National Taco Day is Oct. 6, and Mando Rayo, host of the Tacos of Texas podcast, has a provocative question to mark the holiday: Did Taco Bell steal the taco?
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: We won’t go through the full debate — you’ve got to tune into the episode of the Tacos of Texas podcast, which is going to drop on Tuesday — but I understand this is a question you’ve been thinking about, for a little while.
Mando Rayo: Yeah, and it comes from a place of like, who gets to tell our stories, right? Is it a big conglomerate like Taco Bell? Is it another local one like Torchy’s Tacos? Or is it rooted in community — in the hardships, in the struggle, but also the perseverance of Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, Latinos here in the United States, the history of the United States, and our contributions to this land.
Well, before we go deeper, I wanted to play a sneak peek of your upcoming episode. You set us up a little bit with some American history:
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo redrew the border, but the families stayed where they were. Instead, the border crossed them. Generations had already been living, working and cooking in this land long before anyone called it the United States. And then the Bracero Program formalized a new arrangement. Starting in 1942, millions of Mexican laborers came north to work the fields and build infrastructure. These workers brought not only their labor, but also their families, their traditions and their foods.
You take us way back before Texas was Texas. Why is this important to keep in mind when thinking about Taco Bell?
When we think about kind of where we are as a community, for me, it’s super important to understand this place nowadays, with politics and all, like people are asking people, you know, are you American? Are you not American? All of that.
And the struggle of Latinos living in the United States, whether they’re immigrants or they’re second, third, fourth generation, they still get questioned. And so if we understand the contributions of our history, then we’re able to understand our role within our communities.
The question around Taco Bell is: How did that happen? Let’s trace it down, and let’s go back and see who’s part of that story and who got left out.