cota puts it beautifully: "the idea of heirloom corn underlying many narratives of agricultural justice has to be taken...with a grain of salt."
The taco was never pure. Neither were we.
The Pastor Revelation
Somewhere around Puebla—or maybe it's Los Angeles, or Copenhagen, the book collapses geography like that—Nacho drops the bomb about tacos al pastor. The most "authentic" Mexican taco? Derived from shawarma. The trompo cooking method that signals tradition to every tourist? A borrowed technique from Levantine migrants in the 1930s. Two Puebla families still fight over who invented tacos árabes: the Tabe family or Zayas Galeana, who adapted Turkish doner kebab at his wife Esperanza's urging, substituting pork for lamb because lamb was expensive in Mexico.
"The fact that two places can credibly claim to be the first," Nacho writes, "is yet another example of how problematic it is to be too concerned with originality and authenticity." The taco al pastor didn't exist before the 1950s. Concepción Cervantes at El Tizoncito in Colonia Condesa developed the wet adobo with achiote and added the pineapple. A 2024 Taco Day poll found 27% of Mexicans name pastor as their favorite—double bistec's second place. Forty percent eat it without the pineapple. We contain multitudes.
This is where Nacho's theoretical chops show. He deploys one of my fave scholars, Fernando Ortiz Fernández, and his generative concept of transculturation (versus the limited, weaker, one-way assimilationist concept of acculturation): how dominant and dominated cultures influence each other despite power inequalities. Eric Hobsbawm's "invented traditions" makes an appearance too. The taco, like the nation, is a story we tell ourselves about continuity with a past that never quite existed the way we remember it.
Greater Mexico, or: Ni de Aquí Ni de Allá
Nacho completed Taco at the exact moment in which, he writes, “I had lived longer in the United States than in Mexico." That binational existence—what Américo Paredes called "el México de adentro" and "el México de afuera"—shapes everything. The book's most moving argument flips the authenticity script: if Mexico has "never been authentic" due to transculturation, then Mexican American culture has "always been authentic" because it IS Mexican culture. Just on the other side of the border.
Nacho takes me to Evil Cooks in LA, where Alex "Pobre Diablo" García and Elvia "La Bruja" Huerta serve "The Simmons Lengua Taco" (beef tongue, homage to Gene Simmons), "The McSatan" (beef patty, bacon, guacamole, mozzarella), and "The Poseidon"—octopus cooked in a pastor trompo, a technique borrowed from Regino Rojas at Revolver Taco Lounge in Dallas. He walks me down East Olympic Boulevard in Boyle Heights: Mariscos Jalisco (Jonathan Gold's favorite, 2024 Gold Award Winner), Carnitas Los Chingones, Los Originales Tacos Árabes de Puebla. "East Olympic embodies a simultaneity of Mexican regions that co-exist in a single space in a way that would be difficult to find in Mexico City."
This simultaneity—the multiverse quality of global taco culture—becomes the book's governing metaphor. The chapter title "Every Taco Everywhere All At Once" riffs on the 2022 film, and it's not just a clever reference. Nacho finds pastor in Seoul (Coreanos, born as a food truck in Austin), kalbi tacos in Mexico City (Tizne Tacomotora), fish skin tacos with gooseberry salsa in Copenhagen (Hija de Sánchez, where Chicago-born, Noma-trained Rosio Sánchez has "always been authentic"). The taco proliferates, mutates, adapts.
Tacos Without Mexicans (and Why That's Complicated)
The book's funniest and most cutting chapter tackles Tucker Carlson's 2018 claim that tacos are "an American food" and Tim Walz's 2024 confession about "white-guy tacos"—ground beef and cheese, no spice because "black pepper is the top of the spice-level in Minnesota." Nacho first ate at Taco Bell in August 2000, Pullman, Washington. "I had never seen a hard shell before." The corporate origin story erases Mitla Café in San Bernardino, the Mexican restaurant Glenn Bell visited before wondering "why no restaurant made tacos assembly-line style."
