The Great Debate: Is L.A. Mexican Food Really Better than NYC Mexican Food?

It’s estimated that over 75 percent of all Mexicans living in New York City are from the Mixteca region of southern Mexico, an umbrella term for various ethnic groups living in parts of Puebla, Guerrero, and Oaxaca. New York City is dominated by Poblanos, many of whom are from poor, rural, subsistence farmlands south of the capital. In the late 1970s, economic conditions in Puebla went from bad to worse, prompting entire communities to shuttle north to NYC where family networks were already in place and growing rapidly. In Los Angeles, there are also Mexicans from Puebla, Oaxaca, and Guerrero. There are Mexicans from Chihuahua, Nayarit, and Sinaloa. Durango, Zacatacas, and Veracruz. Almost all 32 of the Mexican states and their distinctive cuisines are represented in Los Angeles. Thus, there are restaurants dedicated to the seven regions of Oaxacan mole; restaurants that are built on birria, a Jaliscan-style goat soup; and a dozen popsicle shops (palaterias) from families from Michoacan. You want to debate the prowess of a Yucatecan tamale compared to an olive-studded one from Sonora? No problem. But in New York, it’s easier to find a taco placero, a pedestrian Poblano dish featuring large corn tortilla cradling dry leftover rice, hard-boiled eggs, and strips of jalapeno, than a decent burrito. Asking a Poblano cook to assemble you a burrito is like asking a Red Sox fan from Dorchester to concoct a proper Cane River-style gumbo. Good luck!

L.A.’s proximity to the motherland is a supreme advantage. Southern California directly borders Mexico—hell, southern California used to BE Mexico. It’s what the Chicano scholar Américo Paredes dubbed “greater Mexico,” as it has historically remained under the cultural influence of its neighbor to the south. Though Rick Bayless and Diana Kennedy have spread a passion for Mexico’s diverse cooking among gringos, it is the immigrants from those regions (legal or undocumented)—their lineage and diaspora—that is the undeniable force that started, nurtured, and continues to develop both specific and imbricate cuisines. Meanwhile, do you know how hard it is to get 2,600 miles from Mexico City to New York City? In recent article in the New York Times, it was estimated that a journey aided by a coyote guide can cost anywhere from $2,500 to $7,000 just to get over the border. Once you get past la migra there is still an entire country to cross. Traveling all the way to NYC is harder, takes longer, and is much more expensive for people, foodstuffs, money—anything, really—than rolling over into an adjacent state.

As one of 18 megadiverse countries in the world, Mexico has extremely varied terrain, temperate and tropical zones, mountainous ranges, and dry deserts, so we can’t really argue that Los Angeles’s climate is the same. However, southern California’s climate does offer a growing season that a North Atlantic region just cannot match. Los Angeles was the largest agricultural county in the USA until 1950s, and vestiges of its productive past can be seen everywhere—in lime trees that overhang onto sidewalks, $5 flats of avocados, a Mayor who advocates for immigrant urban-farmers, and farmers markets that people gush over more than they talk about their first-born daughters. Thanks to globalization, creating Mexican food has leveled the playing field. It is normal to order a crate of cilantro grown in Turkey, shipped to storage in Pennsylvania, and driven to New York City two weeks later. And the crux of the cuisine—dried chilies, beans, and corn—have lengthy shelf lives. Nevertheless, SoCal has the obvious advantage of yearlong local produce: A $300 million dollar avocado industry; nopale and chayote plants that sprout like weeds from roadside medians; incomparable citrus; fresh herbs, tomatoes, and tomatillos in November. In contrast, winter in New York City is an unending sea of cold-storage apples and potatoes and finding a sprightly bunch of cilantro takes a stop at five different bodegas. You know how many high-minded New York chefs are sneaking imported citrus from California onto their menus right now? All of them.

It’s well documented that burgeoning car culture of southern California, post-war migration along the highway to the Inland Empire, and the rise of speedy-service restaurants like McDonald’s gave birth to a fast-food explosion in the state. But it’s also true that these forces also helped to transform what was a questionable ethnic cuisine into a populist obsession. After competing for customers in his hamburger stands in San Bernardino, Glen Bell thought that tacos, like the delicious hard-shell variety he ate in a Mexican restaurant across the street, were a way to capture an untapped market. He put a watered-down version of them on his 1951 menu alongside the burgers, eventually going full-Mexican in 1951 with Taco-Tia, El Taco in 1955, and finally Taco Bell in 1962. By 1967 there were 100 Taco Bells operating in L.A. next to dozens of other local fast-food Mexican chains that served cheap and easy meals that appealed to paisanos and gringos alike. In his book on the popularization of Mexican food in the United States, Taco USA, journalist Gustavo Arellano writes that these Mexican-American hybrids were “a gateway drug...a bridge, a guide, for the American gut,” providing a safe entry point to the cuisine. The tamales, enchiladas, burritos, and tacos “with only a smattering of ethnicity” forming the bedrock of California-style Mexican food that is still going strong at Tito’s Tacos (1959), Burrito King (1960), and King Taco (1974). In the mid-20th century, by contract, most New Yorkers had never heard of a taco and were certainly nowhere near developing their own riff on Mexican-American cuisine. They do get one claim: Juvencio Maldonado, a Mexican immigrant who opened the first recorded Mexican restaurant in New York City, Xochitl, in 1938, which was the sole Mexican restaurant in the city for decades before it shuttered without catching on. Maldonado invented an elaborate metal contraption that held tortillas in a U-shape while being deep-fried into crunchy taco shells. He applied for a patent in 1947 and received it in 1950, though most people attribute the invention to Glen Bell.

California has a long, fraught history of Mexican immigration as a state dependent on cheap labor, with an ever-changing border legislation characterized by an open-close, push-pull relationship. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals found themselves on American soil following the Mexican American war in 1848. Thousands more legally flooded southern California in the early 20th century. In 1920, the Great Depression closed the border. The Bracero Program, in 1942, reopened it. Operation Wetback closed it again 1954, criminalizing migrants and deporting thousands. The story is messy, but it hasn’t stopped a massive, vibrant Mexican community from developing in L.A. and its surrounding areas for over 150 years. That means six generations of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans living, working, growing, collaborating, creating networks, raising families, and cooking a multi-faceted, profoundly delicious cuisines for over a century. That’s why in L.A. you can find an East L.A. tortilleria that has been making estimable corn and flour tortillas in the same spot for almost 70 years; Mexican urban gardeners growing heirloom beans brought from their pueblos; and restaurants that have been perfecting their carne asada since before you had teeth. New York is a tad behind. However, large-scale Mexican migration to New York City has exploded in the past 20 years, swelling from 58,000 Mexicans recorded living in the city in 1990, to 320,000 just ten years later. Fueled by continuing immigration and the highest birth rate in the city, the Mexican presence in NYC continues to increase. Moreover, as the Mexican and Mexican-American populations continues to grow and solidifies, so too does their visibility and their cuisine—a cuisine that is not lesser, not inauthentic, not inherently better, but an equal. Give it time NYC. And you naysayers, watch your mouth.