Texas Food Explorer Vol. 3: Fajitas, and another rant about Austin
Must that city attempt to lay claim to everything great about Texas? With fajitas, they are doing it again.
First things first — fajita originially referred not to a dish but a cut of meat — specifically beef: skirt steaks from the back of the rib cage.
Little prized by Anglo diners, so the story goes, these cuts were handed over free to Tejano vaqueros in West and especially South Texas back in the day, along with brains, tripe, and tongue and other such Mexican soul food.
In the old days there were no fajitas of chicken, shrimp, or mushrooms — such an idea was as crazy-sounding as well, it once sounded when you referred to a turkey, tofu, or impossible burger. There was a time when burgers and fajitas were both beef and beef only..
There are blurred lines between a sizzling skirt steak called an arranchera in Mexico and the tacos al carbon made famous at Ninfa’s on Navigation. Basically they are all the same cut but not necessarily served the same way. For our purposes consider them synonymous. Mama Ninfa tended to call hers tacos al carbon — perhaps taking their name from a 1971 Vicente Fernandez film with staying power enough to still be getting screenings in stateside barrios as late as 1976.
Which is the same year we find the first mention of fajitas being served in public. For the previous five or six years, all mentions of fajitas come in supermarket ads in newspapers, most in the Rio Grande Valley, with a solitary outlier in Chicago. (Which, did you know, at least as of 2017, had a shade more Mexican immigrants than Houston? Or any other city aside from LA?)
Anyway, I’ve had the stuff and Chi-Mex is legit. And note: in the famous gatefold photo to ZZ Top’s Tres Hombres album, perhaps the most famous Tex-Mex food porn shot of all time, there is nary a fajita in sight, thanks to the fact it was taken in 1973, just before the dish assumed primacy in Texas.
Fajitas, at the time, were still mainly only available in Rio Grande Valley backyards, as these newspaper ads from 1971 and 1972 attest:
Earliest ad I found — January 8, 1971 Brownsville Herald. Ad is for a supermarket called Minimax.
H-E-B got in the game the next year, at least in their Mercedes store down in the Valley.
Digression time…
So way back in 1845 we went to war with Mexico over whether the Texas border should be at the Rio Grande or the Nueces River. Yes, we won that war and officially the US/Mexico border is along the Rio Grande / Bravo. But to me, that’s not where it really is: just as southeast Texas from Houston to the Sabine is better imagined as Greater Louisiana, so the strip that lies between the Nueces and the Rio Grande is best envisioned as something other than Texas or Mexico. Hell, even our government seems to see it this way — you can pretty much bring anybody or anything across the border in the Valley, but getting it or them past those Border Patrol checkpoints in Falfurrias, Hebbronville and Encinal, to name a few, is another matter entirely.,
Make no mistake — that is the real border. As one irate trucker put it in a Google review of one of the checkpoints, “I AM AN AMERICAN CITIZEN AND DIDN'T EVEN CROSS THE BOARDER INTO MEXICO JUST WENT TO LAREDO TO GRAB A LOAD TO TAKE NORTH WHY DO I HAVE TO GO THROUGH CUSTOMS AND BOARDER CONTROL?!?!?!?!?!”
Well, because there is one border on the map and another in reality.
Anyway….and you might have seen this coming if you’ve been paying attention to articles about Texas food history over the last ten years or so, anyway, Austinites are trying to stake yet another outsize claim for themselves here, namely through a late Valley-born, Austin-famous character by the name of Jose Antonio “Sonny” Falcon.]
It’s his account that is currently running on Wikipedia, to wit, that he and he alone introduced fajitas to Texans in the Austin area starting in mid-September 1969 and then they spread from there. Which actually finds him backtracking from an apparently disproven version he told the Austin Chronicle in 2005 — that he invented them and named them and the whole, well, enchilada’s not the right word. We’ll go with shebang.
Though he has since heard all the anecdotal evidence about skirt steak being prepared and called fajitas in the Rio Grande Valley as far back as the 1930s, Sonny maintains that both the dish and the name originated with him.
"I looked at that cut of meat and said to myself, 'It looks just like a belt,'" he says. "The first fajitas I ever saw, I made myself right here in the 1960s." According to Falcon's version of fajita history, he figured his new creation would popularize an affordable cut of meat and attract more business to the family store – if he could just get people to taste it. "Any time dad would cook fajitas in the back yard, all our friends would ask to come over," recalls son John Falcon. "Dad knew he'd come up with something great."
