How your Harris County Law librarians spend their weekends.
This Sunday, October 4, Americans will set aside their differences and join together in honor of the humble but mighty taco. We owe this annual celebration to a Texan, Roberto L. Gomez.
Gomez, a San Antonian, was a force in the 1960 “Viva Kennedy!” JFK campaign movement in the southwest. Once Kennedy was in office, Gomez used his connection to the President’s brand to promote various Mexican foods familiar to the San Antonio community, starting in 1961 when he sent President Kennedy a 48 pound tamale, guarded by a motorcade, as a birthday gift. Gomez continued to build on this idea, and in 1965 he sent President Johnson, a dedicated Texan, a 55 pound taco. Shortly thereafter, Gomez helped found the National Taco Council. In 1968, San Antonio’s Congressman Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez stood on the floor of Congress and called for the first National Taco Day to occur that year on May 3. After some hopping around, in 2004 National Taco Day landed on October 4.
Some have speculated that the taco, in its perfect simplicty, must have come to us from deep in the past. In reality, it’s a modern miracle; an early example of fast food, born of industrialization and the need for a quick lunch break.
The taco’s origins are in 18th century Mexico, where silver miners toiled in caves. To extract silver, they would wrap a bit of gun powder in a piece of paper, then slide that into a crack in the rock face. They referred to the gun powder and paper wrap as a “taco.”
Then at some point in the 19th century, a genius Mexican mind, now anonymous due to the fog of history, decided to mimic this by wrapping meat inside a tortilla, and called their culinary innovation a “miner’s taco.”
Fast forward to San Antonio in 1905, where historians have found the first recorded mention of this food taco in the United States. The taco, a true and authentic Mexican food, likely came to San Antonio with Mexican migrants coming for work. It was one of the exotic examples of Mexican cuisine served by so-called “Chili Queens,” whose pushcarts provided Americans with an opportunity to sample culinary life south of the border.
If you travel to Mexico, don’t expect to find a hardshell taco. The crunchy, u-shaped taco shell was an innovation of United States entrepreneur Glen Bell in the 1950s, as he came up with the idea to sell gringo-friendly “Mexican food” to the masses through a franchise business he called Taco Bell.
Another American franchise operation, Subway, made international news yesterday when an Irish court ruled its baked loaves are too confectionery to legally be called “bread.” Is there a similar legal defintion in the United States of a taco?
The answer is that while lawmakers here have yet to define what a taco is, a Worcester County Superior Court in Massachusetts ruled in 2006 that a taco is NOT a sandwich. Thus the taco continues to reign supreme in its own right.
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