INTERVIEW: Ignacio M Sanchez Prado, Author of Object Lessons: Taco

Interviewed by Hillary Moses Mohaupt

Most Americans have eaten a taco or could, at the very least, identify one on a menu. But not everyone could define the key characteristics of a taco or trace its journey from its origins to tables around the world. That’s where Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado’s Taco (2025), part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series exploring everyday items, comes in.

The book’s topic and slender size might trick the reader (or taco enthusiast) into thinking that it’s a quick and light read, but in reality Sánchez Prado offers a deeply researched guidebook for readers and eaters who want to better appreciate this nearly ubiquitous and widely misunderstood food. Sánchez Prado explores tacos as a reflection of modernity, using the crónica form to inform a story of foodways, authenticity, place, technology, and culture.

Reading Taco encouraged me to think critically about the food I eat, and talking with Sánchez Prado reminded me that there are always more opportunities to learn more about something you think you already know well.

This interview has been edited for length.

---

 

Hillary Moses Mohaupt: Thank you so much for this book, which I have found myself thinking about as I’ve eaten tacos recently, and other food, too. It was such a rich book. Can you tell me about your process for preparing for this book?

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado: People with my profession write heavily researched books, and my academic books have a lot of bibliography. My job is to be a professor of Mexican culture, broadly speaking, so that gives me certain freedom. I go and find myself in Mexico five times a year, mostly Mexico City. I go to museums, I eat, I go to movies and bookstores, I come back with three suitcases of materials, and then things start clicking over time. I have been writing for many years about literature and cinema, and food is mostly because my research is mostly about cultural institutions. Food is this kind of cultural thing that people take for granted, right?

I like to think about process, I like to think about the history of things, and when I decided to write about the taco as an object, I did think about the book as an Object Lessons book, which comes with a set of rules and number of words. They’re not very strict about form or focus, but it has to be readable. I’m not alien to this kind of writing, but I’ve mostly done it in Spanish. The separation between the essay and academic prose in the Spanish-speaking world is not as stark as it is in English. I’ve written in newspapers in Mexico and a little in the US, and I have a poetry collection. For me, this kind of writing was just going back to some forms of writing that I hadn’t been able to do professionally, but are in the periphery of what I do. The preparation was really to recalibrate the prose, and do it in my second language for the first time.

And then I start doing the historical research and asking myself, like, “Why does this have two tortillas?” or “who invented this machine that makes the tortillas in the tortillaria?” or “where was the first taquería in Mexico City?” I am more of a bibliographical researcher, so you can see that I relied on archival work of historians, which I’m not, but I think that the kind of cultural studies scholar that I am is in part based on grabbing disciplines that don’t talk to each other and pulling them together into narratives.

HMM: What you just said about grabbing disciplines that don’t talk to each other and pulling them together into narratives: that is so clear in this book and it worked so wonderfully well. You mentioned that you usually write academic texts which might tend to be a little bit drier, and I thought the crónica genre worked really well to make the book engaging. You describe the crónica at the beginning of the book as being a Latin American genre that “uses first-person narrative and description, but focuses on an object rather than the author.” Can you tell me a little bit more about that form and how you came to use it in this book?

ISP: Yes, I kept the word in Spanish. You could say “chronicle,” but it is a long-standing genre in the Spanish-speaking world. The earliest manifestations are the writings of the Spanish  conquerors, because as they traversed the world they encountered, they registered the customs, the physical space of cities, their own thoughts about it. It’s about relating objects or journeys, where the subjective perspective is embedded into it. And then as modernity came it started showing up in journalism. Even today in Mexico you’ll find journalists who write creative nonfiction that’s laced with reportage. It’s useful because it authorizes what is hard in academic prose, which is first-person perspective. There are snippets of my life but it’s not a narrative about myself, which I don’t think anyone would find very interesting. I’m a boring professor who lives in St. Louis.

The model of the 20th century crónica is Salvador Novo. He wrote throughout the 20th century, and he wrote one text as a tour of Mexico City. So the taco tour idea from my book comes directly from him. He held the job of crónista of Mexico City, so he was full-time, paid to write these crónicas, including one of the first histories of Mexican gastronomy.

It’s a genre that’s attuned to the complexities of cities, and I used this method for writing about this specific object of the taco, because the book claims it’s an urban object that comes with the rise of cities.

