TEXAS TACOS
by Denise Chávez
I
grew up between El Paso, Marfa,
Presidio and Redford, Texas, which
in our family was called by its origi-
nal name, El Polvo, the Dust, and Las
Cruces, New Mexico, among women
who didn’t have time to cook and were
constantly on the run between teaching
jobs and family chores. My mother
and her sisters grazed on food through-
out the day as they fulfilled their duties.
These active women were content
with an occasional tortilla de harina o
maíz, either one, either hot or cold, with
anything in between—cheese, baloney,
beans, potted meat, corned beef hash,
green chile, potatoes, egg, you name it.
I became accustomed to my mother
Delfina’s eating habits and eventually,
they became my own. A little bit here,
a little bit there, the hot tortilla coming
off the comal to be eaten with butter or
the aforementioned fillings, topped off
by a dessert taco, little flutes of tortilla
filled with jam, membrillo or fruit.
My mother’s sister, Lucia, known to
me as Tía Chita, lived in El Polvo with
her husband and three children. Tío
Enrique was the owner of the Madrid
Grocery Store on county road 170, en
route to the Big Bend. The haunting
presence of the Río Grande dominated
and cut a parallel swath through the
landscape. At that time, although I
would not have known how to articu-
late it, the spirits, good and bad, lived
alongside us and were kin. The Devil
was ensconced in a nearby cave and no
one disputed it. Once, on the way to
Redford, my mother stopped the car to
wake us up so we could see a UFO. A
Catholic through and through, there
was within my mother and her family
enough space for the magical to fully
reside. The Marfa lights? No big deal.
Elemental hooded creatures that hov-
ered a few feet above the road appear-
ing to move in slow motion and yet had
to be moving really fast? Part and par-
cel of the landscape but just don’t stop
to share a taco. Our family was
attuned to miracle and wonder, and I
accepted it as I did the day in and day
10
out of our lives. At that time, my moth-
er’s world was another country, wild,
untamed and just to my liking,
although I would have never admitted
it then.
The grocery store loomed large in
our lives and was a memorable place
full of mystery to me as a young girl.
My little sister Margo and I would slip
in as quietly as we could through the
back door of the store right off Tío
Enrique’s bedroom, folding ourselves
expectantly into the large room that
housed everything from Havoline oil to
men’s pecheras, giant overalls. We
looked around in awe at the candy dis-
plays and peered into the freezer hop-
ing someone would offer us a red, white
and blue bullet popsicle or an orange
ice cream in a little white push-up con-
tainer. We’d just eaten a loosely
formed taco in my aunt’s kitchen and
sweets were always on our mind, espe-
cially mine, and especially something
from the grocery store. While we wait-
ed around for someone to invite us into
the store for a treat, we reflected on our
state of being.
My mother was a divorced woman
who refused to admit it. She lived with
the continual expectation that my
errant father would return to her neat-
ly rolled trays of tacos, cara side in, her
special recipe including a binder of
peas and cumin, salt, onion and much
love. The cara or face referred to the
side of the tortilla that hit the comal
twice and was darker than the other,
whiter side. Mother made sure we
tucked the cara inside to make a nicer
presentation, a cylinder of ground beef
holding court in the oil-softened tor-
tillas.
My father was a New Mexico man
and was never to be found in our Texas
world. We spent part of every summer,
every Christmas and random times of
the year with my Tía Chita and her
family. Sometimes I would have rather
been at home but as children, we had
no choice. Everything was different in
Texas. We slept outside, we ate at odd
Cenizo
Second Quarter 2013
hours and had no hard fast rules or
schedules and yes, even the tacos were
different.
Everyone loved my mother’s New
Mexico tacos. She prepared them for
special occasions, holidays, birthdays,
anniversaries, and parties. There was
something formal about my mother’s
crispy oven baked tacos and their hard
cheese exteriors. In Texas, we never
turned on an oven and I don’t remem-
ber eating anything with hot cheese.
The only thing I recall eating hot was a
freshly made tortilla.
I am grateful to my mother for her
taco recipe and have continued her
taco tradition, but nowadays my tacos
have been the more formal kind.
When I was younger I’d known the
tasty remainders of pot roasts, chicken,
chile rellenos, all tucked into a tortilla.
Flour or corn, it never mattered. What
is different now is the stuffing inside the
tortilla. I’ve become very staid in my
fillings.
Tacos in Texas are different. More
loosely organized, less weighty to think
about. There’s something about the
tortillas in San Antonio that I love.
Mistakenly called tacos, they are really
burritos in New Mexico, but who cares,
they are so good. The laissez-faire atti-
tude of enjoying a taco on the run in
some out-of-the way joint with a good
salsa is something I love about my other
country, Texas. I am New Mexican
part of the time and Texan the other
half. I’ve eaten tacos from Clint to Van
Horn, from Marfa to my cousin’s
restaurant, El Patio, in Presidio. In my
growing-up years we ate mostly at vari-
ous destinations between one family
member and another. Máma Toña
and her hunchbacked sister, Manina,
would be waiting in Marfa, my Aunt
Lucy Franco in Presidio, my Tía Chita
in Redford. We traveled the Texas
Taco Trail, rarely eating out. What was
there to eat out in restaurants but more
tacos? And why would you pay for a
taco when you could eat one at home
for almost free?
The tacos I knew best were the ones
at my Tía Chita’s house, eaten at any
time of the day, for people ate when
they were hungry, without formal eat-
ing hours or a designated eating area.
We wandered when we ate and no one
cared. My Tío Enrique ate at his pre-
scribed times and then lay down in his
dark bedroom to nap. We ate when
my mother ate or when we were hun-
gry, which could be anytime of the day
or night and in any room of my aunt’s
rambling house. You would walk into
the kitchen and it was likely a helper of
my aunt’s, maybe Lina or Belsora, was
in there in front of the stove making
homemade flour tortillas. Right off the
stove, calientitas, you would wrap one up
in a napkin, butter it and take it into the
living room or the long bedroom to the
side of the kitchen which was our usual
place to sleep, or you would sit outside,
tortilla in hand hoping to catch a
breeze in the hot summer sun.
My relatives ate piece-meal, frijolitos
there, cheese here, you want some chili-
to? Have some fideos. The vermicelli
noodles that I so loved would slide into
the taco. So would the albondigas, the
beloved meatballs, or the beans and rice
become one solid entity inside the warm
tortilla. I loved to watch my Tía Chita
eat, one tiny delicate bite at a time,
rolling her tortillas like miniature cigars
with meticulous care and grace. My
mother ate more loosely and with more
gusto. She loved tacos with any kind of
well-cooked meat, what would be con-
sidered charred by anyone else. Despite
our regard and respect for my mother’s
aunt, Manina, my sister and I tried to
avoid watching her eat. She was an old
lady with few teeth who liked her wine
and chewed heartily with her mouth
open. Everyone loved a good hamburg-
er, which is another kind of taco when
you think about it. A little Sanka on the
side was good, or an orange Fanta or a
limonada, no, not a lemonade, but a
limonada, made with lots of limes. Water
was fine as well, what my mother called
“Good Texas water.”