An Interview with Texas Mexican Chef / Historian Adan Medrano
You probably don't realize it but the food you are eating now is getting more and more authentic to the region.
(A somewhat shorter version of this story originally appeared in Texas Highways magazine.)
At first, the concept of “Texas Mexican food” espoused by Houston-based chef, author, food historian and cultural ambassador Adan Medrano is a little hard to wrap your head around. Wait a minute, you wonder, don’t we already have a name for that? Might not this be splitting hairs over the semantics of Tex-Mex vs Texas Mexican food? But the more you learn from the San Antonio-born former migrant worker, the more you realize the truth has been hiding in plain sight -- though there is some overlap, Tex-Mex is not Texas Mexican nor necessarily what we have come to call “Mex-Mex.”
Instead, is the modern-day expression of the fare indigenous to the original owners of much of South and Southwestern Texas and northeastern Mexico, a patchwork of peoples known as the Coahuiltecans, whose diet developed over millennia and continues to infuse the way both Texans and northeastern Mexicans eat today, dishes like sopa fideo, carne guisada, and chili con carne, or carne con chile, if you prefer. In Medrano’s conception, the Rio Grande is just another stream, not a culinary border, and subtle shifts of word spellings and order can have big cultural implications.
John Nova Lomax: So could you describe what Coahuiltecan means in the context of your work?
Adan Medrano: The Coahuiltecan region is a triangle. The upper end would be around Victoria, going all the way to Del Rio, and then down to Monterrey, and then back up the coast. That little area is what I call the Coahuiltecan region for food. It’s really indigenous food from the peoples who lived there. From the very beginning the word Coahuiltecan didn’t refer specifically to the Coahuiltecan language, nor did it refer to a very specific tribe in that area. It refers to a geographical area with many peoples in it. It’s like when you say I’m a Texan, that doesn’t go into your ethnic background -- that just says you live in a particular cultural space.
JNL: Could you describe the bedrock foods of the Coahuiltecans?
AM: The bedrock foods of the Coahuiltecan region are seasonal and local, local meaning cactus, brush things, deer, quail, turtle, fish, all of those plants and animals that are indigenous to this region. Over time, the cooks -- women, cooking was the domain of women, and women really are the engineers of all the cooking technologies of the Coahuiltecan cuisine, such as earth ovens and boiling techniques. Today there is a straight line between all of those people and people like myself.
JNL: You mentioned the game [meats], and the cactus, and the corn and the beans... and could you talk a little bit about the flavor profile of these dishes?
AM: I would divide it into the techniques that are used, and then secondly the ingredients and how you treat those ingredients. So that we wouldn't do a lot of deep frying, the techniques that would say the flavor profile would be roasting, steaming, drying. Very fresh, the fish is fresh, and when you get to deep frying that, that's more towards the Tex Mex-- we do some deep frying, but that's not the flavor profile of Texas Mexican. As for the use of ingredients, the flavor profile is more direct. There's the flowery-ness, and the intricacy and the complexity comes in the way that you blend, and you know, just throw stuff together.
Let’s say the cheese enchilada -- my cheese enchilada is based on chile guajillo, chile ancho and then the trinity: garlic, black pepper, and a little bit of comino. So that's not a lot of ingredients, and the trick is how to mix those in a way that they really come together when they're supposed to. You eat the dish and you say, “You can't add anything else. This is just right.” It's that sort of technique that characterizes our food.
JNL: And so what is Texas Mexican in relation to Tex-Mex?
AM: Around the 1960s, there’s a movement that happens called Tex-Mex. These are new restaurants run by Anglo people who imitate our food and are very successful in selling it. It’s a format that is high-fat, high-cheese, and the format really attracts the Europeans because they are used to it. You have the Germans with their sausage and the French with their deep-frying. Those are not indigenous, but that is Tex-Mex food. And I think Tex-Mex becomes a reality because writers of the ‘70s began to write about it and there were so many of them writing about it while we did not have access to the centers of communication; we didn’t have any writers. So, they took over the conversation, and Tex Mex is what people think is our food. But Tex Mex is really a sideline of someone else’s idea of how we eat. And that's not how we eat.
JNL: Even so, it seems like you're not really a fan of the rigorous application of the concept of cultural appropriation, at least in your recipes. Would you say that's true?
AM: I am, in terms of justice. I am not, in terms of the idea that there is an ideal platonic plate, and if it's not Mexican in this little detail, then it isn't. [Like] if you don't put garlic in this, then you're appropriating it. Some people think it's formal art criticism. I don't. I'm not a fan of that. I am not a fan of cultural appropriation if it's a political act, when someone removes your voice. Someone has removed our voice.
JNL: When Tex Mex--
AM: Yes. We became invisible, and then it's unjust. It's unjust because it doesn't recognize our agency, and then it also becomes unjust because the ability of those people's voices to have social and political power to enter into the general social discourse is wiped away. You know, you should ask us [if you want to borrow something.]
JNL: We were talking about the Nueces River a while ago, and it got me thinking about how I see the pecan (for whom the river is named) as having almost mystical qualities for all Texans. They remind me of my grandmother, a native of Beaumont, sitting around the Christmas tree shelling them, and my grandfather, a native of Austin, who as a child had a business selling them door-to-door. I still have a little flyer he handed out, where he called them “Condensed Texas sunshine.”
AM: It is as strong and it is as important as you imagine it to be. It’s like the cactus in that sense. To the Native Americans, the tradition is to understand all living things in creation, animals, plants, and even stones -- just to be at one with all that. So that dimension is what is seen, but what is not seen is how that translates into everyday action in society. The pecan for me represents how we have been dispossessed. It’s a story of poverty. It’s got a lot of pain and a lot of anger. When we Mexican Americans begin to write these things about the pecan the pecan becomes more weighty. My parents used to shell pecans to make ends meet and we were paid very poorly. In a land when were as hunters and gatherers who loved the pecan and were able to eat them freely, all of a sudden it becomes a vehicle to turn us into low-paid or slave labor. The delicious pecan became a symbol of terrible things. Whenever I speak in the Rio Grande Valley or elsewhere where there lots of Latinos, I tell that story in order to urge them to write, or to speak because people who have written about our food have not been Mexican-Americans or Latinos, and the more that we do, this side of the story, a more complete story, will be told. All food has culture, all food has politics, and I always say ‘Make beautiful food,’ but can there be beauty without justice?
“Truly Texas Mexican,” Medrano’s documentary, which finds him, historians, chefs, and artists elaborating beautifully on these views, has now been released. It is available via Apple TV, Google TV, and Amazon.