On Cervantes, Hijos de la Chingada, and the Cook as Participatory Journalist
The first time I read Don Quixote, it was assigned—senior year, Spanish honors class—and like most assigned books, I expected to endure it, underline some themes, maybe write a passable essay. But something in me, stubborn or intuitive or just hungry, decided to read it in Spanish, the original language, where I had the sense—accurate, I think—that something lived between the words that would not survive translation. I didn’t understand all of it, but I didn’t need to. I felt the hum. The rhythm. The wild insistence of a man who would not be corrected by the world’s version of what was real. A man who kept walking anyway.
Later, I would learn the deeper drama: how Cervantes, after writing the first volume, was scooped by a counterfeit—a false sequel penned under a pseudonym, flattening his character into farce. And how Cervantes, in response, wrote a second volume of his own, one that calls out the fake, steps inside the fiction, and reclaims the story by making Quixote not just a character but a conscious one. It was more than just a rebuttal. It was a resurrection. It was the first great act of literary reclamation, and it was, in every sense of the word, a meta-move: a reminder that the true spirit, once animated, cannot be extinguished by impostors.
This book is a gesture in that same spirit. It is not a purist’s restoration, but a revision with soul. It is Volume II—not to correct what’s been written, but to call it out, walk around it, and keep going. To remind the reader that the story of Mexican food—especially as it has survived and thrived in Texas—is not over. And it’s certainly not tame.
Because what we call Tex-Mex today is, in many ways, a branding exercise—a ringer thrown in for a ringer, to borrow from The Big Lebowski. A wild and gorgeous creature stripped of its teeth, dressed up in mild cheddar and flour tortillas, served sizzling in sanitized skillets meant more for show than story. It took the unruly, adaptive, syncretic power of Mexican cuisine—a cuisine born of rupture, improvisation, and deep cultural remixing—and sold it back to us as something legible and mild.
But Mexican food, in its truest form, has never been mild.
It is a cuisine born of the hijos de la chingada—the children of nothingness, yes, of violation and fracture, but also of invention, of no-holds-barred imagination, of glorious survival and transformation. Octavio Paz framed the hijo de la chingada as a child of rupture, but he also named the rupture as a source of identity—raw, complex, irreducible. And I see it not as a wound to be mourned, but as a banner to be lifted. A rallying cry for all those who make something out of what was never meant to be enough.
From that nothingness comes a cuisine that has never apologized for its contradictions. One that welcomes the sacred and the profane onto the same plate. That throws caviar on carnitas and doesn’t ask permission. That respects the mole while remixing the salsa. It is, in truth, one of the world’s first great fusion cuisines—born not of trend, but of necessity, of migration, of conquest, of resistance, of desire. It is pre-colonial and postmodern. It is Indigenous science and colonial grit, ranch-hand improvisation and baroque decadence, all stewed into the same pot.
And what Tex-Mex did, or tried to do, was to take that wild animal and put it in a zoo. To freeze it, number it, mildify it. To make it safe for the consumer. To take a cuisine of fire and edge and improvisational holiness and package it like a brand of suburban comfort food. But you cannot contain a mythology in a combo plate. You cannot reduce memory to melted cheese. You cannot tame what was never tame to begin with.
So my goal here is not to destroy Tex-Mex, but to break it out of its cage. To rewild it. To remind it of its origins. To speak not only of what it became, but of what it could become again—if we let it breathe.
This book is a reclamation, but it is also an invitation. It is not an argument for gatekeeping—it is a call to participation. Come with your hands open and your mind curious. Come to cook. Come to taste. Come to ask what stories are buried in your pantry. Come knowing that the only rule is reverence, and the only sin is forgetting.
To the professional cook: learn the system before you improvise. Understand that guajillo and pasilla are not interchangeable. That nixtamalization is not a buzzword—it is a sacred practice that predates the borders that surround your prep station. And when you bend the rules, do it beautifully. Do it knowingly. Do it with the ghost of every abuela watching.
To the home cook: you are not exempt from the story. You are already in it. Every time you cook a taco, you are participating in a cultural memory. You do not need to be perfect. But you should know what you are holding. Let your cooking be a form of listening.
Because the true story of Mexican food in America is not Tex-Mex. It is something older, weirder, wiser, and more alive.
It is a palimpsest—a manuscript layered over again and again, with the original text still pulsing underneath. You can taste it, if you know how to look. You can smell it, if you let the masa stick to your hands. You can feel it, if you stop pretending the story began with fajitas.
This book is my attempt to trace those lines. To speak not from atop the tradition, but from within it. To participate in a myth that keeps rewriting itself through flavor, fire, and fellowship.
Like Quixote, I know that some will say this is madness. But madness, in the hands of someone who believes, becomes vision.
And vision, when shared at the table, becomes culture
