Street Taco (USA)

On an American menu the words "street taco" are a promise about what the kitchen will leave off. The phrase tells a diner the cook is reaching for the small soft corn taco eaten standing at a stand in Mexico, not the knife-and-fork combination plate of yellow cheese and shredded iceberg that ran American Mexican food for a long stretch. A street taco is two small corn tortillas, a modest amount of a single seasoned meat, raw onion and cilantro, one salsa, and a squeeze of lime, and the label exists to draw a line away from everything that menu would otherwise pile on. The interesting part is that in the United States this restrained object has a fairly precise birthplace, and it is not Mexico but a curb in East Los Angeles.

The double tortilla is the tell that the kitchen knows what it is doing. Both sheets get warmed on a flat-top until they flex, then stacked so the inner one soaks up the juices while the outer one stays whole in the hand; the filling sits tight to the center so the fold shuts on the first bite. White onion, cilantro, lime, and one salsa go on, and nothing else. Slide crema and shredded cheddar back in and you have rebuilt the very plate the term was coined to push away from, which is why a careful taquería treats the absences as the recipe.

Where the thing actually lives in American life is the taco truck and the late-night sidewalk window, and that setting is specific to a few cities rather than general. In Los Angeles the trucks park outside bars at closing time and beside job sites at dawn, and the order is fast and cheap and eaten off a paper tray on the hood of a car; the spareness is partly an economy of a kitchen working out of a window with a single griddle and a few tubs of salsa. Two or three tacos go down in a few bites apiece, the lime cutting a thin bright line through the fat, and the whole transaction is over in the time it takes to count out a few dollars.

The truck that started this is documented. In 1974 Raúl Martínez Sr. converted a secondhand ice cream truck into a mobile taco kitchen and parked it outside a bar in East Los Angeles, selling soft corn tacos off the curb to a late crowd; by some accounts the truck carried the name La Güera. Within six months the line was long enough that he opened a brick-and-mortar King Taco in Cypress Park, and the food writer Gustavo Arellano has since credited Martínez with inventing the modern Los Angeles taco truck. The small soft doubled-corn taco the city now calls a street taco is, in its American form, largely the thing that rolled out of that converted ice cream truck.

That curb did not stay uncontested. In 2008 Los Angeles tried to legislate the trucks off the street with an ordinance that ordered them to relocate as often as every half hour or face fines, misdemeanor charges, and the threat of jail; one vendor was hit with a thousand-dollar penalty for selling tacos. The pushback ran under the slogan "Carne Asada Is Not a Crime," and the harshest restrictions were struck down in court, with the disputes running into 2009. The fight is a US story with no Mexican equivalent, because in Mexico the object needs no defending and no qualifier at all.

Which exposes the small honesty problem in the name. In Mexico the thing is simply a taco, eaten on the street, the word "street" entirely unnecessary; the qualifier is an Americanism that turns an everyday object into a marketed category, and it occasionally gets stuck onto builds that are not especially traditional. The phrase is a genuine signal of intent and a real description of a restrained build, but it is a US menu convention rather than a Mexican one, and reading it as a guarantee of authenticity rather than a promise about restraint is the common mistake.

An American label for an old Mexican object

The object is ancient and the label is recent. Maize was ground into masa across Mesoamerica for thousands of years before any document caught up to the folded result, and the written record only reaches the taco in the nineteenth century. The small soft corn taco eaten standing on a street is the baseline of that tradition rather than a modern style, which is exactly what lets the American qualifier claim to be reaching back past the cheese-and-iceberg plate toward something older.

The form crossed north with people long before it acquired its menu name. At the turn of the twentieth century Mexican women were selling homemade food to laborers on the sidewalks of Los Angeles and San Antonio, an inheritance of the tamale pushcarts and the San Antonio chili queens, and Mexican food in the United States was read for decades as cheap street food rather than restaurant food. Martínez's 1974 truck sits at the point where that sidewalk tradition turned into a fixed Los Angeles institution that other operators copied by the hundreds.

The qualifier itself came last and has no founding date. "Street taco" hardened as an American retail term as the older Tex-Mex combination plate lost ground in US restaurants to more traditional Mexican cooking, and there is no first menu to canonize and no person to credit for the phrase. The hard dates in the story belong to the food, not the words: the converted ice cream truck of 1974 and the courtroom fight of 2008 and 2009, both decades before "street" was hung on the result.