Tex-Mex Food: Mexican or Spanish

Texas-Mexican was identifiably Tex-Mex since the turn of the twentieth century, but was not called Tex-Mex until well past mid-century. It was called Mexican or Spanish, which implied authenticity or class. Tex-Mex was a slur, reflective of Texas Mexicans’ status as second-class citizens. The term was first used as a nickname and abbreviation for the Texas and Mexican Railway in 1875. By the early twentieth century Americans used Tex-Mex to describe Texas-born Mexicans. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests the term was first used in 1941 in Time magazine to refer to “Tex-Mex Spanish, that half-English, half-Spanish patois of the border.” In 1961 the term was still used with this meaning in the Dallas Morning News. The same year “Tex Mex food” was mentioned in an article. By the 1970s Tex-Mex was accepted as a culinary reference. The food writer Waverley Root, in Eating in America: A History (1976), wrote “Tex-Mex food might be described as native foreign food, contradictory though that term may seem. It is native, for it does not exist elsewhere; it was born on this soil. But it is foreign in that its inspiration came from an alien cuisine; that it has never merged into the mainstream of American cooking and remains alive almost solely in the region where it originated.” Tex-Mex cookery was popularized outside the region in specialty restaurants. Tex-Mex became one of the hottest food trends in Paris, France in the 1980s.