Truly Texas Mexican: Tacos, Feminism, and Cultural Resistence
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Through the years the home cooking of Texas Mexican families sustained their indigenous identity and their memory. By cooking nopalitos, deer, mesquite, and tortillas, these indigenous women led the cultural resistance against colonization.
Around 15,000 years ago Native American women domesticated the plants and used them as food ingredients, they also cooked the same game and fish which we eat today. This gave birth to Comida Casera (Home Cooking) of contemporary Texas Mexican families which has become an integral part of the people’s identity.
Comida Casera
Comida Casera became famous in the latter part of the 19th century by indigenous businesswomen and chefs who operated outdoor diners. Later these “chili queens” as they are called suffered harassment, became victims of intense racism, and subsequently went bankrupt.
However these chili queens inspired other women in Texas they kept the tradition of Comida Casera, and they kept on cooking. Chefs, artists, and community leaders in areas around the state such as Brownsville, Corpus Christi, and San Antonio shared these intimate food experiences, shaping what they are today, winning over dispossession and injustice.
Chef and Food Writer Adan Medrano takes viewers on a road trip throughout Texas to discover Native American roots and the influence of indigenous women in Texas Mexican cuisine ( not to be confused with Tex-Mex). It seeks to find and showcase the cuisine that keeps alive the community’s heritage and indigenous memory.
The film which was released in 2021 based on the book “Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes,” by Adan Medrano (The book which was published in 2014 was a finalist for 2015 Book of The Year by Foreword Reviews).
Medrano is not a stranger to filmmaking as he founded the San Antonio CineFestival in 1976, which is the longest-running Latino film festival in the United States.
“The core of the reason behind my filmmaking at that time is to express my identity which is so often erased,” he once said in an interview at the Texas Public Radio program Fronteras.
The documentary is helmed by Uruguayan filmmaker Anibal Capoano who is joined by another Uruguayan Gabriel Bendahan as the film’s cinematographer. and was screened in different film festivals. Truly Texas Mexican the film won several accolades among these include:
Winner Best Documentary in the New York Independent Cinema Awards (2020)
Winner Audience Choice in the Hill Country Film Festival (2021)
Nominee Best Documentary 25th Red Nation Film Festival (2020)
A Must-See Documentary
The film is about an hour and a half long. Adan Medrano takes on a road trip across the state and interviews the women chefs; his subjects also share their traditional recipes.
The documentary uses cinema verite technique where in some scenes the camera follows Adan as travels around Texas and meets with his subjects, in this unobtrusive style of filmmaking viewers are likened as part of the scene, keen voyeurs to what is going on in each scene.
It is more than a food documentary as it interweaves history, heritage, archeology, and feminism. It finds its soul in the different stories narrated by its subjects. Documentaries give ordinary people like myself access to knowledge or information which has been kept from us. Often it deals with social, political, economic, and environmental issues.
Effective documentaries provide us with stories taken from a certain vantage point. In Truly Texas Mexican it is through the cuisine of Texas Mexicans that Medrano effectively reaches out to his audience.
And it has been an eye-opener for me as a Texan to discover a history albeit a painful one. A story of people dispossessed and a part of their culture (cuisine) being appropriated.
That region encompassing San Antonio, Houston, Brownsville, Monte Rey, and Matamoros is unique in Texas as it is the home of the indigenous Mexican Texan community whose heritage and culture are not yet well-known. The documentary presents this subject unknown to many of us.
I enjoy documentaries that make me well-informed and that provide me with a wealth of information that is set in familiar places. Indeed there are many things about Texas that I do not know of.
One of my favorite parts of the documentary is Christine Ortega’s quest to continue the family’s barbacoa recipe which is no longer done presently by the family. The practice of slow-cooking a cow’s head using an underground oven was painstakingly revived by Ortega, done through learning the process which has been practiced by generations. I admired her deep sense of identity and that many of us would just let these traditions wallow into oblivion.
But the most touching was at the beginning when they discussed the “chili queens” who in the late 1800s became successful chefs and businesswomen and were credited for starting the San Antonio restaurant industry. However, racism would rear its ugly head, “They wanted Mexican food (What wine goes well with Mexican food?) without the Mexicans” Medrano would describe the mentality back in the day, and that apathy would eventually displace these entrepreneurs.
Another interesting subject is Celeste DeLuna, a print artist who creates dishes based on the memories of her mother. As with the stories the documentary establishes connections that have been nearly wiped out by the politics of colonization.
Adan Medrano’s documentary is interesting documentary to watch. The style immerses you into the narrative of a people, their cuisine a thread that connects them to the past. Truly Texas Mexican: Tacos, Feminism, and Cultural Resistance can be viewed on Amazon Prime.
