Buckle up people because I’m about to deliver some shocking news. Breakfast burritos are not really Mexican.
I know, I know. It’s much to hear at once but let me state my case first.
As touched on in our beloved book, Taco USA by Gustavo Arellano, he wraps the burrito history for us. Burittos don’t have a long history like corn or tortillas. You won’t be finding them in the ruins of the Mayan temples. But you can find them in most Mexican-American fast food chains like Dos Toros, Chipotle, or Taco Bell. I’m particularly a fan of burritos and even more so the ones at Dos Toros. As Arellano notes “Chipotle is now the second largest Mexican food chain in the United States; in the past decade, its take on Mission-style burritos has come to define burritos in the United States, leaving other styles relatively unknown” (143).
The history is then as follows according to this book:
- Burritos drift along the ‘borderlands since the 1920’s’
- Migrant workers from the 1940’s – 1960’s were served the burrito as a quick and cheap lunch by their ‘handlers’
- Burritos are everywhere nationally since the 1960’s
They were a food that blatantly displayed a person’s class and therefore became symbols of embarrassment. The flour tortilla gave to the migrant workers, or braceros were “an object of scorn”.
Fast forward to today, they are now popular items on anyone’s menu. Even NASA eats burritos. So inherently, breakfast burritos are also not a Mexican thing. This hybrid is just another concoction brainstormed to adapt to the American taste buds. I mean take away the tortilla, which will most likely be flour anyways, it’s a regular Jimmy Dean breakfast. Don’t get me wrong- I love me a breakfast burrito. It’s literally my favorite things put together. However, it is important to make the distinction in recognizing the history of the food we’re eating. Especially as what we group into our perception of culture that is without a doubt, not entirely true
Tacontento 
The same goes for the breakfast taco. These are US inventions, but thank god they exist!
One of the tacos we’ll try on our taco tour is a kind of breakfast taco, de machaca, which is dried beef mixed with egg on a flour tortilla. So good! It comes from the northern state of Sinaloa, where my father’s family hails from. It’s probably the closest thing to the breakfast taco as we understand it. And by the way, the breakfast taco is a Texan thing. The burrito, I think it’s more California. But for me growing up in AZ, eggs in a tortilla were common, also with sliced up hotdogs–what my mom would call “huevo con weenie.”
LikeLike