ALONG the old path of Route 66, the drive-ins and lunch joints of Oklahoma City look a bit different from the picture postcards in nearby souvenir shops.
Instead of burgers and shakes, you’ll find superspecific varieties of tacos, tortas de albañil, traditional Mexican stews and tostadas de pollo.
El Primo Loco, a grilled chicken drive-thru offers a tostada Siberia, made famous by its namesake restaurant in Monterrey. Hang a right onto Southwest 29th Street and you’ll find a paleta and bionicos dessert shop, a panadería and a Mexico City-inspired torta spot.
Bookending the scene are two markets that feature dishes rare outside Aguascalientes, one of Mexico’s smallest states.
In a former oil change shop, Crudoolandia sells ceviches and aguachiles alongside Clamato cups and beers for customers to mix into micheladas.
“We’ve always wanted to capture that Mazatlán, Sinaloa vibe,” said Nancy Soto-Hallman, who opened the spot with her husband in 2012. “Of course, we don’t have seafood as delicious as Mazatlán’s – it’s one of the cities with the best seafood in Mexico. But we wanted to copy that style – the banda Sinaloense-style, the festive atmosphere.”
In 1980, fewer than 10,000 people of Mexican descent lived in the Oklahoma City metro area. Today, that number is about 180,000, nearly 12% of the population. And the variety of culinary offerings reflects the size and regional backgrounds of that community.
In the past 50 years or so, the population of people of Mexican descent in the United States grew from about 8.5 million to more than 39 million. And according to a Pew Research Center analysis in 2024, one out of 10 restaurants in the United States serves Mexican dishes, and about 85% of all counties have at least one Mexican restaurant.
That means a vast array of regional Mexican food can be found across the country, from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific Northwest. There are pocket-size food scenes in New Haven, Connecticut; Charlotte, North Carolina; and the Armourdale neighbourhood of Kansas City, Kansas.
In just the last 15 years, the American palate has expanded well beyond combo plates and game-night nachos. Mexican food in America today is a dynamic cuisine all its own, created by Mexicans and Mexican Americans apart from Mexico – and as American as any food.
But there is a jarring split-screen. Just as Mexican food is flourishing in the United States, so are nativist politics. Latin Americans, including Mexicans and Mexican Americans working in hospitality, have been swept up in aggressive deportation campaigns that have been a pillar of President Donald Trump’s second term.
The paradox is not lost on Gustavo Arellano, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.
The way we grew up eating
The story of Mexican food in the United States really began with the American annexations of the Mexican territory that became much of the US Southwest. In his book, Arellano chronicled the rise, starting
in the 1800s, of Mexican purveyors like the Chili Queens of San Antonio and tamale wagons in Los Angeles. In the decades that followed, Mexican American cuisine evolved to cater to the brief lunch breaks of blue-collar crowds.
By the 1980s, Mexican food was widespread, the margarita emerged as one of America’s most beloved cocktails and American corporations such as Frito-Lay and Pace Picante made tortilla chips and salsa ubiquitous.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Oaxacan immigrants went to California to work in great numbers. Most were Indigenous, and they formed a large population and culture of transnational people known as Oaxacacalifornia.
Lugya’h, Casa Gish Bac and Comedor Tenchita are just a few examples of restaurants that carry on the legacy of Oaxacan immigrants who helped make moles, tlayudas and quesillo famous in the United States.
This sharing of Indigenous traditions and stories through food also set an example for other Mexican immigrants to showcase dishes from their own regions.
Today, there are thousands of Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles, where the cost of living is among the highest in the nation. So, like many other Americans, Mexican immigrants and their descendants have looked elsewhere for work and more affordable housing.
That’s what brought Salvador Alamilla’s family to Idaho. Alamilla started cooking at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Boise called On the Border – “avocado fries, taquitos, every fried thing that you can think of” – working his way up from dishwasher to several cooking positions.
When he opened his own restaurant, Amano, in Caldwell, Idaho, Alamilla wanted to hew to the foods his family used to make in Michoacán, in southwest Mexico. That meant short ribs, and lamb shanks roasted for 12 or more hours in an underground oven like the one his grandfather used. The distinctive wood-smoke flavours of the region are married to a depth of spice, “the way we grew up eating.”
The move was a bit of a gamble. “We didn’t start off with that ready audience,” said Alamilla, the restaurant’s chef and co-owner. “But over the years, I brought the community along with us on our ride.”
The tensions of the political moment weigh on Alamilla, whose parents brought him to the United States as a five-year-old using another child’s papers. He did not become a legal permanent resident until high school. In a town the size of Caldwell, he said, it’s not hard to know your neighbour’s views. He sometimes looks out at the dining room and sees people who he knows support the ICE deportation campaign.
“It gives me a lot of sadness,” he said, “that the same people who want our people to be deported are the same people that are enjoying a chilli Colorado.”
Brown excellence
At 7.30am on an overcast Sunday evening in March, the line was 40 deep at El Volcancito, one of the busiest tacos al pastor stands in East Charlotte, North Carolina.
Standing at the trompo, a standing spit of roasting pork, taquero Daniel González said he honed his craft in Los Angeles’ competitive street-food scene at a chain of tacos al pastor vendors that are among the best in Southern California.
“I was at La Güera out there in Los Angeles,” said González, smiling with pride as he turned the trompo to cook his mound of marinated pork.
Crowding around the salsa bar and huddling onto patches of grass to eat tacos standing up, locals debate whether Charlotte’s best al pastor is at El Volcancito, El Nazareno, Tacos El Regio, Compa Tacos or La Cumbre.
But the fact that there is such a debate – in a county that had fewer than 7,000 Hispanic residents, according to the 1990 census – tells much of the story. Today, that population is around 60,000.
Carlos Salgado helped create the surge of American chefs learning to nixtamalise heirloom Mexican corn to make tortillas in the traditional, labour-intensive way in his 10 years cooking at Taco Maria, in Orange County, California.
The chef and his wife, Emilie Coulson Salgado, closed the Michelin-starred restaurant in 2023, and moved to Emilie Salgado’s native Door County, Wisconsin.
La Sirena, their new restaurant, is finishing its second summer in Ephraim, population roughly 400. Wind blew in off nearby Eagle Harbor in late May, as diners filled the 22-seat restaurant for the evening’s featured dish: arrachera con mole negro, made with Wisconsin wagyu and served with warm heirloom corn tortillas.
Door County, where the Hispanic and Latino population is around 4%, is a long way from Southern California. But Carlos Salgado said he’s as inspired as he ever has been to cook world-class Mexican food.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that we wanted nothing less than to substantiate this example of brown excellence in a place that maybe hadn’t seen it before,” he said, “kind of like Taco Maria did 15 years ago.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
