TEXAS TACOS
by Denise Chávez
I grew up between El Paso, Marfa,
Presidio, and Redford, Texas, which in
our family was called by its original
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 lit-
tle bit here, a little bit there, the hot tor-
tilla coming off the comal to be eaten
with butter or the aforementioned fill-
ings, topped off by a dessert taco, little
flutes of tortilla filled with jam, mem-
brillo 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, on
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 near-
by 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?
12
Cenizo
No big deal. Elemental hooded
creatures that hovered a few feet above
the road appearing to move in slow
motion and yet had to be moving real-
ly fast?
Part and parcel of the landscape but
just don’t stop to share a taco. Our
family was attuned to miracle and won-
der, and I accepted it as I did the day in
and day out of our lives. At that time,
my mother’s world was another coun-
try, 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 a orange ice
cream in a little white push-up contain-
er. We’d just eaten a loosely formed
taco in my aunt’s kitchen and sweets
were always on our mind, especially
mine, and especially something from
the grocery store.
While we waited around for some-
one 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
Second Quarter 2009
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 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 attitude 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 various destinations
between one family member and
another. Máma Toña and her hunch-
backed sister, Manina, would be wait-
ing 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. Mi 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 hungry,
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 love 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 considered charred by anyone else.
Despite our regard and respect for my
mother’s aunt, Manina, my sister and I