HMM: Let’s talk about that – tacos are modernity. I loved that you came back to that again and again as a specific phrase. You mentioned its connection to the rise of cities, but in the book you also talk about how they are a reflection of technology, cultural and political changes in the 20th century. Can we dig into that?

ISP: With Mexico, both inside and outside, we have a complicated relationship with our Indigenous past. We’re a mixed culture and Indigenous culture is a very fundamental component, but there’s also this overromanticized idea about ancient Indigenous culture that was constructed later on. A lot of the ideas about indigeneity for non-Indigenous people come from the time of the Mexican revolution. So everyone thinks that Mexican food has this ancestral thing that cuts across, and that’s not true. Some of it is migrant food, some of it Europeans brought, some of it is from African heritage.

I looked into the very good work from Jeffrey Pilcher and a Chicano scholar named David Bowles. There is no indication that a word for an object called “taco” existed in the pre-Columbian Indigenous language. According to Pilcher, the first use of “taco” is from the 1880s. But to me the more critical part is it’s not possible to make tacos until industrialized tortilla-making, because making tortillas from scratch is backbreaking. You could never do it on a scale to have a full-functioning, high traffic taquería. Those don’t exist until the late 19th century, the maquina tortilladora comes in the 1930s and 1940s, and taquerías don’t start proliferating until the 40s and 50s because street food starts growing and subway stations create a space. So it’s not a history of Indigenous ancestors, but rather the history of a food that was created in relation to the needs of a growing city and a working class that had to go to work in a factory and had to go in a subway.

HMM: I loved that this book gave a sense of touring Mexico and touring Mexico City in particular and all the stops – what’s the fact about taquerías in Mexico City? There’s one every 400 meters?

ISP: A geographer named Baruch Sanginés did a GIS map of all the taquerías in Mexico, and found that in Mexico City 95% of the population lives 400 meters or less from a taquería, essentially walking distance. That tells you how embedded it is in the culture. But the key piece is that this is true of Mexico City, but it’s not true of almost anywhere else. Tacos are more prominent in places where they have very strong tortilla production, whether it’s corn or flour, and in places that have a strong industrial base. I think those are the two biggest criteria. If you look at the map carefully, all the main places are cities. In rural areas, you barely find any.

HMM: That’s fascinating. You talk about doing these taco tours in Mexico City and in other places around the world. This book ends up reading like a guidebook for readers to take their own taco tour, or at least to eat a taco with more care and curiosity so that we’re not – I think you said this in the book – using “taco” as an adjective rather than as a noun.

ISP: That is a good, steady criterion right?

HMM: Yes. Taco salad is an abomination.

ISP: Well, it’s not a thing, right?

HMM: It’s not a thing.

ISP: I mean, all the adjectival uses. I guess you could make a good taco salad. I haven’t had one yet. But if I stick to my principle that you cannot police authenticity, I guess it’s conceivable that it can be good. But I think there is a problem – to say that stuff doesn’t have to be authentic doesn’t annul the fact that you can also denounce bastardization, right? The fact is that it has become such a low-quality industrialized food and that’s what most people imagine Mexican food to be in the US. It’s the problem I want to tackle. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s just that the ones from Taco Bell are bad.

There’s an American tendency to cannibalize foods from other parts of the world, a flavor in powder. So you have churro, everything, pumpkin spice, but that is not the food. That is just the views of a cultural object for the sake of selling you things that have nothing to do with that cultural object. That to me is a problem, but it also has a context, and the context is that in the US in particular, we Mexicans are seen in a very homogenous way because we are thought of as a single race, which we’re not. And we’re seen as a poor country, which we’re not.

To me, displaying the diversity is really a subtle way, without preaching to my readers, to invite them to expand their understanding of Mexican culture. It is just astounding how Mexico and the US depend so much on each other, and how people from one country are astoundingly ignorant about the other. Showing Mexican culture in this framework of modernity allows people to think about Mexico in a different way. It really goes a long way in countering stereotypes.

HMM: Right, because if we say tacos are modernity, then Mexico City is modernity. Mexico is modern – it’s not the homogenous, poor country that most Americans imagine it is.

ISP: If I’m working with such a stereotypical object, I think it’s my job as a writer to counter the received ideas and the factually incorrect stereotypes that people have about the object and about Mexico. A lot of the research is geared towards that: “we think this is the case – is this really the case?” That’s the method in there.