Sonny approached powerful family matriarch Doña Soledad Guajardo with his idea to promote the market, and the prescient businesswoman gave him her blessing. He cut a deal to set up a concession booth at a weeklong outdoor event, and his fajitas made their commercial debut at the Dies y Seis celebration in Kyle in September of 1969. Though it was a watershed event in overall fajita history, sales of the new dish were hardly an overwhelming success. "We gave away little cards with maps to the store on the back, but I think our biggest night we only made about $17," Falcon ruefully admits. Undeterred, Sonny began to work rodeos, fairs, and outdoor festivals on nights and weekends, hawking fajita tacos to ever more appreciative crowds. He created fajita fanatics from Mercedes to Abilene, everywhere from BorderFest in Laredo to AquaFest in Austin. "The first year we'd work an event, some other food concession would be the top earner," says Sonny with pride. "When we came back the second year, we'd be number one." By the third or fourth year, the other booths were invariably serving fajitas, too. When Fajita Cook-Offs came into vogue, Sonny's tender, tasty beef was a perennial winner, although his competitors piled on the condiments and did everything they could to learn his secrets. Sonny Falcon was so personally identified with the dish by the late 1970s that an Austin reporter christened him "The Fajita King," and the apt moniker stuck. (He now owns the trademark on that term. His request for a trademark on the word "fajita," however, was turned down.)
Here Falcon’s weird specificity reminds me of that of Jelly Roll Morton, who famously claimed to have invented jazz in 1902. “Ere me, there was chaos and void, and I and I alone brought order.” It was almost certainly more complicated than Falcon’s version, and trouble is none of it is documented. Yes it’s possible that his seeding of fajitas “everywhere from Laredo to Austin” was how they commenced on their road to global domination, but I just don’t buy it. He claims the big debut of fajitas came in September 1969 — but right up there above his account in this very post, we have a newspaper ad showing they were just another cut of meat in Rio Grande Valley supermarkets only a year later. That’s not how these things work. Remember, word traveled far less rapidly in those days, and if fajitas were some new sensation, one only available from one cook’s traveling kitchen, the ad would have gone into more detail about what fajitas were rather than just tersely translating them as “skirts.”
Clearly, by 1971 the term was familiar to meat-shoppers in Mercedes, Texas, too familiar for them to have just been unleashed on an unsuspecting world a year previously in faraway Kyle. Not so coincidentally, Mercedes was Falcon’s birthplace and hometown until 1962. I’d bet he first came across the term there and later, in the absence of much competition for the title, and with the aid of a compliant local media, staked his claim to their invention. And because Austin loves to trumpet itself as a Font of All Creation, and the outside world loves to listen, that, for now is the official truth about fajitas.
Well, Wiki does mention a lady in Pharr named Otilia Garza who apparently added them to the menu at her Round-Up Restaurant, and to have invented the sizzling platter presentation, the same year Falcon claims to have invented them from nothing, The entry does credit some of the spread of their popularity to “numerous restaurants in San Antonio,” Houston’s Ninfa Laurenzo, and the restaurant in Austin’s Hyatt Regency as other populizers
There is a singular lack of mentions of fajitas in any online archives of Texas newspapers (aside from supermarket ads) between 1970 and 1976, when the dish is finally ready for its first close-up.
Much of the time Falcon was allegedly performing as Juanito Fajitaseed in and around Austin, Mama Ninfa Laurenzo was stacking bank selling her tacos al carbon over on Navigation Blvd. Confoundingly, her daughter Phyllis Laurenzo Mandola claimed in a 1978 Associated Press article that Ninfa’s fare was derived not from that of mom’a upbringing in and around Harlingen, but that of Mexico City. (The setting for Tacos al Carbon, the 1971 comedy that marked the acting debut of Vicente Fernandez, the George Strait of Mexico.) I suspect what Mandola was that he mom’s Rio Grande Valley fare was something apart from the lava floes of orange cheese Tex-Mex of places like Felix, Pancho’s and Molina’s.
Mama Ninfa claims her tacos al carbon were first to Texas when she opened her ten-table restaurant in 1973 and, additionally, that she introduced Texas diners to cilantro, “so important in Mexican sauces,” as she said.
Unlike Falcon, Otilia Garza, pioneer of the sizzling fajita platter in Pharr, did not claim to have invented the fajita — she said she was cooking much as her grandmother had before her, just across the border in Reynosa, Tamaulipas.