But Nacho refuses easy outrage. Gustavo Arellano's "gateway drug" thesis gets respectful treatment: Taco Bell and fast-food shops "opened a gate for the acceptance of Mexican culture." Rachel Laudan's defense of industrialization sits alongside Alyshia Gálvez's critique. Old El Paso shells exist "because working people need inexpensive and simple meals." The "blanket refusal of processed food has a tint of classism." His wife Abby, born in working-class Pittsburgh suburbs, introduced him to Old El Paso taco kits. Her perspective balances his chilango purism.
"But who am I to judge?" he asks. "I also belong to the generation of Mexicans who made hours-long lines to eat in the first branches of McDonald's and Burger King in Mexico City." That self-implication is everything. Nacho never positions himself above the material he's analyzing. He's in the mix, conflicted and hungry like the rest of us.
The Worst and the Best
Every road trip needs a disaster and a revelation. Nacho finds both. The disaster: O'Tacos in Paris, a chain of 200+ stores selling "French Tacos"—likely born in North African communities in Lyon. He orders chicken cordon bleu with "samouraï" sauce and the "melty" finish (Emmental and smoked bacon), eats it on a bench facing the Arc de Triomphe. "Like the worst of US burritos, the interior was an unfortunate combination of stuff mixed beyond recognition." As tacos without Mexicans go, "this may be the worst offender I have ever found."
The revelation comes in St. Louis, his adopted home, where Yucatecan-American chef Alex Henry makes the taco de castacán at El Molino del Sureste: "a thick piece of crunchy pork belly served in a heirloom corn tortilla made from the house nixtamal covered with cilantro salsa, topped with sliced tomatillos and radishes." The description is the book's most elaborate and sensuous: "A bite of this taco triggers the gradual expression of layers of sublimity: the mineral saltiness of the tortilla, followed by a rich fatty softness contrasted with the unapologetic crunch of the pork's outside followed by the two-step dance of tanginess from the tomatillo and the salsa and rounded by the fresh bite of the radish."
That the best taco in the book comes not from Mexico City but from St. Louis, made by a Yucatecan-American chef, enacts everything Nacho has been arguing.
Greater Mexico. Transculturation. Modernity. Always already authentic.
Home Is Where the Taco Is
"Tacos are modernity but they are also home," Nacho writes near the end. "I feel at home in modernity, in chaos, in the vertiginous spaces of cities around the world, but also in the stalls and restaurants that place a delicious food in a tortilla. This is why I am always searching all the tacos everywhere all at once." In graduate school, he stretched vindaloo into a second meal by wrapping it in Mission corn tortillas with chipotles from La Morena. "These tacos nourished my study nights and allowed me to acquire the skills that lead to writing books like this one."
The book ends where it began: with abuelita Zoila and mamá María del Carmen, "who raised me against all odds, and from whom I acquired from an early age both the love for tacos and the knowledge of the complex gastronomical geography of Mexico City. They did not get to read this work, but their spirit is present throughout these pages." From the tortillería in 1986 to Copenhagen in 2024, the taco carries memory forward. It connects the dead to the living, the México de adentro to the México de afuera, the scholar to the kid who once watched tortillas emerge from a screeching machine, stunned by the alchemy.
From Cocinas to the Road
Reading Taco reminded me why Angela M. Sánchez and I called our recent collection From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides: because Latinx pop culture lives in these everyday spaces where food and performance and memory intersect, where tradition gets invented and reinvented, where we make meaning out of masa and meat and the stories we tell while eating. Nacho's book belongs on the same shelf—scholarly but never stuffy, personal without being indulgent, bilingual in its bones.
If I could, I'd take that road trip for real. Two chilangos (or one and a halfie) rolling through Boyle Heights and Copenhagen and St. Louis, arguing about corn versus flour (I’m celiac, so corn all the way), tasting transculturation on our tongues, letting the taco be what it's always been: not a relic of the past but a machine for making futures. Nacho would point out the taquería; I'd take notes. We'd both remember our abuelitas.
That's what the best food writing does. It makes you hungry for the thing and for the world that made the thing possible. Taco delivers on both counts. Order the book. Then order the taco. Preferably al pastor—with or without pineapple. You now contain multitudes.
★★★★★
Essential reading for anyone who eats, thinks, or remembers.
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