HMM: That makes a lot of sense. So, this next question is heading off in a slightly different direction. You started off by saying you’re a professor of Mexican culture and literature, so I’m curious about what surprised you about tacos as you put together this book.

ISP: This was a process of unlearning. Mexicans from Mexico are ignorant of Mexicans in the US and of the diaspora more broadly. Over the years I’ve had to learn the differences of the Mexican American experience and the fact that we come from the same cultural ground, but the experience of being a minoritized migrant changes a lot of things.

One of the easiest ways to explain this is, I grew up in the years when Mexican nationalism was seen badly by educated people because it was considered to be the culture of the ruling party. And then you come to a Chicano community in the US and you see virgins of Guadeloupe and sombreros, and there’s a little bit of culture shock there, especially if you have seen those stereotypes all your life. But if you understand that that’s pride against racial discrimination, then it carries another meaning, right? So this is a project that allowed me to delve into things that I wouldn’t have touched otherwise. I would never have gone to Taco Bell. What was surprising was not that I liked it – because I didn’t – but the story is very interesting. I started thinking, Why do they put cheddar cheese and canned olives? Maybe this comes from whatever is available, and they make tacos out of that, so who am I to judge that?

When you start traveling within a culture and start thinking of its histories, you really have to unlearn your own prejudices about things. The process of writing is always a process of research and learning.

HMM: Do you have any advice for other writers who might be interested in writing about food?

ISP: Two pieces of advice: one is if you find a cliche, question it. Track it down. Fact check it. See if it holds. If it doesn’t hold, write something more interesting. But if it holds, the story of how it became a cliche might be an interesting story to tell.

And the other piece of advance is, yourself is not always a legitimate standpoint. Talk to other people. Question your limits, your cognitive and epistemological limits. Read outside your comfort zones. To write the book that I wrote, I really had to confront some things that were invalidating. And that’s good. Invalidate yourself! Discomfort, invalidation, dissent, are very good methods of writing. Being uncomfortable leads to better writing than when you’re comfortable.

HMM: That’s very good advice. So this next (and almost final question) is one I ask everyone I interview. When you’re ready to share a piece of writing with someone, who is your first reader?

ISP: No one. I am very private with my writing. In this particular case I did run my first chapter through two colleagues who are scholars of Mexico, because I trust their judgement about Mexico, but they’re also Americans who came to my field learning about it, rather than having been born in it. So it’s a different perspective that I really value. I also have a former student, Lena Crown, who has a podcast called Awakener, and she read 85% of the manuscript for tone and clarity, because as a second-language speaker to me the biggest problem is making sure that the thing I thought I said is actually what I said.

HMM: Is there anything we didn’t discuss that you want to make sure we talk about?

ISP: I traffic in counterfactuals so usually people get curious about some of the things I say that’s against the grain of some ideas. I always say I’m fueled by frustration, and my research process starts by reading something and thinking, “this is wrong.” But why is it wrong? That’s a question that animates me.

HMM: You just said “against the grain,” which is a phrase that you use in this book, talking about flour tortillas, because you spend a lot of time talking about the assumptions that people make about flour and about corn. You do metaphorically write against the grain, to dig deeper and investigate, “what is this about?”

ISP: There are theoretical, philosophical methods like this – when you do research against the grain in history, you go against the grain of what the historical document says and try to flesh out the silences, or try to account for the power structures.

Some people in my area of the country say that the flour tortilla is not as good, and they’re wrong. In northern Mexico, that’s what they eat, because they have wheat. It’s just an agricultural difference. To go against the grain is to flesh out a lot of things that we think, and those things have consequences. The critique of the hard shell taco is grounded in a discriminatory idea that has harmed a community for many years. The writerly work is to dismantle the logic of that idea. The crónica allows you to shred things apart because you have to account for the parts and the process in a way that the narrative of the self doesn’t let you, unless you do it on purpose. But that’s not how most memoirists write. The crónica is always thinking about the parts, and the process, and the history of something.

HMM: And by dismantling something, you ask yourself, as you said earlier, is this thing that we thought was true, actually true?

ISP: It’s a form of fact checking, and it’s a way of approaching the actual social existence of things. So if I go have a taco in Seoul, which I did, it’s not in the social milieu where I expect it to be, and it doesn’t taste the same, and it doesn’t work the same, but it’s still there and I still have to explain why it’s there.