Don’t call it Tex-Mex. It’s called Texas Mexican
Houston chef, writer found his food needed a champion and a name
This city’s Second Ward is full of temptations for Adan Medrano, a writer and chef who lives just a few miles southeast. The Mexican-American neighbourhood is home to the perfect flaky tortillas at Dona Maria Mexican Café, scratchmade in flour or corn, and ready to be folded around eggs with the fine threads of dried beef called machacado. It has the off-menu roasted tamales at the Original Alamo Tamales, with blackened husks and caramelized edges of masa and meat. And there’s Taqueria Chabelita, where the owner, Isabel Henriquez Hernandez, makes pinto beans whose smoky intensity comes not from pork fat, but from a slow char in a hot pan.
For Medrano, who grew up in San Antonio with generations of relatives on both sides of the Rio Grande, this is all his comfort food, his culinary heritage, his comida casera, or Mexican home cooking.
Just don’t call it Tex-Mex, he said. He prefers to describe it as Texas Mexican, which is also how he describes himself.
Texas Mexican is the indigenous cooking of South Texas, according to Medrano, 71, whose second cookbook, Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking, will be published in June by Texas Tech University Press. It’s the food that’s been made by families like his on this land since before the Rio Grande marked a border, when Texas was a part of Mexico, and long before then.
Don’t get him wrong: Tex-Mex is a cuisine that should be respected and celebrated, he said. It’s just that Tex-Mex standards like queso and combo fajitas piled high with chicken and shrimp don’t speak of home to those whose Texas roots go back some 12,000 years.
“That’s not our food,” said Medrano, who has spent the better part of a decade defining his cuisine, inspiring a growing number of Texas Mexicans in the process. “We don’t eat like that.”
You can find Texas Mexican here at Medrano’s Houston gotos, and at decades-old San Antonio West Side lunch spots like Old Danny’s Cocina, or even newer favourites like El Puesto No. 2 down the street. It’s at Maria’s Restaurant in downtown McAllen and at Café Amiga in Brownsville, both run by granddaughters of their founders.
It is dishes like chicken poached with striped green squash and corn, the tomatonoodle soup called fideo, and gulf shrimp and cactus stewed in a mix of dried red chiles. It’s the simple ground beef picadillo or the beef-and-potato stew called carne guisada, both subtly seasoned with a pounded paste of black peppercorn, garlic and cumin, which Medrano describes as the Texas Mexican version of the Cajun holy trinity.
It is what Juan Hernandez, of Dona Maria Mexican Café, has always described as “mamastyle cooking” — the mama in this case being his wife, Anna Hernandez, who grew up a block away from the restaurant and is a co-owner. Juan Hernandez would never call the food she makes Tex-Mex; in fact, it inspired Tex-Mex.
That began in the early 1900s, when local Mexican-American home cooking was first adapted in restaurants run “by Anglos for Anglos,” Medrano said. In the 1970s, writers started referring to that hybridized cuisine as Tex-Mex: refried beans as smooth as pancake batter; chili made with powdered spices and stock, instead of the carne con chiles based on whole dried red chilies; fajitas with anything other than the skirt steak that gave the dish its name; and extra cheese on everything.
The idea of distinguishing Texas Mexican from Tex-Mex came to him after he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America program in San Antonio in 2010. Medrano, who also founded San Antonio’s annual Latino film festival in 1977, originally took the classes for fun, he said, but they led him to an epiphany: After decades in the shadows, his food needed not just a champion, but a name.
Medrano didn’t want to use the word Tejano, because it is sometimes used to highlight Spanish colonial ancestry rather than Indigenous heritage, and because spelling Texas with a J instead of an X is a European practice. He came up with a better term after learning about the distinct regional cuisines of Mexico, realizing that he had essentially grown up with one of his own. “You have Oaxacan Mexican, you have Jaliscan Mexican,” Medrano said. “Why not Texas Mexican?”
His work has been revelatory for restaurateurs like Sylvia Casares, a well-known Houston chef who operates Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen. “I had been searching for 20 years for how to describe my food,” said Casares, who is originally from Brownsville, at the state’s southeastern edge.
Casares met Medrano after he recommended her restaurant to a Houston reporter as a place to taste hallmarks of the cuisine, especially her enchiladas. Her crew makes hundreds a day the Texas Mexican way, each tortilla bathed in chile sauce and softened in hot oil before being rolled around its filling.
Like many Mexican-American restaurateurs, she puts both Tex-Mex and Texas Mexican items on her menu. Most of her customers assume those that appear more traditionally Mexican were imported.
Yet these are not “south-ofthe-border” creations, said Medrano: “Texas Mexican didn’t cross the border, the border crossed it.”