DO TORTILLA AND CHIPS SALES HERALD THE RECONQUISTA?

DO TORTILLA AND CHIPS SALES HERALD THE RECONQUISTA?
By Juan Montoya
Esther Cepeda, the columnist from the Washington Post, had a tongue-in-cheek (or is it tongue-in-tummy?) editorial published today which triggered a few thoughts.
Cepeda wrote on a food-industry finding that tortillas now outsell hamburger buns and tortilla chips outsell potato chips.
In her argument Cepeda states that despite the fears of non-Hispanics or the "Hispanic Hype Machine," that it signals the Hispanization of the U.S.,  the food-industry numbers do not reflect that American society is reaching the majority-minority tipping point that will mean the end of life as we know it. Rather, she says, what it does signal is the growing popularity of ethnic foods (now Hispanic) as it was once with Italian food (pizza) and German foods before that. In fact, she wrote, the ratio of the racial majority (white) to minorities remains at  63 to 37 percent.
When I attended Olmito Elementary in my first year in school, it was during the days when the school districts used to prohibit (and punish) children who spoke Spanish at school. Now, I know I'm dating myself, but many of us went through that experience at different times at different places.
And I'm not making a plug for language immersion because I know one linguistic size does not fit all, but in that sink-or-swim setting, I was one of the ones who made it. My first-grade teacher was an elderly teacher in her 70s. I was a young boy who lived in a household where Spanish was spoken. How many more were discarded by the system and ended up in manual labor or the migrant stream we'll probably never know. I shudder to think how many lives were negatively impacted by these rigid educational polices.
But along with the prejudice toward language, at Olmito there was also a corresponding stigma attached to eating homemade tacos prepared for local Mexican-American students by their moms. The large Anglo-farmer contingent in the student body displayed their intolerance in such derisive terms when kids pulled out the tacos prepared lovingly by their moms that after a while my own mother sent me and my sisters with a lunch of baloney and bread, foods alien to out dinner table to stop the bullying.
The teasing stopped and the girls fit in with the culturally-correct culinary status quo at Olmito Elementary.
I was, I confess, a taco aficionado even back then, as were the majority of the other kids who rode with us in the bus from the outskirts of Olmito. Soon, they – in the tradition of kids everywhere – wanted to trade lunches. These were rural Mexican-American kids who wanted a taste of bread and baloney they were unaccustomed to eat and were willing to trade some of the succulent tacos their moms sent with them to eat at lunch.
That played right into my hands. I looked through the taco buffet offerings on the bus and finally settled on a kid whose mom was a master making tasty homemade flour tortillas wrapped around the softest diced potatoes cooked in bacon bits and drippings. Houston, we had liftoff!
The kids, like my sisters, didn't want to put up with the nasty bullying by the townies and farmers at taco-munching Mexican kids. So we chose a mesquite tree by the railroad tracks on the east side of the school by old 77 and each noon we'd sit under the tree – and yes, talk Spanish to our hearts' content – and partake of the forbidden food. That tree still stands. I learned  how to ask the teacher how to be excused to the bathroom from the kids there.
That was many years ago. Now, as we learn that the food that was the object of scorn and derision is now enjoyed by large numbers of Americans of all races and ethnicities, it seems like pendulum has changed and that, indeed, the way to a people's heart is through their stomach.