The more I dig into the history of Texas food, the more important Reynosa seems all the time — it seems like many roads have their origins there, with antecedents from somewhere else in Mexico, leap the border, catch on in the Valley and then to San Antonio, and then Houston and then Dallas, all with little media attention.
But when these innovations hit Austin, the whole world starts to hear about them. Austin is the one Texas city that attracts the chattering classes from the coasts, and they almost always fall victim to the fallacy that the place of their first discovery of something — be that something breakfast tacos, Townes Van Zandt, grackles, margaritas, or spring-fed swimming pools — is therefore both the sole preserve and creator of those things. And when an outsider pronounces Austin as creator of something often enough their local media — the most provincial of any Texas big city — will echo that claim, and then it makes it into Wikipedia, and before you know it, that’s the official story.
I mean, in addition to Falcon’s spurious claim of invention, the Official History of Fajitas is now shot through with accounts of how some German-born chef at Austin’s Hyatt Regency added them to the menu at that hostelry’s La Vista Restaurant in 1982, and how that is supposed to mark some signal moment in the international acceptance of fajitas. Maybe among a certain class of Fodor’s-reading traveler of that era, but that is damn sure not how a Mexican dish gains popularity in Texas. Texans want to go into some barrio and find a hole-in-the-wall where they can believe that every dish is handcrafted by someone’s abuela with recipes from deep within Old Mexico, their secret spices dating back to time immemorial.
Or something. In a single word, “authenticity” is one of the top traits foodie types are looking for in Mexican/Texas Mexican food to this very day; the romance of the hole-in-the-wall restaurant with unbeatable food is very strong. So yeah-no on the idea that Texans would brag about how they had this amazing Mexican dish called fajitas in the restaurant at one of Austin’s swankiest hotels (at that time). It rings false unlike the accounts that have people first encountering fajitas at Original Ninfa’s, or any of many places in San Antonio or the Valley.
So again you have Austin media embellishing very spurious and shaky claims to both the invention and popularization of a staple Texan dish. Jeez, circa 20 years ago, Austinites knew their place in the Texas dining hierarchy, but with the arrival of tech billions, they’ve got way beyond their station, which was once as a repository of Texas comfort foods — chili con carne, old-school Tex-Mex, BBQ, and CFS — and have now made an effort to have themselves anointed as the incubator of all those dishes too. To paraphrase Jimmie Dale Gilmore on Dallas, Austin is now a rich city that tends to believe its own lies.
Anyway, by the time the ‘70s were out, Mama Ninfa had close to a half dozen restaurants and sales of $15 million, as against whatever Falcon was selling at his stall at rodeos and county fairs. In short, she was the big dog in popularizing fajitas once they escaped South Texas, not Falcon — he tacos a la Ninfa and tacos al carbon (fajitas in all but name) were the signature moment in Houston’s history: the official dish of the Luv Ya Blue / Urban Cowboy-era, a brief window when the Bayou City captured the national eye in a way it might not have again since then.
Anyway, now fajitas are everywhere. And no longer just made of beef but also poultry, seafood, vegetables, you name it. They came along just early enough in my life to imprint themselves on my soul — after a year or two abroad in 1994, I came across a plate of mediocre fajitas at Tel Aviv’s Hard Rock Cafe and literally wept with joy at first bite. And there are now fajita nachos and fajita salads and pizzas and egg rolls and whatever else; I am not sure if in my lifetime I’ve seen any one Texas dish go from zero knowledge north of the Nueces to global domination like fajitas have. Keep the tortillas warm and soft and pass me the platter.
Great tale of the origin of fajitas and yep, the first time I came across VEGETARIAN FAJITAS was in Dallas of course. Here, up in Nashville, THE SAN ANTONIO TACO COMPANY, was the innovator at the shop a couple of San Antonians at Vanderbilt, Richard and ?? opened up in about 1984. It was Steve Earle who helped get them moving with his voluble proselytizing. For me, fajitas will always be BEEF! In the words of a former housekeeper, my mom, your grandmom used to quote, "That's all there are to it".
Great story on the origin of fajitas of which I had no idea despite being a regular at Ninfa's on Navigation. I also didn't know of the connection between Ninfa Laurenzo and the Mandolas. One thing you missed (maybe on purpose) when it comes to Tex-Mex "soul" food are mountain oysters. I first encountered those working cattle at my aunt's family ranch near Seminole. They let the ranch hands have them. (I hear they taste like McNuggets.) I've never eaten rattlesnake either and guess it will be a cold day in Hell before Austin claims that delicacy.