One of the things that is most annoying about being a modern day Texan is sharing the state with an increasingly obnoxious City of Austin and its culture. What I have found over time is the newcomers to the state first encounter things there and believe not only that they only exist in Austin, but that Austin invented them. This extends from grackles to breakfast tacos. ( Yes they really do believe that Austin invented grackles . I kid, a little, but many think they are unique to the city.)
Anyway back in 2016 Eater Austin published a widely reviled article everywhere outside of Austin (linked above) claiming that the capital city was the birthplace of the “crucial breakfast taco.”
It's just hard to say how stupid that article was and then how a food website with a reasonable amount of respectability would publish it, and why they’ve left even a revised edition on the web. I don't think that was a native Texan anywhere near the editorial board at that website, and certainly none that have even ever been to San Antonio, much less the Valley.
There was a food historian cited who also was not a native Texan and he's a really good food historian and he mentioned that they were first recorded in the public prints in Corpus Christi in the 50s. And yet the Neo-Austin writer plowed through that stop sign and went ahead with the claim of Austin being the birthplace of the breakfast taco.
That just boggled my mind. When I was 9 years old I was taken on a trip to Brownsville/Matamoros and had my first Mexican breakfast. Huevos rancheros frijoles, bacon, sausage and salsa served alongside a stack of tortillas. And you know what? I made myself a little breakfast taco. All on my own. Because I saw everybody else in the restaurant doing the same thing.
So in this instance what I believe has happened is that Mexican and Mexican Americans have been eating what we now call breakfast tacos for hundreds of years, but Anglos only want to trace their existence to when we gave them that name in English. Also, I think they were used to market the idea of a Mexican breakfast wrapped up in convenient, to-go packages — foil-wrapped tortillas.
I can compare it to the other half of my upbringing, away from Texas and up in Tennessee, where sausage or ham and biscuits are the equivalent of breakfast tacos. and usually were not really marketed as such. It was just something that you did with the food in front of you at breakfast time. It really is that simple. There were no restaurants that had a destination sausage and biscuit combo; there were only restaurants where you made your own sausage and biscuits, exactly the same way as you made a breakfast taco in Matamoros.
Anyway into wrap up here Austin is just so frustrating these days, in regard to so many things, and laying claim to the “invention of the crucial breakfast taco” is just one of them.
Further reading: Please read mi compadre Gustavo’s takedown of the Eater Austin article here.
Austin out-marketed other Texas cities to create their own myth and origin story about being "the live music capital" - maybe of Travis county but not much else. And they have driven much of the live music out to Buda, G-Town etc. Sad
One of the best things about living in Los Angeles is to get to read Gustavo Arellano’s columns on a regular basis