Tortillas, Tiswin, and T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest by Gregory McNamee; The Autobiography of Gucci Mane

The Southwest foodways are peopled by Chinese immigrants, Pueblo Indians, African Americans, and Yankee Anglo transplants.

While many guides to Southwestern food culture oblige readers with a chapter on the Mesoamerican origins of the tortilla, to my knowledge, this is the first book that assesses the tortilla’s development as a key component of Aztec military strategy. “Any army capable of carrying provisions and still moving swiftly enjoys a tactical advantage,” Gregory McNamee writes in Tortillas, Tiswin and T-Bones: A Food History of the Southwest. “In the case of the tortilla, easily folded and stored in a kit bag, a protein-rich ration allowed Aztec armies to range widely and conquer distant cities.”

Over four decades and 40 books, McNamee has been writing about the culture and history of the Southwest. He puts that lifetime of learning to use in Tortillas, Tiswin, and T-Bones, where he bridges a number of connections between the region’s current food and its ancient history, including immigrant arrival patterns as well as references to pop culture eating trends. Reading the jauntily written book is something like dropping in on a conversation between

Guns, Germs, and Steel author Jared Diamond and Anthony Bourdain. This sweeping food-based history of the region covers everything from the purported roasted mastodon diet of the Paleoindian culture of Clovis circa 11,000 BC to the emergence of kimchi tacos and Korean- Chicano fusion cuisine in late2000s Phoenix and Los Angeles.

The Tucson-based author is as comfortable discussing the Tohono O’odham tribe’s annual late June harvest of the sweet-tart deliciousness of the date- shaped fruits that drop from the spiny arms of saguaro cacti (“it tastes something like a cross between a cucumber and a sweet watermelon”) as he is tracing sushi’s American launch to early 1980s Tucson. Seriously — McNamee makes t he case that a small cadre of Air Force members developed their taste for raw fish and rice while stationed in Japan, married Japanese wives, relocated to the massive Davis-Monthan Air Force Base located within Tucson city limits, and sustained a sushi culture long before New York or LA made yuppie haute cuisine of what was essentially Japanese fast food.

It also turns out that Tex- Mex staple, the chimichanga, is most likely a Mexican take on the Chinese egg roll and comes from Sonora or Sinaloa, both of which locations were much more welcoming to mostly male Chinese i mmigrants who often intermarried with Mexican women and cooked up hybrid delights in the kitchen. McNamee writes that this why Mexicali, a city of a million people in Baja California, houses over 200 Chinese restaurants, many of them offering New World fusions of Chinese and Mexican recipes, “such as arrachera (minced beef) with asparagus in black bean sauce and fried chiles in lemon sauce.”

At High Rolls Cave in Otero County, New Mexico, where an excavation revealed preserved foodstuffs dating back 3,500 years, he makes note of what might be the world’s first breakfast burrito, the excavated remnants of a yucca pod “stuffed with a mixture of goosefoot, pigweed, amaranth and other wild seeds,” according to archaelogical dig director Steven Lentz.

McNamee’s view of t he Southwest i s expansive, stretching from LA to Houston, taking in the Mexican states of Baja, Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Nuevo León. Given the border- crossing habits of food, this seems to be the only appropriate task. His Southwest foodways are peopled by Chinese immigrants, Pueblo Indians, African Americans, and Yankee Anglo transplants, all of whom clash and meld against the region’s ceaseless appetite for beans, corn, chiles and squash. But the author is no purist. McNamee is less a gourmand than an all-inclusive populist who is equally fascinated by Southern California and how it gave birth to the twin fast-food empires of McDonald’s and Taco Bell.

One minor criticism — t he book would benefit from some footnotes. For instance, while it’s fascinating to learn that Chinese immigrants to California in the early 20th century, despite living in a time of vast, legalized xenophobia against them, nonetheless mastered both the grower and grocer’s market for celery and garlic, I can’t be the only reader of this book who wants to know how McNamee knows this. Yes, he does provide reference books for each chapter and no, this is not an academic tome — but some footnotes are necessary when you are firing factoids at this fast a clip.

The author ends the book on a circular note. Native Americans, who once defined Southwestern food, have begun to return as chefs, cooking up a precolonization diet: no white flour or processed sugar, chicken, beef, or pork. In their stead are beans and chiles, bison and rabbit. This approach is not wasted on expensive tables for adventurous eaters. In nearby Nambé Pueblo, a community farm produces indigenous foods and livestock to feed the elderly. Navajo chef Freddie Bitsoie is currently filming episodes of

Rezervations Not Required, which will explore the deep culinary diversity of Native American food. It’s possible, McNamee muses, that the Southwest may power a revival of American Indian cuisine. But for now, it’s enough to know that a humble green chile cheeseburger is a perfect example of the region’s cuisine — part ancient plant, part highly processed buns and beef — a 100-percent Southwestern collision of cultures. — Casey Sanchez