TEXAS MONTHLY STORY: "TACOing ABOUT SOUTHMOST"

By Michael Hoinsky
Texas Monthly
August 4, 2016
Chances are you got that taco you’re eating by getting in your car and driving to an establishment like Torchy’s or Taco Deli, where you’re devouring it in a clean, air-conditioned environment. How convenient—and inauthentic.
Tacos are street food. They’re intended to be enjoyed on the go. The reason the countless places like the two mentioned above even exist in Texas, California, and elsewhere is mostly because of an area of Brownsville called Southmost, located just north of the border wall and defined by a three-mile radius of Southmost Boulevard, known as “Taco Boulevard.”
“Southmost is considered the Texas motherland of taquerias,” said Chuy Benitez, the Houston photographer whose images are featured in the Texas Folklife exhibit “Taquerias of Southmost,” opening on Wednesday. “It was where the taco spot became Americanized. Because what they serve would be considered street tacos in Mexico. The Southmost area is the first place where you actually had brick-and-mortar taqueria spots versus little taco shacks and mobile vending trucks for tacos.”
Around five years ago, Benitez traveled to Southmost with Cristina Ballí, the former executive director of Texas Folklife, an Austin nonprofit that champions the folk arts and varied cultures of the state. Ballí, in tandem with fellow Texas Folklife staffer Michelle Mejia, both Brownsville natives, had been conducting interviews and gathering research material to accompany Benitez’s photos, using funds designated for a statewide survey of food traditions from the National Endowment for the Arts. The exhibit debuted in 2012 at the museum of the Brownsville Historical Association, another collaborator on the project.
The latest showing, at Texas Folklife, includes an opening reception with talks by Benitez, an El Paso native who, as an undergraduate photography major at the University of Notre Dame, came to realize that his hometown had been reduced to desert landscapes in the photography world and was largely missing depictions of the millions of people on both sides of the border. “That’s what lit the fire to make my own body of work that was about cultural representation.” Benitez will be joined on Wednesday by Mando Rayo, a blogger for Taco Journalismand co-author, with fellow Austinite Jarod Neece, of The Tacos of Texas, out September 20.
It can be said that Southmost, home to more than twenty locally owned taquerias, helped inspire the nationwide gourmet-ification of tacos over the past decade. But the tacos one will find in Southmost are nothing fancy. They’re fairly small, and a plate of five can go for five bucks. They also adhere to strict recipes.
“They’re garnished with cilantro and fresh chopped onion,” said Charlie Lockwood, the current director of Texas Folklife, citing a blog post written by Ballí. “Only certain types of tacos—bistec, fajitas, and tripas—will include avocado and white crumbled or shredded Mexican cheese. Bottles of green and red salsas are ready at each table. The tacos can also be accompanied by grilled onions and frijoles a la charra, or charro beans, but never rice. It just doesn’t go.”
Southmost has breakfast tacos too, but they’re more like the American version of the burrito. Flour is used instead of the traditional corn as with other tacos. That brings us to the tortilla, perhaps the most important part of the equation for all tacos served in Southmost. Most of the taquerias entrust Alaniz Tortilla Factory. Benitez visited the factory and discovered all the taquerias’ labels on the tortillas. “Each place had its own recipe,” he said. “None of them had generic tortillas. Everyone had a secret formula, and this tortilleria was like the gatekeeper to all that information.”

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