In the documentary, food becomes art activism, a way to stay healthy, happy, and connected to the land. Ingredients, dishes, objects, and techniques turn into tools to reclaim an identity that is constantly contested and put down.
I have been following Adán Medrano’s work for a while, and I was excited when he told me he was writing and produce a documentary about his own culinary roots. The result is Truly Texas Mexican, now available on Amazon Prime. It is the perfect segue to the reflection about food heritage on film I have been developing in the blog with High on the Hog, on African-American cuisines, and Food:Generations, on the transmission of culinary knowledge in Poland. Medrano, however, does not explicitly frame his approach to Texas Mexican food in terms of heritage, as the concept is probably too entangled with ideas about patriarchy, power, and control to make sense to the characters that share their stories on camera.
In fact, much of the film is about separating mainstream ideas about what Tex-Mex, a style of commercial food that has become synonymous with Mexican cuisine for many consumers in the US and around the world, from the lived experience of local communities in South Texas and North Eastern Mexico, especially the state of Coahuila. For these populations, the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande was not a border, as families and friends lived on both sides. When the fence appeared, they severed connections between the two sides of the river. Medrano muses: “We never crossed the border, the border crossed us… our food is not from south of the border, our food is from the Texas-Mexican region.” Over images of river patrols, one of his interlocutors points out that the fence does not only keep people out, but it funnels people, trapping them.
The documentary emphasizes food not only as a tool to resist colonization but also a way to establish connections and create (or strengthen) community. The molcajete that families show as their proud heirloom and use to cook on a daily basis becomes a metaphor of the dynamics that underlie the local culture, as the carved piece of stone produces something great from many distinct ingredients, which however are crushed and mashed in the process.
The narrative goes back and forth between the present and its roots in history, starting from Native American foodways and continuing with the Spanish conquest, the formation of Mexico, the Mexican-American war, the United States’ annexation of Texas in 1845, and the Anglo colonization that followed. Traces of the native presence are explored through plants like chapote (Texas persimmons), the berries from the Brazil bush, prickly pears, tender nopalitos coming out after a rain, and mezquite beans (Medrano grounds them, mixes with agave nectar, and rolls them into balled covered in concolì, sesame seeds). A sequence is dedicated to Gran Sal del Rey, a huge salt lake to which natives from central Mexico went to get the salt they used to preserve food and to cook. Until the establishment of the Spanish colony, the land was open to anybody, but later local populations had to pay a tax to access the lake. This is just one of the many examples of dispossession and exploitation that the documentary reveals as marking the history of the area.
Dispossession shaped the very appearance of Tex-Mex in restaurants opened by Anglos for Anglos in the 1900s in tourists centers along the San Antonio river, so they could enjoy Mexican food without rubbing elbows with the Mexicans who originally cooked it. The initiators were in fact local women known as Chili Queens, who sold food outdoors from stalls on plazas and squares. Smart entrepreneurs with noticeable commercial acumen, each of these women had dishes and specialties they were renowned for. As their food was appropriated by Anglo impresarios who could count on money and connections to launch their businesses, it moved away from its origin and acquired a different style. Medrano exclaims at one point: “Enough with the cheese.” Of course, the fact that Mexican immigrants in the US and elsewhere later embraced this style as their own, an authentic expression of their culture, complicates things a bit…
Women are the main protagonists of the documentary: Rosalia Vargas and Letty Pérez, Mexican women that found a new home in Texas; the owners of Maria’s Restaurant in McAllen, women from Texas who found in food a way to express themselves while ensuring financial stability for their family; Celeste de Luna, a print artist who enjoys her own culinary creations based on the kitchen memories shared with her mother. Cristina Ortega brings back the tradition of cabeza de pozo, cooking a whole cow head in an earth oven as she had seen her grandparents do. It is a tradition that is already described in a Spanish book from the mid 1600s, a practice that women were in charge with, while men helped with the fire but could not be there when then oven was opened. Cristina and her family members (which include the filmmaker) buy a head with tongue, eyes, and all; they season it with salt pepper, garlic, and cloves, wrap it in linen and burlap soaked in water, then place it in a large hole in the ground with hot sand stones and lava rocks, cover it, and let it cook overnight. Cristina refused to check on google how to do it; instead, she asked the elders, embracing the traditional way of learning.
Truly Texas Mexican highlights how cuisine evolves, refusing heritage as musealization or exclusion. Culinary practices are the results of miscegenation and interactions between natives, Spaniards, mestizos, Anglos, foreigners, and none of these contributions can be denied or excluded. In this context, it would not make sense to stick to purism or to any sort of stable canon. Food becomes art activism, a way to stay healthy, happy, and connected to the land. Ingredients, dishes, objects, and techniques turn into tools to reclaim an identity that is constantly contested and put down. They sometimes come across as fragments, almost lost in the contemporary landscape, that locals need to hang on to in order to remind themselves of who they are.
Visually, the film avoids most of the food porn trappings: we see cooking and eating all the time, and the dishes do look appetizing, but the messiness involved with preparation, labor, and the clean-up is not hidden. Food is not there just to excite the viewers. It rather expresses those whose voices are sometimes lost and whose bodies cannot move freely. Medrano shows great pleasure in eating food with his fingers, using pieces of tortilla to grab small morsels. A custom that some may find uncouth is displayed with pride, representing a different approach to cuisine. Towards the end of the film he states: “the act of cooking is an act of facing difference in a way that makes you grow in understanding.” It is about accepting the other, “it is a formula for society that lives in peace.”